A Rebel in the Making

929 words

Markus Pruss
Lara – Die blonde Rebellin, Volume 1: Lara in Gefahr
Florian Schur, 2024

I really had hoped that Spencer J. Quinn’s young heroes of The No College Club had just gotten a German equivalent. But it was not to be – at least not yet.

Lara: Die blonde Rebellin (which sounds like a cheap made-for-TV movie, to be honest – Lara: The Blonde Rebel) is a new book series for young adults, written by Markus Pruss of The Liberation of Nemmersdorf fame[1] and illustrated by Emil Kraus.

The first book, Lara in Gefahr (Lara in Danger), is set in 2016, after the gates of hell, or rather the German borders, have been opened wide. At least it’s supposed to be. Admittedly, it’s been a few years since I last saw a school from the inside, but I don’t think the Gender-Gaga (as we call it around here) was yet so bad in 2016 as it is portrayed in the story. Was Ausländer raus already a theme song in 2016? Were diversity laws that favored “people of color” on the job market already around? The beginnings were there, sure, but all of this current-day insanity rather reads like it’s been superimposed on the not-so-distant past.

As Mr. Quinn proved, you don’t have to dumb down a story for young readers. Not that Markus Pruss is consciously doing that, I think; it’s just that he makes all the well-known mistakes of aspiring writers. The cheap phrases. The inconsistency. The wooden dialogue. The focus on minutiae. In a way, Lara is Hermann muss fallen for teenagers, but without the complex plot.

16-year old Lara is a bit of a rebel in school, insofar that she questions the Refugees Welcome narrative and resents her teacher’s “gender speech”. (In German, you have a male and female form for many words which poses a real problem for inclusivity nowadays, since you would by necessity have to exclude those creatures who don’t identify as either. So naturally, the language has to be changed, which is an ongoing battle. However, just to correct Mr. Pruss here, the “inclusive” form he uses is definitely modern. Back in 2016, we still used another one.)

Still, despite being a fan of a far right band, liking everything Germanic and Viking and having a Stolzmonat flag in her room, Lara is apparently not yet a race realist. Despite her doubts about mass immigration, she still lets herself get swept up in a school project to welcome a new batch of refugees into her hometown. Primed by the media to expect poor women and children – don’t we all remember those photos? – she and her friends Max and Mia are surprised to face young and middle-aged men who really have no use for the teddy bears and diapers the students have brought.

Then Lara meets the young Syrian Ali and, despite having some doubts, agrees to a date with him, after which, of course, there is no getting rid of him. However, Lara soon discovers that he might be involved in drug-dealing.

Her mother, a rabid feminist, is no help at all, and her father’s whereabouts are unknown ever since he left the family when Lara was still a child.

Luckily, that’s when a new student joins her class. Leon has been expelled from his previous school for beating up a Turkish student and has biker friends. Not someone to mess with, it would seem; yet he is also a perfect gentleman toward Lara and gets along well with her best buddy Max. Along with Mia, the “last generation of Germans” in their school, as they jokingly call themselves, form a tight-knit group. (This might be a dig at Letzte Generation – Last Generation –, the German equivalent of Just Stop Oil and the likes.) They even attend an underground concert of Lara’s favorite band and have to flee when the police shows up. During their escape, tender feelings between Lara and Leon as well as between Max and Mia become apparent; you know the drill.

The friends devise a plan to rid Lara of Ali’s unwanted attentions with the help of Leon’s biker buddies who, apparently, have nothing better to do than drive around the school all day on the off-chance that Ali might do something. Which he does, eventually. The story ends with the news that Ali and his dealer friend will be deported. (If only.)

A future installment of the series will probably include the search for Lara’s father. I hope Markus Pruss works on his style in the meantime, because the series certainly has potential, and I would like to see more of it.

Notes

[1] By the way, Hydra Comics sent out an e-mail on October 21, the 80^th anniversary of the events at Nemmersdorf (my translation):

“Next year, politicians and the media will use the 80th anniversary of the end of the war to instrumentalize history for their own purposes. In the process, an eternal German guilt will be propagated and current political campaigns will be linked to the end of the Second World War. It will most likely be undignified and difficult to bear.

It is therefore all the more important that the Nemmersdorf massacre marks the beginning of the series of anniversaries. It is a prime example of Germany’s repression of its own victims. We must therefore consider how we can commemorate it in a meaningful way. … Since October 18, we are reporting daily on social media with pictures from our comic about what happened on that day 80 years ago. You can follow us on Twitter/X, Telegram, Facebook and Gettr and support our posts by sharing them.”