It follows the student Kurt Gerber as he's approaching the final exams at his school. He's basically disoriented, depressed and well, you know... the typical stuff lots of young people deal with. It also talks about oppressive authority from the teachers and the ending is unfortunate and devastating.

It was published when Torberg was only 22 years old. He was inspired by his own experiences and the fact, that there were a lot of student suicides in the year 1929 (in Austria I'm guessing).