Musil's novel is ostensibly a Bildungsroman, a story of a young disoriented man searching for moral values in society and their meaning for him.
The expressionistic novel, based on Musil's personal experiences at a boarding school in Hranice (in Austria-Hungary, now in the Czech Republic) was written according to Musil "because of boredom". In later life, however, Musil denied that the novel was about youthful experiences of his own. Due to its explicit sexual content, the novel at first caused a scandal among the reading public and the authorities of Austria-Hungary.
Later, various prefigurings of Fascism were identified in the text, including the characters of Beineberg and Reiting, who seem to be orderly pupils by day but shamelessly abuse their classmate psychologically, physically and sexually by night.
In 1966, the German director Volker Schlöndorff made the film Der junge Törless based on the novel.
