The Marianum in Vienna has been one of Austria’s elite boarding schools for as long as anyone can remember. Till Kokorda doesn’t expect much from the school when he starts fifth grade there, but he quickly learns how hard the school can be because of his form teacher, the so-called Dolinar. The Dolinar teaches German and has a long-standing reputation as the strictest teacher the school has ever seen: Students are punished harshly for even the smallest of mistakes, or even for not having the same opinion as him. Students who are bad in school and particularly those who struggle with German are constantly ridiculed. Sometimes the Dolinar is visited by former students, which fills his current students who suffer under him with disgust.
Till’s biggest concern is to not attract too much attention, and he manages to be average in everything that he does, except for one thing: Till has a passion for the PC game Age of Empires 2 and quickly spends most of his spare time in front of the computer. He even makes a friend, Georg, and they spend most of the school’s skiing trip in their room, playing AoE2, as they call it. Till manages to become supervisor of the computer room and spends all of his spare time at school getting better and better. The game also helps him through his parent’s divorce and his father’s sudden death of cancer when Till is in the ninth grade. Till’s mother is concerned about the amount of time he spends gaming but doesn’t know how to breach the topic since she barely knows anything about gaming.
Till’s first years at school pass mostly uneventful with few exceptions, for example when he forgets his edition of BRIGITTA for German class, and he and some other boys who’ve also forgotten it make a plan to escape the school grounds to buy it in a nearby bookshop. Meanwhile Till has become internationally recognized in the AoE2-scene and tries to explain it to his mother by showing her the stream of an American Youtuber talking about Till’s gameplay. He doesn’t realize that his mother, who doesn’t even understand the concept of livestreaming, much less of AoE2, can barely follow him. Till even attends Gamescom in Cologne where he plays against others live.
In eleventh grade Till starts to smoke, and it is in the smoker’s corner of the school that he first meets Feli and Fina. He soon becomes close with both of them and starts to hang around in bars and on demonstrations, because they both have strong political opinions. He joins a new AoE2 Team and breaks his chin during the Christmas holidays, because of which he misses two weeks of school, which doesn’t endear him to the Dolinar. Till’s mother is overjoyed to meet some of his friends when Feli and Fina visit him. The next month Feli, who actually doesn’t go to the Marianum and was only visiting previously, manages to win a high-profile writing competition and changes to the Marianum, where she’s now one year below Till. He too submitted a text and to his surprise manages to get an honourable mention. After bringing her home late from a party one night Till realizes that her family is very rich, like most people at the Marianum, and that she doesn’t get along with her mother. Till has by now acknowledged that he is in love with Feli, but it is obvious to him that she doesn’t like him back. They kiss at a party and Feli immediately decides that it was a mistake, but they remain friends.
Later that year, Fina and Feli are overjoyed and go to every demonstration together. But around the same time the Dolinar realizes how much time Till has spent gaming at school, and he is now his least favourite student: No one is allowed to talk to him and he has detention for the rest of his last schoolyear. On his eighteenth birthday Till inherits a small fortune from his father, and for a long time the grief for him overwhelms Till once more. He finally tells Feli that he loves her, and to his surprise she loves him too, she only wanted to make sure that Till was really in love with her. They start dating around the same time Till visits a gaming convention in Shanghai, and comes back feeling very ill and has to stay in bed for most of January. Then, in March, the Corona-pandemic breaks out. By this time Till feels better again and he and Feli move into his father’s old apartment together where they spend the first lockdown. Till even gets her to try gaming, which he is now thinking about pursuing professionally.
Till only visits the Marianum again for his final exams. Because of the Covid-allowances it is for the first time possible to hand in a blank paper and still pass his A-levels, and he’s one of the few couple of hundred students in Austria who does so. After leaving the Marianum for the last time he meets one of the Dolinar’s old students on the way back, who got thrown out in eighth grade. He tells Till that he thinks Dolinar is actually quite a good teacher, and Till vehemently disagrees.
Echtzeitalter is an incredibly unique coming-of-age story. The character-driven nature of the text makes it hard to summarize the novel, since there is very little that could actually be considered relevant to the plot. But precisely these parts are what makes the book a very unique experience: The author loses himself in tangents about the elitist nature of the school and even takes time to describe how its pupils and teachers look in other people’s eyes. He can describe a seemingly uninteresting detail at length, only for the reader to later realize how important it truly is. Till as a character is fascinating, because he manages to be relatable to a broad audience without coming across as shallow, instead his complexity is something that sinks in the more you read. The themes of the novel, elitism, modern politics and the gap between the generations, which is tied-up with Till’s gaming, are all applied to modern day Austria, but there is no reason why they wouldn’t resonate the same way with the audience of any other western country. The way Till matures over the course of his academic career at the Marianum is incredibly well done and how he slowly grows out of childish pranks against his teachers and instead comes to appreciate them is unbelievably relatable. Overall, despite its relevance for millennials and even younger generations this novel manages to speak to everyone who has ever been to school.