Were you team “The Three ???” or “TKKG”?
We Millennials share some universal memories: Excitedly exchanging the latest Diddl sheets in the schoolyard. The pride of holding your own cell phone weighing two kilograms in your hands for the first time. The despair when our GameBoy game was anything but child's play. And sometimes we even read books! “Harry Potter” of course and “Until Dawn”. And these 11 other books that, for some reason, we've all read collectively as a generation:
1. “A case for you and the Tiger team” (Thomas Brezina)
For many of us, the Tiger Team was our first contact with crime fiction. In Thomas Brezina's book series, we solved a number of cases with Biggi, Luk and Patrick like old professionals. And if you had no idea (which, admittedly, happened quite often), you could simply use the included “decoder” to quickly look up the solution and then act as if you had figured it out on your own. Easy peasy! Detective work is child's play.
2. “Naughty Girls, Naughty Books” series (various authors)
It wasn't a straight girls' youth in Germany if you didn't read at least one “Naughty Girls, Naughty Books” book between the ages of 11 and 14. They had snappy titles like “Math, Stress and Heartbreak” or “Double Somersault with a Kiss.” These literary masterpieces were actually all about having fun with your siblings, kissing cute boys and finding math stupid and… uh… Why did we all think the books were so cool?
3. “Artemis Fowl” (Eoin Colfer)
Anyone who preferred to spend their youth in fantasy novels rather than reality and was at some point through “Harry Potter” and “Eragon” sooner or later picked up “Artemis Fowl”. As a kind of counterpart to Harry Potter, Artemis was an evil super-genius with an ultra-cool bodyguard, lots of high-tech bells and whistles and her own castle, all of which I found very impressive as a child. The novel series about the brilliant 12-year-old never achieved as much fame as Harry Potter, but was found on numerous children's bookshelves in the early 2000s.
4. “Goosebumps” (RL Stine)
Did you voluntarily traumatize yourself with “Goosebumps” books, or did you have a happy childhood? The horror stories of RL Stine, the Stephen King of schoolyards, had a strangely addictive factor despite (or perhaps because of) their nightmare potential. From today's perspective, the stories about monster sponges under the sink, cursed cameras and headless ghosts read rather silly (especially the incredibly stupid twists at the end of EVERY. DAMN. STORY.), but back then they gave us plenty of sleepless nights.
5. “The Olchis” (Erhard Dietl)
What I would have given as a child to be an Olchi. Live in the trash! Never have to bathe! Farting and eating dirt all day long! It sounded like a pure children's paradise. Unsurprisingly, the little green disgusting men are still very well received by children to this day.
6. “My friend Conni” (Liane Schneider)
There's always something going on with Conni. Conni bakes pizza, goes skiing, helps mom bake, spends the night at Julia's, plays soccer, travels, but never gets on her parents' nerves, is always in a great mood and has no damn problems in the world. I admit it: I always thought Conni was a bit shit. Slow down a gear, Conni. Nobody likes show-offs.
7. “A case for TKKG” (Stefan Wolf) or “The Three ???” (Robert Arthur)
In my schoolyard, people knew nothing about East and West Germany. In our case, Germany was divided between “TKKG” and “Die drei ???” fans; there was an unwritten rule that you couldn’t like both.
8. “Lord of Thieves” (Cornelia Funke)
If you had any school reading material in the 6th grade, then the chances were good that it was a book by Cornelia Funke. On the one hand, because it feels like she wrote 90 percent of German children's books anyway and because you can easily read the books for the third time as an adult… Which is what you have to do as a teacher.
“Lord of Thieves” was definitely a solid choice. Two orphan boys from Germany flee to Venice from their relatives with custody. The fact that they prefer to live on the streets and join a gang of thieves doesn't speak very much for the relatives, but even more so for the lovable thieves. And to balance out the somewhat depressing basic premises, there was a bit of magic.
9. “Matilda” (Roald Dahl)
Maybe so many 90s kids read this book by Roald Dahl because it was so nice to watch the corresponding 1996 film in class. Or maybe our teachers just wanted us to think reading was cool… or that we thought we could get superpowers from it. Well, Matilda only has superpowers in the book because her badass brain is squeezed out of her too small head or something like that. Of course not literally, otherwise we would be back to “goosebumps”.
10. “The Perfume” (Patrick Süskind)
The story of serial killer Grenouille, who kills women to make perfume from their scent, isn't necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when you think of young adult literature. Patrick Süskind did not write the novel for young people either. And yet it feels like every person who went to school between 2000 and 2010 read the novel in their youth.
11. “Eragon” (Christopher Paolini)
Remember when Eragon was the hot shit?! In the noughties, there was no getting around “Harry Potter,” and it seemed as if we were constantly being inundated with new fantasy stories about boys with magical talents. It was precisely at this time that Eragon also fit in seamlessly and felt like it was present everywhere in the bookstores. You could see this blue cover with the dragon on every corner! Then the film flopped and since then we've all been acting like it never happened. Or when was the last time you thought about Eragon?!
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