An autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse
A work depicting the destruction of young souls by institutional education.

Hermann Hesse's work, Beneath the Wheel, which tells the story of two boys, Hans Giebenrath, who was called a genius, and Hermann Heiler, who is a reflection of Hesse himself, about how standardized systems and education destroy pure souls, was published by The Story with the original 1906 first edition cover design.

The cover design of the wireless first edition of The Story Hermann Hesse's 'Beneath the Wheel' is an educational novel that criticizes the contradictions of the school system with the historical background of turn-of-the-century German society.
It shows how the oppressive school system and the lack of understanding and ambition of school teachers, including the father, the village church pastor, and the principal, affect a sensitive adolescent boy.

The work that established the genre of boarding school literature

In this work, Hermann Hesse based his story on a crisis he personally experienced during his adolescence.
In late 19th-century Germany, youth suicide, especially among schoolchildren, became a serious social problem, and many reports on the issue highlighted a significant increase in schoolchild suicides around the turn of the century.
In Prussia, there was even a statistician who claimed that one student committed suicide every week.
At that time, youth suicide seemed to be regarded as a cultural phenomenon of the turn of the century.


Between 1880 and 1918, a particularly large number of works set in boarding schools appeared in Germany, resulting in the establishment of boarding school literature as a genre in turn-of-the-century German literature.
Beneath the Wheel is a novel of the highest literary standard that established the genre of the boarding school novel in German literature.
Although "Beneath the Wheel" was written against the backdrop of German society at the turn of the century, it is a book that deals with the lives and realities of teenagers in Korea today, who are suffering from the pressure and stress of grades due to the overheated competition for college entrance exams, and can relate to them.