Friedrich and Friederike

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Friedrich and Friederike or Is that already love? is achildren's and youth book created in 1983 . It was written by Max von der Grün .

content

General

The work is a collection of nine short stories that exemplify a year in the lives of the pubescent working-class children Friedrich "Fritz" Lodemann and Friederike "Rieke" Meister . The two have been friends from childhood, but discover that they now feel more for each other than mere camaraderie, which sometimes makes their friendship more difficult.

Both live in a workers' estate on the outskirts of Dortmund, with row houses . Friedrich's father works shifts in a steel mill, while his mother works as a cashier in a grocery store. Friederike's father owns a painting company, while her mother is a housewife.

Both parents are friends with each other and also own neighboring parcel plots in a garden division. Fritz and Rieke spend a large part of their time in the arbors.

The stories

  • The bathroom

Friedrich and Friederike go on a fishing trip on a frozen lake. Here, however, Rieke breaks into the ice. Subsequent attempts by Fritz to dry her wet clothes are difficult because he is a little too suggestive. And they don't go unnoticed.

  • The beautiful stranger

At Carnival time, Friedrich meets a girl dressed as a harem lady during a carnival party, with whom he immediately falls in love. He is courting her and tearing Friederike a little in the process. But what he doesn't know: Rieke is under the masquerade.

  • Day trip

On a school trip, Friederike isolates herself from the class and ends up being left with a sprained ankle in the middle of the forest. When her absence is later noticed, Fritz and his class teacher have to go out to look for her.

  • The night watch

In the arbor colony, where Fritz and Rieke's parents also have their dachas, burglars run around. In order to ambush them and, if the opportunity arises, to put an end to their craft, both secretly spend the night in the garden shed. Soon, however, the thieves actually show up and Fritz and Rieke identify you as a parcel neighbor.

  • The landmark

Continuation of the events from "The Night Watch". Friedrich and Friederike decide to brand their criminal neighbors. To do this, both of them paint the name on a dilapidated water tower in a night-and-fog action. A dangerous and filthy company.

  • The flat tire

On a bike trip to a swimming area, Rieke's bike got stuck because of a hole in the tire. While Friedrich repairs the damage, Friederike goes dreaming for a walk in the forest. Fritz then chains her bike to a tree. This has consequences, because Rieke can free her bike in an unconventional way and now demands a similar action from Fritz.

  • Building site

After an information day at school, Friedrich knows what he will do later: he wants to be a crane operator. For this purpose, he goes to a construction site, looks over the shoulder of the operator of such a construction device and is also allowed to operate the device once. When he tells Rieke about it with a swollen chest, she persuades him to pull her up with the crane. Everything runs smoothly until the power fails ...

  • Unexpected wealth

While walking through the woods and fields, Friedrich and Friederike discover a man who is hiding a package. They take it out of hiding and discover a box with tens of thousands of D-Marks. The decision to take it with you ends in dreams of riches and two piles of money divided. But at that moment Fritz 'father joins them ...

  • The roadblock

After construction work in the settlement, the road closures will be lifted again. Friedrich and Friederike want to keep the car-free and therefore calm condition a little longer and therefore secretly rebuild the barricades. At first everything goes well, but then both have to realize that the blocking also has disadvantages. Especially for her parents.

review

Together with Friedrich and Friederike, Max von der Grün remained true to his style of literature about the working class in post-war Germany. The work can be seen as a continuation, in a certain sense even as a continuation of his story Vorstadtkrokodile .

He is exemplified by the two young main characters who are followed in the short stories for almost a year and thus become part of their lives. The burgeoning love between Friedrich and Friederike as a red thread between all the stories is an important part of the book. The sensitive narrative is easy for Max von der Grün and is particularly easy to understand for beginners. Due to the connection with topics such as first love, friendship and puberty , it is particularly suitable for recipients in the same age group.

On the other hand, the book is also a conglomerate of contemporary history. Based on the two working-class children Friedrich and Friederike and their environment, the reader experiences the color of the times and the attitude towards life of the people in the Ruhr area of the 1970s and 1980s with all its ups and downs. There are many cross-references in the book, for which the careers of the fathers of the main characters serve as examples , especially for the recession in the German economy that began in the mid-1980s (which primarily hit the book site of the coal-rich Ruhr area ).

filming

In 1987 the youth book was made into a nine-part miniseries " Friedrich und Friederike " by the WDR . In addition to some actors known from the Rhineland region (including Dieter Prochnow , Beate Abraham and Detlev Redinger ), mainly amateur actors from the vicinity of the Ruhr area acted as actors .

The shooting took place in the direct and indirect surroundings of Dortmund, mostly in Lünen . The Victoria housing estate and the “Am Kanal” housing estate in Lünen, where the school scenes (here the Bebelschule) also took place, served as the backdrop for the parents' houses . In the episode 'Flat tire', a bike tour leads to Cappenberg Castle and its stud on the Schlossberg there.

The cinematic implementation largely adhered to the book and the dialogues there. In some cases, passages were implemented differently, storylines were summarized or completely deleted and new, supplementary secondary characters were added. With Katzenfund an episode independent of the book was even shot. By and large, the entire work can be regarded as close to the original.

The first broadcast on German television took place in 1988 in the evening program of the ARD , a second broadcast in the following year. The series has not been broadcast since then. All episodes of the series have been available in stores on DVD since March 2009 .