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Gymnasiums are, in theory, intended to impart a comprehensive humanistic education, what Germans call Bildung. Alexander von Humboldt described Bildungas “the linking of the self to the world.” Bildung could also be a noun describing the massacre of the spirit necessary to transform a human child into a German adult. Bildung, in midcentury West Germany, was intended to create a type of man who would wield power and influence in the new transatlantic capitalist order. The term Bildungsroman, a German word for novels of education and development—tales of children becoming adults—remains untranslated in English. smalltownnovella is a novella of both kinds of Bildung: both the linking of the self to the world and the institutional destruction of feeling necessary to produce subjects who will manage and govern.