It is remarkable how quickly and aesthetically impressive the pandemic has arrived in children's literature.

Last year, Tamara Bach had already transformed the lockdown into a kind of chamber play in her young adult novel "Das Pferd ist ein Hund", during which the social structure of a Berlin apartment building was rearranged.

Now, with the children's novel by Katja Ludwig, another book has been published that takes up the curfew and the risk of infection as unheard-of events in literary form.

Lena Bop

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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"Ellie & Oleg - nobody's here but us" takes his subtitle very literally.

Twelve-year-old Ellie and her stepbrother Oleg, who is four years younger, are actually the only ones left behind in their blended family's new home somewhere deep in the Brandenburg countryside.

The parents of the two only wanted to go back to Berlin for one day to get a few last things before their new life begins.

But in the evening they do not return.

And you can't reach her by phone, because Ellie can no longer find her cell phone - so begins a narrative of a pre-digital time in which the adventure takes its course.

The two children are now on their own, alone in a house with no neighbors apart from the "boozehead" who lives in a shack nearby and shoots everything that gets too close to him and his chickens.

Otherwise there is no help in sight.

Neither in the village, which is now surrounded by an impassable fence with a sign on it: "Warning!

This is a communal pandemic containment area.” Still on the vast expanses of the so-called prairie,

This attempt brings them nothing, because they cannot find the way back, a first night under the open sky.

But before the second night begins, they also discover an old Trabi in an abandoned LPG yard and with it the relief of having at least a tin roof over their heads.

In addition, the apple tree behind the yard gives the two of them a hitherto unknown joy over a few wrinkled apples.

"The apples have skins like sticky old greaseproof paper, but inside they're sweet and vanilla like cookie dough and, besides my favorite instant noodles, they're the best thing I've ever eaten."

Ellie's point of view, from whose point of view the story is told, changes in the course of the new experiences of being on her own.

At times, circumstances require her to wipe away her own tears of despair so as not to frighten her little brother.

But they also give her energy and ingenuity that feels so good that on the umpteenth day of the pandemic, when you look at the dining table, you no longer feel abandoned: “When I come into the kitchen, you are everyone is already there.” And by that she means three others besides Oleg, namely Eddie, Teddie, the stray dog ​​Averell and the cat Sissi.

The book is teeming with such scenes, good ideas and finely worked out details, which find beautiful correspondence in Heike Herold's black and white vignettes.

It thrives on good ideas and many coincidences, which Katja Ludwig weaves together in such a way that the events never tip over into slapstick, but always retain the serious tone that arises from the absence of the parents and which develops an exciting pull.

"Ellie & Oleg" is her second book with this basic motif after "Der Schwesternzauber", which was only published last year.

It understands being suddenly alone as an impertinence full of opportunities that it becomes easier and easier for the children to recognize and seize as the days go by.

And this lightness gives courage – also to those who read about her.

Katja Ludwig: "Ellie & Oleg - except us, nobody is here"

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With vignettes by Heike Herold.

Klett children's book, Leipzig 2022. 236 p., hardcover, 16 euros.

From 9 years