I’ve polished off another German crime novel, which I bought in the Oxfam shop in Bonn. It features a middle aged male detective, Adalbert Kluftinger, who is rather set in his ways, and lives in the picturesque but socially conservative southern region known as the Allgäu. And as in so many German Krimis, up pops adult education. Twice.

The Allgäu town of Kempten, image licensed under Creative Commons
On the first occasion, Kluftinger heads to the local university for applied science to interview a witness, who happens to be lecturing at the time. After getting lost on the campus, Kluftinger walks through a door into the lecture hall, where everyone assumes that he is a pensioner who has come along out of interest. Far too embarrassed to explain otherwise, he waits until the lecture is over.
This episode assumes that the reader knows of the German practice of Seniorenstudium, under which for a small fee, older adults may attend courses as ‘Gasthörer‘, or ‘guest listeners’. In Kempten, as in my old haunt of Cologne, the fee is €100 (or up to €300 per semester depending on the number of courses taken), and the university doesn’t separate older adults from others who register (online) as Gasthörer. But in practice, most such associate students are older adults, and the scheme is a popular one.
The second occasion involves a dancing class. Frau Kluftinger, a dance lover, has enrolled herself and her husband for the course, which inevitably involves him in humiliation at the hands of the tutors. I’d like to think that most adult teachers don’t enjoy humiliating their weaker learners, and the novel turns the tutors – an ultra-camp German male and an Italian woman whose grasp of German grammar is weaker than mine – into parodies. it isn’t clear in the novel who the course provider is.
The novel is called Laienspiel, which I understand as roughly equivalent to ‘Amateur Dramatics’, and the plot involves wicked goings on around a community performance of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. It’s a novel with a lot of humour, and it exploits adult education in order to emphasise the awkwardness and discomfort Kluftinger feels with the unknown, uncertain, and unpredictable. And it’s another example of the way in which adult education serves so often in German krimis as an unremarkable backdrop to dramatic events.
I wonder, though, whether we have underestimated the importance of embarrassment in adult learning. Or rather, in deterring some people from taking a formal course, with the risk that others will judge you for needing to ‘return to school’, or that you will show yourself up in some way by making mistakes in front of people who seem more confident and competent than you. Perhaps this is one more reason why remote forms of learning, where no one sees you fail, attract some people ?