posted on 16 May 2016

Fabian by Erich Kästner

I suspect that Erich Kästner is best known in the UK as the author of the children’s classic Emile and the Detectives or perhaps even Lottie and Lisa. Kästner ‘s commitment to writing for children was partly the fulfilment of a strongly held political position – he was a pacifist and strident opponent of the Nazis who felt strongly that hope for the future could only be found in children and that they deserved the very best when it came to the books they read.

Important as this seems, Kästner was, however, a complex and important cultural commentator, a satirist and adult novelist whose work deserves a much wider audience. Born in Dresden in 1899 his move to Leipzig in 1919 and then to Berlin in 1927 proved to be the most significant in terms of his identity as a writer. His career coincides with and, in many ways reflects, the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic in Germany.

By the time his adult novel Fabian was published in 1931 he was something of a minor celebrity because of the success a few years earlier of Emile and the Detectives and he was working on the screenplay of the upcoming film version. His novel shows the influence of this with Fabian being structured around quite short episodes that cut quickly from one scene to another.

However, for me, what makes Fabian such an outstanding book is the way in which it distils and somehow captures in time the spirit of the declining Weimar Republic. Kästner was clearly astute enough to see that he was living in critical times and had real forebodings about where Germany might be heading and all of those fears find their way into this book.

He goes out of his way, both in the sub-title of this book and in his opening remarks, to insist that this is the tale of a moralist – which is his way of underscoring the essential purpose of the satire and irony at the heart of the story. I’m pretty sure he did this because he rightly anticipated that there would be those in authority who would want to condemn this book as essentially immoral because of its frank engagement with the sexual practices, prostitution, drugs and crime that were endemic in Weimar Berlin and which were the symptom of a sort of hedonistic decadence that often accompanies cultures that are in terminal decline.

The book follows a short period in the life of Jacob Fabian, a still youngish man with a literary and philosophical bent who finds himself working in the world of advertising.  As a young man about town he finds himself constantly on the edge of dissolution – women throw themselves at him (and just about any man with money), their husbands collude in their own cuckoldry, bordellos are a popular pastime and he floats around the edges of this world as both part of it and as an almost ironic commentator on what is happening.

Jacob is essentially a deeply moral person – he refuses all the blandishments to easy dissolution and is fiercely loyal to his one true friend, Stephen Labude,  a well-off doctoral student who suffers from a sense of his own lack of legitimisation. He also falls in love and is loyal to Cornelia who eventually betrays him for the furthering  of her own career in the movies.

The reader essentially sees the world through Jacob Fabian’s eyes and we are asked to judge the behaviour of a society that is clearly swirling down the plughole. What we also know is that in such environments the immoral flourish and the decent and the moral are swept away. When Fabian loses his job (an augury of the fate to befall so many in late Weimar Germany ), then his girlfriend and then his best friend, his only recourse is to return to the Germany of his parents, out of the maelstrom of a place like Berlin where solid, long-held values are perhaps  still  to be found. Alas that too proves to be an illusion and there is no place of safety in the emerging Germany of Hitler for the likes of Fabian.

Kästner was, of course, right in assuming that the response to his book would be hostile and critics would misunderstand what he was trying to do. The book was heavily censored when it was first published in the UK in 1932 because of its sexual frankness and was not fully restored to the original until the copy I have was released in 1990. This act of literary vandalism is not just a priggish act of censorship but a fundamental misreading of the book and what it is saying.  Not surprisingly Kästner also found himself on the list of banned authors when the Nazis came into power and copies of his book were thrown onto the infamous book burning bonfires which he himself witnessed. He was arrested and questioned on numerous occasions by the Gestapo and expelled from the German literary guild and spent much of the war working on films rather than books until his house in Berlin was bombed in 1944.

Kästner’s post-war optimism soon gave way to gloom as Germany recovered and even started to rearm – something which was an anathema to his still strongly held pacifist views. His later life was dogged by alcoholism and he wrote less and less – eventually dying of cancer in 1974.

I’ve always found the period of the Weimar Republic fascinating and this view from the inside adds a really three-dimension aspect to the vista. The book jacket cites praise from Graham Greene and it is easy to see why that would be the case – the darkness of the places in which the human spirit at times finds itself is something both writers have in common.

Copies are available online although the most affordable seem to be paperback. You’ll pay more for the hardback shown in my photograph but I do think it’s a book you might well read more than once.

 

Terry Potter

May 2016