Kurt Gerber embarks hopefully on his last year at school, leading to the all- important exam, but finds that he is constantly at odds with the sadistic class teacher Professor Kupfer, known to his students as "Lord God Kupfer", who particularly dislikes him. Inspired partly by its author's own experience of his final school-leaving examination, which he passed only at the second attempt, and partly by the suicides of no less than ten school students in a single week in the winter of 1929, Young Gerber is a timeless tale of classroom angst, and an undisputed classic of Austrian literature.