Schlöndorff’s debut feature turned against the fatal constellations of the Adenauer era: its impersonal and mindless film productions, its evasions of political problems, and its vacations from history. Reverting to the distant past of Robert Musil’s famous novella of 1906, it offered a less obvious contribution to the definitive postwar German project of "coming to terms with the past" through its penetrating study of young cadets in an Austrian military academy—a preview of coming fascist attractions. Young Törless has gone down in film history as a seminal work that announced a new German cinema of international stature.