Entsagung oder Desillusion? Der Student als Paradigma des Spätrealismus in der tschechischen und deutschen Literatur

The progressive industrialization and its economic consequences led to a decline of the traditional bourgeois values, and to the rise of the modern metropolitan society, in the second half of the 19th century, where the individual was focused mainly on career ambitions. The literature of late realism and early modernism takes up this process and presents increasingly disillusioned literary characters who fail due to the difference between their social and political ideals, and reality. The phenomenon of disillusion can be found both in Czech as well as in German Moravian literature. The study analyses and compares the student novels Santa Lucia by the Czech naturalist Vilem Mrštik and Die Vaclavbude by the German Moravian author Karl Hans Strobl (and briefly the novel Výpravy chudých by Antonin Sova) with regard to the patriotic ideals, the disillusioning processes, the images of German and Czech ethnicity, as well as the image of the metropolis Prague as they are depicted in the novels.