Prussian authoritarian education

Prussian authoritarian education is the disciplinary regime that enters the Old School with Director Wulicke and recasts learning as a form of state service. It replaces the earlier ideal of cheerful classical study with authority, duty, power, and career advancement; in its classrooms and courtyards, the student’s body is trained to display obedience, while Hanno Buddenbrook and Kai Mölln answer its solemn language with private irony.

From Classical Learning to State Service

The Old School had once treated classical learning as a joyful end in itself, pursued with calm, leisure, and cheerful idealism. That tradition changes when Wulicke, previously a professor at a Prussian secondary school, succeeds the former director, a warmhearted man who had died early in 1871. Under the new principal, authority, duty, power, service, and career become the school’s highest values. In his official speeches, Wulicke repeatedly unfurls the banner of Kant’s categorical imperative, making moral philosophy sound like an institutional command.

The change is not merely rhetorical. The school becomes a state within the state: teachers and students alike come to think of themselves as civil servants, intent on advancement and on remaining in good standing with those in power. Soon after Wulicke’s arrival, the institution is renovated and modernized according to current hygienic and aesthetic standards. The narrator leaves open whether the result is an improvement in human terms: the newly comfortable school may be less sympathetic and generous than the old one, where kindness, sentiment, serenity, benevolence, and good cheer had held greater sway.

Authority in the Classroom and Courtyard

Wulicke’s authority is made visible through the students’ immediate bodily response. When he enters Herr Modersohn’s English lesson without warning, the room has just fallen silent to listen to a delicate melody from a music box. His sudden arrival breaks that fragile interval. Modersohn turns ash-grey and pulls his chair down from the platform, dusting it with his handkerchief; the students leap to their feet, press their arms to their sides, bow their heads, and bite their tongues in an effort to show servility. Wulicke surveys them before ordering them to sit and telling the lesson to continue. The inspection turns ordinary classroom time into a display of submission, and the pupils’ posture becomes as important as their recitation.

The courtyard shows how discipline extends beyond the formal lesson. The boys have adopted a rough code of masculinity in which strength, gymnastic skill, drinking, and smoking count as virtues, while effeminacy and dandyism invite punishment. A boy who buttons his top collar or carries a walking stick risks being taken to the pump and publicly humiliated. The school’s coercive culture therefore operates both through the director’s official authority and through peer enforcement: students reproduce its standards among themselves, policing appearance and conduct before a teacher need intervene.

The institution’s everyday practices are tolerated by a senior teacher who overlooks petty rule-breaking, hazing, and fights in the courtyard. Yet this laxness at the margins does not soften the larger atmosphere. When Wulicke appears, angry and pointing at the running pump, students and staff are thrown into alarm. His presence can turn even minor disorder into a spectacle of fear, and the contrast between tolerated roughness and sudden, concentrated authority makes the school’s hierarchy palpable.

Wulicke and the Performance of Obedience

Wulicke’s immense authority is matched by an unpredictable temperament. He is described as enigmatic, duplicitous, wilful, and jealous; his smile can be as frightening as his anger. He may tell a joke and then rage at those who laugh, leaving subordinates unable to know how to behave. They abase themselves in the hope that their displays of deference will keep them from being crushed by the justice he wields. Power here works not only through explicit punishment but through uncertainty: the possibility of sudden displeasure makes obedience a constant performance.

The language of the school reinforces that performance. Wulicke’s appeal to Kant’s categorical imperative lends official and moral gravity to an institution whose practical priorities are discipline, service, and advancement. In the inspection scene, the students’ synchronized gestures—standing, bowing their heads, and holding their arms close—show how an abstract hierarchy is inscribed on the body. Their conduct is not presented as a free response to the lesson; it is a rehearsed posture elicited by the director’s entrance and sustained under his gaze.

Hanno and Kai’s Private Resistance

Hanno and Kai stand apart from the school’s prevailing culture. Their friendship is well known, but teachers tolerate it only grudgingly, suspecting something hostile behind it. Classmates regard the two as eccentric outsiders and generally leave them alone. Kai’s title, Count Mölln, commands a measure of respect, and his wildness and insubordination make him difficult to assimilate; Hanno’s frailty, soft hair, and shy, gloomy eyes likewise set him apart from the boys who prize force. Even the bully Heinricy cannot bring himself to treat Hanno as he treats other students.

The two friends’ dissent takes the form of private, carefully controlled irony. They avoid the ordinary, crude nicknames used for teachers, which they find humorless and commonplace. Instead, they add the formal title Herr to a teacher’s surname, turning respect into a coolly mocking performance. Their shared phrases for the teaching staff and the institution allow them to imagine it as a grotesque presence rather than accept its official self-image. Because they keep their private naming between themselves, their irony is a small shelter within a system they cannot openly challenge.

That distance does not spare Hanno from the school’s pressure. In the courtyard he tells Kai that he is afraid of the disturbance surrounding his Ovid class, not simply of failing. The distinction is revealing: the prospect of a poor grade is less frightening to him than the public agitation and institutional ordeal that will attend it. His dread registers the school’s power as an atmosphere surrounding evaluation, not merely as the outcome recorded in a book.

A Contested Institution

The Old School’s transformation brings comfort and modernization, but the narrative measures those gains against the loss of warmth and humane ease. The institution’s official ideals of duty and service coexist with public humiliation, career-minded conformity, and fear of arbitrary authority. Its pupils learn not only classical subjects but also how to stand, bow, conform, and anticipate judgment.

Against that enforced seriousness, Hanno and Kai’s shared wit does not overturn the school’s order; it exposes the gap between the institution’s elevated language and the experience of those living under it. The school calls its ethic duty and moral imperative, while its daily rituals teach vigilance and submission. Their restrained mockery preserves a measure of distance, but Hanno’s anxiety and the students’ immediate abasement before Wulicke show how narrow that freedom remains. Prussian authoritarian education thus appears both as a historical change in the Old School and as a system that produces compliant bodies, anxious students, and a small, precarious counterculture of irony.