hulit1-7, Exercise 2: Commenting without attacking

Model answer (one possible choice: Orkeny's One Minute Stories; check):

Orkeny's very short pieces take a plain, bureaucratic or everyday situation and push it to the absurd: an instruction that makes no sense, a rule applied to the letter with ridiculous results, a person defined by a form. Because the targets are bureaucracy and the absurdity of daily life in general, no ruler or policy is named. Readers who lived under the system recognised the world described, so the comment worked without a direct attack.

Why it passed: the stories could be read as a universal comedy of modern life or as satire of any bureaucracy, and a censor would find it hard to point to a specific offence.

Limit: later readers who did not live in the system may miss the references, and it is easy to claim a political purpose that the author did not state (check what Orkeny said).

An Ottlik answer would stress the institution of a military school as a setting for loyalty and pressure, which is again indirect.