Dresden: Erich Kästner: Reading was like taking a breath

The boy sits with his legs dangling on the wall that surrounds the property with the magnificent villa at Albertplatz 1 in Dresden. Many years later, when the little boy had long since become the famous writer Erich Kästner, he would write about it: »I loved sitting on the garden wall and watching the life and goings-on on Albertplatz. Albertplatz was the stage. I sat in the box between jasmine and trees and couldn’t get enough of it.” The villa belongs to his uncle Franz, a businessman who became rich trading horses.

Kästner’s parents, the master saddler Emil Kästner and Franz’s sister Ida Augustin, have to stretch to offer their only son a good life. Erich was born on February 23, 1899 in a small attic apartment at Königsbrücker Straße 66, just a few minutes’ walk from the glamorous Albertplatz. It was “a tenement like a thousand others,” is how he describes the house. No matter where life takes him later: “No matter what else I became, I have always remained one thing: a child of Königsbrücker Strasse,” he wrote in his 1957 autobiographical book “When I was a little boy.”

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No matter how hard the parents struggle, the father as a saddler in a suitcase factory, the mother as a home worker, money is always tight. But things should get better for the boy. At the age of over 30, Ida trained as a hairdresser and was soon able to build up a large customer base. Erich, who started school in 1905, is a model student. Although he deeply detests the methods in the “children’s barracks,” as he calls the schools. But books became his passion: “I read and read and read. I read as if it were breathing. As if I would have suffocated otherwise.”

While his relationship with his father is rather sober, there is no problem between his mother and Erich. They both often visit the city’s theaters together. »We waited on the street for hours to get the cheapest seats when the ticket office opened. My love for the theater was love at first sight, and it will remain my love until the last sight,” he writes. As does his love for his melancholy mother, which often causes the boy to despair. “Farewell, my dear boy!” he reads on the hastily scribbled notes that Erich often finds on the kitchen table when he comes home from school. »Then, chased and whipped by wild fear, crying loudly and almost blinded by tears, I rushed through the streets, towards the Elbe and towards the stone bridges. I found them almost every time. And almost every time on one of the bridges. She stood there motionless, looking down at the stream, looking like a wax figure.”

Due to his brilliant academic achievements, Erich was able to take a preparatory year at the teachers’ college in 1913. However, he quickly realizes that he is not particularly suitable for teaching. »Yes, it was the biggest mistake of my life. And he didn’t realize it until it was almost too late. When, at the age of 17, I stood in front of a school class and, since the older seminarians were in the field, I had to give lessons.«

He would rather study. Nothing will come of it for now. In the summer of 1917, Kästner was drafted. Because of an injury and a heart condition that he acquired during drills in the barracks, he doesn’t have to take part for long. Nevertheless, he learns to hate military things. In 1919 he achieved such brilliant high school diplomas that he received a golden scholarship from the city of Dresden, which enabled him to study.

He moves to Leipzig, studies German, history, philosophy, newspaper studies and theater studies. In 1924 he took up a position as editor in the features section of the “Neue Leipziger Zeitung”, was fired three years later because of an allegedly pornographic poem and moved to Berlin, where he experienced his most productive period until the end of the Weimar Republic. He publishes poems, glosses, reports, writes reviews and film reviews and becomes a well-known intellectual.

In October 1929, his first children’s book, “Emil and the Detectives,” was published, which Edith Jacobson, the owner of a children’s book publisher, persuaded him to produce. It was his breakthrough to later global fame: the book sold millions of copies in Germany alone and has been translated into more than 60 languages ​​to this day. The film adaptation in 1931 became a box office hit. With “Pünktchen und Anton” (1931) and “The Flying Classroom” (1933), two more children’s books that are still successful today followed quickly and tell a lot about Kästner’s own childhood. With his autobiographical novel for adults, “Fabian – The Story of a Moralist,” published in 1931, he paints a social picture of the decline of the Weimar Republic on the eve of fascism.

In contrast to many of his dissident colleagues, Kästner did not emigrate after Hitler’s victory. When asked why, he would later answer with an epigram: “I am a German from Dresden in Saxony. My home won’t let me leave. I am like a tree that – grown in Germany – if necessary, withers in Germany.” He wanted to stay as an observer in order to later write a novel about the “Third Reich” – but he never writes it. And: He didn’t want to leave his depressed mother, she wouldn’t have survived.

On May 10, 1933, Erich Kästner was the only one of his colleagues among the spectators at Berlin’s Bebelplatz and had to witness his books being thrown into the flames by the Nazis as “against the German spirit.” Thanks to a friend, the émigré Jewish publisher Kurt Leo Maschler, his books will now be published by the Atrium publishing house in Switzerland, founded by Maschler. However, Kästner also continues to publish in Germany under a pseudonym. Although banned from working, he wrote the script for the acclaimed Ufa entertainment film “Münchhausen”, which premiered in 1943, with special permission from Joseph Goebbels under the pseudonym “Berthold Bürger”.

After the Second World War, he moved to Munich, where he headed the features section of the “Neue Zeitung” until 1948, later working as a freelance author, but was never able to repeat his successes. He saw his beloved hometown of Dresden again in 1946 and wrote with shock: “Centuries had created its incomparable beauty. A few hours were enough to hex them off the face of the earth. That happened on February 13, 1945. What was left was a desert.”

125 years after Kästner’s birth and 70 years after his death in Munich in 1974, Dresden is now celebrating its most famous writer all year long. Under the motto “Alles Kästner” there are more than 50 events for all age groups until June alone – for example in the Villa Augustin, where little Erich loved to sit on the wall and often in his uncle’s kitchen. Since 2000 it has housed the Erich Kästner House for Literature, the only Kästner museum in the world. Numerous theaters and cinemas have Erich Kästner’s works on their schedule, and two exhibitions can be seen in the Dresden Cultural Palace. If you want, you can download a free app and go on a journey of discovery through Dresden in Kästner’s footsteps. Under the motto “Parole Emil,” third graders are hunting a thief in the city, as they have been for many years. And if you want, you can travel through Dresden on the “Lottchen” tram and get very close to Kästner.

In one of the daily letters that Kästner sent his mother since he started studying, he writes: “When I’m 30 years old, I want people to know my name. I want to be recognized by the time I’m 35, and even a little bit famous by the time I’m 40.” At 125, Erich Kästner is immortal. Not just in his hometown.