Plot
The young prince Karl, of a small sub-kingdom of the German Empire is sent off near the turn of the 20th century to get a university education in Heidelberg, Baden-Wuerttemberg. His grandfather was one of a handful of petty kings within Germans-speaking central Europe. Fictional Karlsburg is small but fiercely proud of its history and traditions.
Karl has been raised most of his life for the military, but when it comes time for him to marry, the princess picked for him can't stand his stiff formality. This would not be such a problem but for the fact that Karlsburg has no great wealth, only good breeding. His tutor recommends that he be sent to University to develop an easier, more sociable manner. He (eventually) slips into the social mix, becomes accepted as a "good chap" by his student peers, and falls deeply in love with Kathie, a pretty, popular, and musically inclined barmaid, who holds "court" in the local biergarten. Love notwithstanding, when his old grandfather passes on unexpectedly, the young Prince must turn his back on the girl and marry the princess, while taking his place in the small Kingdom that he's been preordained to rule. He returns for one more visit to Heidelberg, and bids Kathie a poignant farewell.
The parallel subplot of the Princess being in love with Count Tarnitz, whom she cannot marry, was completely omitted from the film.
Read more about this topic: The Student Prince (film)
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“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)