Ronald M. Schernikau chose the hostile and disciplining world of a high school as the setting for his debut Kleinstadtnovelle (The Small-Town-Novella). It is said that Schernikau presented his novel to his teachers and classmates a couple of weeks before his graduation. Even though I wouldn’t like to follow the 1980s media narrative of him using the novel to hold his own high school to account, it is at least safe to say that he and the books' protagonist b., who like the author himself at the time is a queer teenager, endured comparable conditioning by their respective educational institutions.
After catching feelings for leif, a boy with whom he masturbated on a class trip to Berlin, b. faces a homophobic campaign lead by the well -situated parents of his classmate, which involves the local newspaper and culminates in a trial-style class conference. The disciplining measures give the structure for the second half of the novel and are itself structured by school representatives, much to the disbelief of b.’s mother, whose expressions of the conviction that the private life of her son shouldn’t bother the school as an institution remains unheard.
School, even though it is reproducing the norms of society in general, has its own set of rules and disciplining methods. Schernikau’s portrayal of it underlines once again that puberty is a spatial phenomenon. There are specific rooms designed for it to happen, class rooms, of course, but also gyms, clubs, skateparks, orthodontists, gynecologists’ waiting rooms and many more. All of them are shaping the way young people navigate and orientate themselves, segregate pubescents from the rest of society and discipline them to a point where they see no other option in life than throwing themselves into a job market that wears them down until there’s little left.

his [b.’s] former german teacher had the audacity to tell him in his face: shut your mouth until you have graduated, after that you can do whatever you want to, don’t risk it all. in university somebody else is going to come and say: do your phd first, do your exams first, get in line first, grow up first and become one of us.

There is not much to expect from the classmates either. leif, the boy b. fell for, will end up being a good man like everybody else and the locker room b. and the other boys share after gym class, is a combat zone where "men are trained to beat up faggots and rape women […] where the systematic destruction of happiness takes place." b.’s biology teacher emphasizes that he wants to raise awareness for these people who are able to do little about their homosexuality, but also, he continues, doesn’t want to promote it, as the societal interest of the survival of the human species always needs to be prioritized.

Indeed, puberty poses a biopolitical problem for society. Kids are unpredictable, even the straightest kids aren’t innocent, they wanna have fun and they are allowed to have fun, it only has to happen in a space that was built for it. As they represent a reason for – and the justification of – the western nuclear family and serve as projections of the future of patriarchal society, children have to be trained and detained. School plays a central role here, but of course there is a whole ecosystem of academic fields and professions working together to ensure the rupture-less risk management of a national demography.

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Most importantly, though, puberty is a phenomenon of age, of time, timing and temporality. The question is not if, why or how you’re going to have a puberty, but when you’re going to have it normally. The reason for the hormonal changes in young people’s bodies that serve as the base for puberty as a societal project remain largely unexplored. Nevertheless, puberty science creates a set of norms mostly around when first and last indicators of that phase should take place in human beings. These norms build the groundwork for a whole set of medical practices that intervene in young people’s bodies and minds in the form of for example hormone therapies, information leaflets or sex education. They trickle down to schoolyards, where pupils compare their experiences and discuss at what time they should’ve been made. Who doesn’t lie about having or not having had their period, wet dreams, romantic or sexual encounters with others, masturbated… when the grounds on which the discussions take place are centered so much around optimal timing?
Even beyond the idea of puberty as a stage, experiences outside of the expected timeframes are mostly worth nothing or give reason for discrimination. Second puberty, for instance, as many queer and especially trans people describe the (re-)experiencing of their gendered selves, is not a concept that fits within the dominant western story of straight time. Affiliation with subcultures beyond what is considered youth, is regularly condemned as well, specifically targeting those who are dependent on building communities outside of the realm of the secluded nuclear family.
Drawing on the concept of queer temporality I’d suggest to detach puberty from its existence as a particular phase in life and open it to a wider demography. Rather than serving as a difficult stage of pre-subjectivity, it is a form of subjectivity that emerges more often in many lives, for some it might even be around constantly.

It is the powerlessness and the absurdity of the school structure that b. experiences that drive him out of the small town to become a subject that can enjoy at least a little bit of autonomy. He chooses subculture and Berlin over school and Lehrte towards the end of the novel and the feeling that stayed for me after finishing the book, was, that not puberty itself is the problem, but the hostile conditions in which it is supposed to happen. It is not puberty that causes the trauma that so many – including b., including you and me – want to flee from, but the violence that pubescents face.

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Schernikau’s 1980 novel is written in lower case, apparently because he thought it was easier to not use capitals on a typewriter, but nevertheless anticipating what will become a style of writing associated with teenhood up until contemporary text messaging. Yes, it is just easier to text like that, many people reply under the Why do teens use mostly (or all) “lower case” letters in their texts? - post on Quora. It comes across as casual, careless and disobeying authoritative grammatical structures imposed on the writer. It is considered more direct and honest, others say.

Even though it is written in third person, Kleinstadtnovelle begins with an „I“ that is not marked as direct speech.

i am afraid. am female, am male, double. feel my body departing from my body, see my white hands, my eyes in the mirror, i don’t want to be double who am I? want to be me, male, female, see only white. i am facing myself, want to reach myself, stretch my arms out towards myself where am i? i see, kiss, hug and intermingle. at some point lea appears, then reappears, and at last he is aware of her. b. senses: he’s lying in bed, it’s morning, his room is blurry, he tries to take it in, feels the movement of his head, doesn’t try to steer it. no hope for a good day today, fuckingettingup, fuckingschool, fuckinglife.

A similar monologue also closes the book and a distinction between the I and b., becomes more visible, when Schernikau writes that the "I" wants to "dance like b." There is an instance that frames the story of the young protagonist and it uses the "I" as its pronoun, while blending in and out of the figure b.. It is somebody in dialogue, for whom b.’s story seems important.

Puberty is a rather recent invention and even though the effects it has on our life's expand beyond the realm of even a broad understanding of fiction, it has always been in dialogue with what could be considered aesthetic work. For instance, the adolescent is linked to European literary history like no other figure and vice versa became the subject that most products, especially aesthetic work, are targeted to. Movies and songs are written for teenagers, because they are still allowed to subject themselves to aesthetic work, to give themselves away, to be unstable in their own subjectivity, to be influenced by something, to question their autonomy. In the case of Kleinstadtnovelle, whose author was a teenager himself, the distinction between author, narrator and protagonist becomes so blurry, that it is impossible to say, where who begins and ends. This cross-identification between the instances can be read as a simultaneous fractioning and multiplication of a self that needs to  protect itself against the winds that come from all sides. The young, queer person needs to be anywhere and not at all – The more fragmented the subjectivity, the less of a target it provides, the less of a fixed, stable outcome it will have.
You’ll find similar kinds of identity making deeply entangled with the forms of various aesthetic medias, even if adolescence isn't their core subject. The drive to figure and figure out in visual arts and literature for example, to form a body that is also a text body or a body of text that is also a body. Poetics, as writing about writing, as a form that brings together aesthetics and politics, lends itself for the investigation of different kinds of pubescent identity here.

Knowing that a lot of lines of critical discourse meet under the teen’s worn out favorite band’s merchandise and that a lot of meaning and emancipatory potential lies in the yet so bluntly derided rage in adolescents, I am trying to engage with the pubescent with the aim to find out how a different angle on this particular phenomenon could not only include those who are left out from its dominant narratives, but also benefit young and old people alike.