41.7 percent of teenagers struggle with feelings of uselessness and 61.5 percent of teenagers are afraid of doing something wrong. However, the extent of lack of trust in others among teenagers is remarkable. Two thirds of young people (63.6 percent) do not trust other people - according to a study conducted by Bielefeld University in 2022.

Arctis

Alexander Kielland Krag | Eben auch nur ein wenig Angst | Arctis Verlag | 224 pages | 16 EUR

The young adult book Nur ein wenig Angst by Alexander Kielland Krag is about this fear: the story is told from the perspective of Cornelius, a young man in the paralysing grip of an anxiety disorder. He wants to run away from his anxiety: from football training, school, and his friends, who keep trying to approach him and are rejected constantly, much to their frustration. Reading it, I feel like one of Cornelius' friends, Aksel or Oliver, and find myself thinking: Oh man, what the hell are you doing - come on! Cornelius doesn't make it easy for those around him: he blocks out, pushes away, shouts, puts barriers around himself and his fear and perceives almost any attention as harassment.
I suspect this is the intention! That the reader initially identifies with the friends. How are we to grasp how difficult it is to comprehend fear if we never experience it first-hand? Only at the very end do the friends get an idea of what is actually going on here: Aksel asks Cornelius which part of his body he would give in return for being free of his fear forever. It’s only with Cornelius' answer that his friends (and I) realise what fear can mean - that even a little bit of fear is a burden so huge, it can be almost impossible to bear.

I feel caught out again when Cornelius says that he knows what his father thinks about him and his generation: that young people today have it easy, and have so much that the generation before them could only have dreamed of - but then you have two very different lists: What you might think GenZ has going for it in sharp contrast to what they themselves feel; standards are too high, the pressure and anxiety of social media - in fact, the feeling of anxiety so dominates GenZ that it is now considered a characteristic of theirs.

I wondered how people of Cornelius’s age read Just a Little Anxiety - especially if female. Was ´fear’ presented appropriately and did it help them to (better) understand the phenomenon? Because both of them, let's call them Elly and Carla, were familiar with fear - fear of the school system in the stressful Bavarian school system (they attend year 11 here), perhaps also fear of groups, and certainly the fear of not being able to fulfil their own high expectations.

Because I have so many questions as an adult reader, I met with year 11’s Elly and Carla for just under an hour to talk about "Just a little fear". They both found the book "extremely quick to read", finishing it in one or two days. The fact that the protagonist was a boy gave them mixed feelings - pleased on the one hand that the deeply entrenched cliché ´men are not afraid’ was dismantled but on the other hand , though they wouldn't necessarily have wanted a female protagonist here, in general they would like to see more female protagonists, and those as untypical and multi-layered as Cornelius in this book. They wished that the same effort to dismantle stereotypes be made with both female and male protagonists .  

Boys play the main characters in the book - the protagonist is a 17-year-old boy and it is mainly boys or men who appear - his friends Aksel and Oliver, his father and the doctor who prescribes Cornelius tablets.
Women play a more marginal, yet still important, role. Cornelius’s girlfriend Lea is the first to become aware of his anxiety disorder. She is close to her own brother, who is probably also suffering from severe psychological stress. And then there's Emilie, who has a crush on Cornelius and actively approaches him - she wants him, but is also empathetic and understanding and puts no pressure on him, giving him the space he needs. After all, the psychologist is also an understanding, encouraging, calm listener. "Another female cliché," say Elly and Carla: empathy, understanding, acceptance - attributes belonging on the women's bench.

Both reacted very positively to the topic itself. Both have experienced fear first-hand, but they had never encountered the topic of fear in literature or films before and think it is particularly important that more attention be paid to it. In any case, they see the book as suitable for school reading -  to raise awareness of the subject and encourage conversations around it, something this book would certainly achieve This, and it’s brevity and approachability would make it a suitable book for obligatory class literature.
The book also focuses on the topic of fear in a good way. Neither girl see it as a weakness that fear dominates Cornelius to such an extent that family, friendship, love and first sexual experiences are all overshadowed by it.

They were able to identify with the subject of fear. Neither of them had experienced nausea to the same extent - it seemed rather harmless to them compared to the feelings they associated with anxiety. For Elly, it was always more of a feeling of tightness, massive anxiety around the chest area, whilst Carla couldn't quite put her finger on it. However, this was not a criticism from either of them, but rather an interesting experience.

The language didn’t stand out to either of them, even if sometimes it is noticeably short and concise, and speech marks are not used for dialogue, something Elly initially found a little hard to get used to. Both were so engrossed in reading that the language seemed to fit well - they both felt it suited Cornelius, with his tendency to block everything out.

And yet neither of them would give the book full marks - only a 7.5 out of 10. And both were surprisingly in agreement here. Because both of them actually found the way out of the fear trap a little too easy. Elly even thought it was presented in a "childish" way and therefore more suitable for younger readers, perhaps 12 or 13 year olds. It seemed to them that there was too much understanding around Cornelius and that he received therapy surprisingly quickly. His circle of friends was also stable and present throughout. Both felt that this was too positive and easy - in their experience, it can often be far from straightforward like this.

Elly had found that opening up to others actually makes things worse, as you are simply not understood. Being heard and seen with your fears - and getting professional help - only happens much later than it does here, if at all. A little more reality and confrontation would have been better, and it would have been good to show that not everyone understands, that people rarely react correctly. The book needed to pack a bigger punch. It lacks something special, something unforeseen - perhaps just a little more courage.

In this respect, Just a Little Fear is perhaps just a little too timid in its approach to the subject of fear, perhaps also a little too pedagogical: look, it's not bad, open up, because nobody will hurt you. Perhaps a little more courage was needed here to deal with the fear: it sucks, I’ll show you how bad it is, things can go wrong, it hurts - and yet….!