ABSTRACT
Volker Schlöndorffs Young Törless (Der junge Törless, 1966) occupies a privileged position within postwar German film history as the work that initiated the rise of Young German Film. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1966, it received overwhelming approval, the International Critics’ Prize, and considerable notoriety at home. After twenty years of floundering and ineptitude, of second-hand fantasies and quickly produced travesties meant to imitate Hollywood, of Heimatfilme, serial productions, and sundry other attempts to profit in a film economy lorded over by American occupiers and controlled by foreign distributors, German cinema, so it was proclaimed in 1966, had once again found a voice of its own, a distinct identity. Seen together with a host of ambitious contemporaneous debut features — Alexander Kluge's Yesterday Girl (Abschied von gestern), Peter Schamoni's Closed Season on Fox Hunting (Schonzeit für Füchse), and Ulrich Schamoni's It (Es) — Young Törless was a seminal work announcing a new German cinema of worldwide stature, formal assurance, and critical incisiveness.
