Ilse Janda, 14 or Ilse is gone

Ilse Janda, 14 or Die Ilse ist weg is a book for young people by the Austrian writer Christine Nöstlinger and was published in 1974. It is about the young Erika who is looking for her older heaviest Ilse who has run away .

action

Not everything is going ideally in the Janda family. The parents of 14-year-old Ilse and 12-year-old Erika got divorced years ago , the mother remarried and with her new husband Kurt had two more children, boys, who also live in the family. There is increasing conflict between Ilse and her mother: She comes home late and claims to have been to a friend's house, which turns out to be a lie. Since it is not getting any better, her pocket money is canceled and Ilse is no longer allowed to leave. She therefore decides to avoid the situation by secretly packing up her things and moving out.

Only Erika is privy to her plan, who even helps to distract her mother when Ilse leaves the house with her suitcase and gets into a car. Together with Amrei, an old friend who she recently met again, Ilse wants to go to England , where the two girls have got a job as nannies . Erika believes her sister and agrees to keep the whole thing a secret, not least because Ilse threatened to kill herself otherwise . When Ilse is finally gone, Erika plays the unsuspecting at home and is also surprised that her sister has suddenly disappeared. She's waiting all the time for a postcard to come from Ilse, because she has promised to get in touch as soon as she and Amrei have arrived in London . She only realized that everything was a lie when one day she suddenly met Amrei on the street and spoke to her about Ilse's whereabouts, which showed that Amrei had not had contact with Ilse for a long time.

Erika therefore decides to look for her sister. Her first point of contact is her friend Helli, with whom Ilse has always done a lot, but she doesn't know anything either, only that she is with a student named Herbert Plank. Erika goes to see him, but it turns out that it was just another lie from Ilse. Herbert's brother Nikolaus knows, however, that a certain student, who is called "the dabbed one", was very obviously in love with Ilse and always pursued her. Maybe he knows more. Together with Nikolaus and his friend, who is called Alibaba, Erika visits the person concerned. After they put him to the test together, he reports that when he watched Ilse again, he saw her climb into a red BMW to a man with a white suede coat - he even still knows the license plate and also where the car often stands, namely in front of the “Goldene Gans” inn, which is why he assumes that the stranger is the innkeeper.

Ilse and Alibaba go to the tavern and are amazed when they see the landlord because he has nothing to do with the description of what has been spotted. After the trail got lost, Alibaba later finds out that the car does not belong to the landlord, but to his brother. When Ilse later walks past the inn again, she sees the landlord accepting a delivery of beer and signing it with a pen that belonged to Erika. She has been looking for the pen since Use's disappearance. The landlord is surprised when she asks him where the pen comes from and says that Erika can have it if she likes it. When the landlord then receives a postcard from his brother in Florence , Erika sees that Ilse co-signed the card. Now she knows that her sister is in Florence with the host's brother.

Erika turns to her grandmother, with whom she and Ilse lived for some time after their parents divorced. The grandmother finally seeks out Erika's and Ilse's mother, although the contact had long been broken off. The whole story, including Erika's role in it, is told and the parents go to the host of the "Golden Goose". When the latter finds out that his brother is traveling with a minor, he calls him in immediately. The brother finally takes Ilse to the train station on the Austrian border and then goes into hiding because he wants to evade a trial against him. Ilse had pretended to be significantly older and said that she was about to graduate from high school.

Finally Ilse comes back to the family. When the two girls were lying in their room, Ilse said that she was really on the way to London with Amrei, her cousin had picked her up. But that would have got her a better job, namely in Rome with a count as a nanny. On the way there, however, they met a man in Florence who makes films and was very enthusiastic about both. He will soon be coming to Vienna to do test recordings, and Amrei and Ilse are to be hired for a main role and role. Erika knows that nothing is true about the story, but is silent about it. She wonders what to do now and is scared.

filming

In 1976 the novel was filmed in Germany under the title " Ilse is gone ".

expenditure

• Christine Nöstlinger: Ilse Janda, 14 or Die Ilse ist weg, Verlag Friedrich Oetinger, Hamburg 1988.