Der Wilde Garten: Roman

A teacher watches her students bloom into women and finds herself haunted by what she cannot protect them from. Hanna Südekum has given her life to the girls' school, guiding adolescents through the turbulence of puberty while their parents look away. When a mother destroys her daughter's treasured notebook of private thoughts, Hanna is the one who must pick up the pieces. But as the girls grow into desire and rebellion, Hanna's carefully maintained world begins to crack: a student dies, another runs off with an actor, and her closest friend is revealed in a late-night tryst she was never meant to see. Even her beloved Gertrud slips beyond her reach, consumed by forces Hanna can name but not control. Three years pass in this rigorous, tender novel of awakening, as Hanna tutors a boy who worships power and watches a magnetic sculptor undo a bourgeois couple's composure. The wild garden of the title is both the untamed passage of adolescence and the secret interior life that adult society works to destroy. A student named Grete speaks the novel's bitter truth when she rages at books that ignore girls' inner battles. This is precisely what von Urbanitzky refused to do, writing in 1934 a novel that dares to take female desire and adolescent suffering seriously.