The Staff Room

Author: Markus Orths

Translator: Mike Mitchell   Cover design: Marie Lane  

Kranich is a newly qualified teacher about to take up his first post. As soon as he arrives at the school he is plunged into a nightmare kafkaesque world which has all the worst features of a totalitarian state. Very soon he finds himself caught between the Education Authority Police, Secret Security Officers and the CG, the Conspiracy Group, that aims to undermine the school system but only 'verbally, since no one would want to put their own job at risk’. The four pillars of the school system, as the headmaster explains on Kranich’s very first day there, are 'fear, misery, pretence and lies'.

In The Staff Room Orths, himself a teacher in his first post, has written a grotesque satire which is both absurd and extremely funny.