Adults talk. Marco did something.
Adults talk. Marco did something. is a book for young people by Kirsten Boie .
action
15-year-old Marco, who grew up in a fictional small German town, committed an arson attack on a house inhabited by Turkish immigrants in the neighboring larger town, in which two children were killed. The action begins after the act and reconstructs how this act came about:
Marco is the youngest of three brothers. While the older ones, Bernd and Sven, did not cause any problems at school, Marco already behaves cheekily towards his teacher in elementary school, does not do his tasks and does not keep up well in class. His mother grants him a lot of freedom and doesn't support the teacher in her work. Although Marco only gets a recommendation for secondary school, his parents register him at a grammar school. There he behaves very friendly at first, but that doesn't last long. In the middle of the 6th grade he was demoted to the Realschule, shortly before the end of the 8th grade he even had to go back to the elementary and secondary school that he had left after the 4th grade. The other students react to the "returnee" with glee and behave rather negatively, only with his classmate Rüdiger Poffatz he becomes friends. He in turn has contact with a few older youths like 17-year-old Sigurd, who has xenophobic attitudes and whose father is a member of a right-wing extremist party.
When Marco wears a patch at school that reads “I'm proud to be a German”, his class teacher wants to discuss the topic of national pride. Marco cites the autobahn as an example of something the Germans could be proud of, and he does not respond at all to the teacher's provocative question as to whether he would be proud of Hitler. The teacher - who teaches German and history - then makes the time of National Socialism and the Holocaust a major subject in the class. Marco always provokes new discussions with the teacher and doubts the Holocaust. In a history paper, Marco crosses out a task on the number of victims in various concentration camps. The teacher gives him a five, with which he would not have passed his secondary school certificate. Marco angrily approaches the teacher and leaves the school. He and his clique are later kicked out of the local youth club for drinking beer there. That same night Marco carried out the arson attack, which is not shown in detail.
Narrative
The story is told from the perspective of a journalist who questions various people in the small town after the crime, such as neighbors, the teacher, the headmaster, the pastor and the social worker in the youth club. However, the journalist does not have his own say, so is not a narrator, only the statements of the respondents are reproduced. It becomes clear how differently Marco himself and the deed are perceived: The mayor and the school principal have an interest in ensuring that their location or school is in a good position in public and is not associated with the attack. The mayor tries to downplay the act with words like "incident" and "happening". The pastor and the social worker, on the other hand, doubt their own behavior and wonder whether they could have influenced Marco differently and whether the act could have been prevented. A neighbor and a gas station tenant, whom Marco sometimes helped with car repairs, portray him as a smart and friendly boy, while the statements made by the young people make it clear that Marco was unpopular with most of them and had always lied and "screwed up". The teacher's reaction to Marco's comments was perceived as exaggerated and counterproductive.
It is only at the very end that Marco's own thoughts are reproduced in the third person: He believes that most adults are also against foreigners, but (unlike him) do not dare to do anything. In addition, he had not planned the death of the children, he just wanted to give the Turks a "lesson" so that they can go back to their homeland. He doesn't feel guilty.
expenditure
The book was published in 1994 by Oetinger- Verlag, the paperback edition in 1995 by dtv , and in 2015 there was a revised new edition. In 2001 a translation into Dutch was published ( Marco doet tenminste iets ... , translator: Els van Delden). In Denmark in 1998 an edition edited for German lessons was published with a Danish afterword by Erica Kirsch.
source
- Kirsten Boie: Adults talk. Marco did something. Hamburg: Oetinger 1994. ISBN 3789131083