'Kadettengeschichten: The Siren Call of Militarism in the Prussian Cadet-School Story'

in The German National Imagination from the Early Modern Period to the Present: Cultural Identities in a Changing Landscape. Essays for Joachim Whaley, ed. Charlotte Woodford, Anita Bunyan, and Margarete Tiessen, Cambridge (Legenda Press), 2025, pp. 96-112.

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Stories and novellas based upon the experiences of pupils at the Royal Prussian Cadet-Schools (Königlich Preußische Kadettenanstalten), which trained boys from the age of ten to take up a career in the Prussian Officer-Corps, were a publishing phenomenon in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany.

Largely written by former cadets, these works, such as Paul von Szczepanski’s Spartanerjünglinge (Spartan Youths) and Johannes van Dewall’s Kadettengeschichten (Cadet-Tales), were serialised, published in multiple editions, and even hailed in the Reichstag, the German parliament, as ‘famous novellas’ and ‘best-beloved treatments of cadet-school life’.

Expanding on Helen’s previous work on this topic, this chapter investigates this little-known genre of German children’s literature, exploring the ways in which patriotic feeling and the prospect of a martial career were justified or glorified in these volumes, and suggesting that they might have contributed to boys’ commitment to militarism and self-sacrifice prior to and during World War I.