Tschick (2010)

Why We Took the Car (German: Tschick [ˈtʃɪk]) is a youth novel by Wolfgang Herrndorf first published in German by Rowohlt Verlag in 2010. The English edition, translated by Tim Mohr, was published by Scholastic in 2014.

It deals with the unconventional friendship between a 14-year-old middle class boy and a Russian late repatriate youngster. The novel was awarded with the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Children's Literature Award) as well as the Clemens-Brentano-Preis in 2011. In 2012, it was also awarded with the Hans Fallada Prize. It was published in over 25 countries and sold over 2 million copies in Germany alone until September 2016.

Intention

To the question why he wrote a youth novel with Tschick, Wolfgang Herrndorf answered the following in a conversation with FAZ:

I’ve reread the books of my childhood in 2004, ‘Lord of the flies’, ‘Huckleberry Finn’, ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’, ‘Pik reist nach Amerika’ and so on. I did this because I wanted to know whether they were really as good as I remembered them, but I also wanted to find out who I was as a twelve-year-old. During that process, I realized that all of my favorite books had three things in common: a quick elimination of the grown-up attachment figure, long journey, wide waters. I thought about how I could integrate these three things into a somewhat realistic youth novel. Sailing down the Elbe with a float seemed ridiculous; to sign on a ship as a runaway in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 21-century: jabberwocky. I only could think of something with a car. Two boys steal a car. The water was missing, but I had figured out the plot in a couple of minutes.

Plot

Maik Klingenberg, 14, comes from an affluent but dysfunctional family home in Marzahn, a part of eastern Berlin. His mother has a severe alcohol addiction and his father is described as a somewhat neglecting parent. Maik has no friends since his best friend Paul moved to Brandenburg. In school he is an outsider, which is why at the beginning of summer break he is not invited to the birthday party of Serbian beauty queen Tatjana Cosic whom he secretly has a crush on. Whilst on the most part considered boring, one of the few times he stands out in class is the moment he reads an essay in German class talking about his alcoholic mother with striking but loving openness. The teacher is horrified, his classmates laugh at him and call him a psycho from then on. The new classmate Andrej Tschichatschow (Tschick for short), an uncommunicative late repatriate from Russia, who sometimes shows up openly drunk to class, is also an outsider and excluded from Tatjana's birthday party.

Maik, in the hopes of still being invited, draws a picture of Beyoncé as a present for Tatjana, because the girl loves Beyoncé's music. However, the last day of school passes without anything happening. On top of that, Maik's mum has to go to a rehab clinic again while his dad wants to use that time to go on holiday with his young female assistant, telling Maik it's a business trip. It appears, at this point, that Maik will be forced to spend his summer holiday alone.

Suddenly, Tschick arrives at his front door in a stolen and run-down, light blue Lada Niva. Tschick asks Maik to join him on a trip to visit his grandfather in Walachia. Even though neither of the two actually knows where that is, Maik hesitantly accepts and the two start a journey into the unknown. Before that, however, they drop by at Tatjana's birthday party, where Maik, encouraged by Tschick, hands his crush the present. The boys then drive off, leaving the bewildered guests behind.

As they haven't brought any maps, the boys soon get lost in the forest and emerge in a small village. A family of five kids, and a mother, who is overtly critical of consumerism, invites them for lunch, which is strictly organic and only handed out to those who can answer a short quiz, which mostly revolves around Harry Potter. Further down the road, while scavenging a dump for a hose in order to steal some fuel for their Lada, the runaways encounter the tomboyish and street-smart Isa Schmidt. Isa plans on travelling to Prague to visit her half-sister and offers to help the boys find and use a hose, if they take her somewhat along the way in exchange. Despite her unbearable uncleanliness and stench, the boys reluctantly agree.

Arriving at a reservoir, they throw Isa into the water without any hesitation, so she can wash herself and get rid of her stench. She throws away her old clothes, cleans herself thoroughly and then puts on Maik's clothes. Maik is then allowed to cut her hair very short and discovers not only her shapely naked upper body, but also that his old love for Tatjana gradually starts to fade away. The next morning, the three of them decide to climb the nearby mountain. They enjoy the delightful nature and romantic atmosphere at the peak, carve their initials into a piece of wood and vow to meet again at this very spot in exactly 50 years.

As they are descending the mountain and a coach stops at the car park, Isa thinks getting to Prague by coach would work better than with the old Lada. They arrive at the crater of a huge area of brown coal mining and meet the last remaining inhabitant Horst Fricke, who is obviously senile. After welcoming them by shooting them with an airgun, he invites them for a lemonade and tells them about his tragic losses (for instance of his love) and traumatic experiences he had at a concentration camp and at the eastern front. As a farewell present he forces a mysterious, small bottle with a foul-smelling, but seemingly life-saving liquid, on them, but Tschick throws it out the window of the Lada without hesitation.