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Wolfgang Herrndorf, Benedict Wells and now Elena Fischer – they have all achieved great success with their novels about teenagers. Even in adults. How come?
Novels about growing up regularly storm the bestseller lists. Current example: “Paradise Garden” by Elena Fischer.
The German received rave reviews for her heartbreaking and heartwarming novel about a 14-year-old’s self-discovery. And she even made it onto the longlist for the German Book Prize.
Because of this success, she sometimes still feels “as if she were in a state of limbo,” says the 36-year-old author with a laugh. The enormous response to her novel – her debut, of course – could not have been predicted.
Successful teenager
“Hard Land” by Benedict Wells met with a similar reception a few years ago. Or “Tick Tack” by Julia von Lucadou. Or – a little while ago – “Tschick” by Wolfgang Herrndorf.
Legend:
With a stolen Lada in the cornfield: The 2016 film adaptation shows the main characters in “Tschick” as classic teenagers. Rebellious, courageous and looking for meaning.
IMAGO/ZUMA Wire
All of these successful novels are about the emergence of young people – albeit in different settings. About melancholy and falling in love for the first time, about the pain of parting, hope and the search for a place in the world.
Coming-of-age stories obviously strike a chord with the reading public – including adults, as the high sales figures suggest. “Puberty,” says Elena Fischer, “is a highly explosive time and therefore offers exciting material in itself.”
Universal questions
Benedict Wells believes that there is no contradiction in the fact that adults like to read novels about young people. As a teenager, you often long to “no longer be considered a teenager.” And novels about adolescents would therefore not necessarily be considered particularly attractive at this stage of life.
But as you get older, “you often long for your youth and the feelings you had back then.” That was also his own experience, says the 39-year-old.
For Claudia Sackl, a literary scholar at the University of Zurich, “coming-of-age novels ask teenage characters the universal question of ‘Who am I?’”. This fundamental question concerns us not only in our youth, “but throughout our entire lives.” And this makes puberty stories “attractive even into old age”.
Legend:
New teen novels like “Tick Tack” (2022) by Julia von Lucadou also deal with current topics such as social media and the like. But the genre itself has a long tradition.
IMAGO / Westend61
A look back shows: Goethe’s “Werther” and “Wilhelm Meister”, Gottfried Keller’s “The Green Heinrich” and Adalbert Stifter’s “Nachsommer” thrilled audiences in their time. These works are now considered classics of the genre, which is also known – somewhat outdatedly – as educational or developmental novels.
Novels of crisis
The literary scholar Claudia Sackl still finds the current boom in coming-of-age stories remarkable: “We live in a time in which we are confronted with many crises. Puberty novels deal with the behavior of people in transition.” This means: The works of Fischer, Wells and Co. can be used to make connections to current issues that generally concern us as a society.
According to Claudia Sackl, there is also a certain feel-good factor that is almost always inherent in these novels: Since they are about young people who still have life ahead of them, there is at least potential hope in these books that they will overcome the challenges presented to them. And this positive look into the future is obviously good for readers, especially today.