Why We Took the Car

Why we Took the Car (German: Tschick) 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.

Onto 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.

Maik Klingenberg,14, comes from an affluent but dysfunctional family home in Marzahn, a part of eastern Berlin. In school he is an outsider, which is why at the beginning of summer break he is not invited to the birthday party of 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.

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