A few years before I fell for Orwell, Kästner was my first literary boyfriend. His most famous book is “Emil and the Detectives” though most of you would know him as the writer of the novel on which the “Parent Trap” film was based on. In every library I went to I would look him up first and a copy of “Toncek i Tockica” (“Pünktchen und Anton” in original) was amongst few of my possessions I brought with me when we first came to Canada.

Though he is particularly known for the children’s lit, he was also a poet, screen writer and satirist. Over two decades ago, while I was watching some film in which Nazis were burning his books, I made a mental note to read his adult fiction once I am old enough to. This month I finally got around to it.

“Fabian. Die Geschichte eines Moralisten” is set in Berlin after the stock market crash a few years before Nazis came to power. The protagonists are underemployed or unemployed and some form of prostitution or other seems to be the only sure way of making money. Marriage as an institution has collapsed, loneliness and domestic violence run rampant and the only people who do well in this environment are those that have no scruples or are able to overlook them. Women’s issues (pretty sorry state at that point) and the effect of new technologies (weapons production and machines replacing human labour) are discussed. In the final chapters Kästner seems to blame German penchant for order and tolerance of brutality for the mess they are in, though interpretations of the final chapters may vary. There is some talk of the bourgeois organizing and improving the situation through pan European effort but it comes to nothing. The novel takes for granted that some sort of violent clash is imminent.

Needless to say this novel is suitably depressing. I never thought of Kästner as a pessimist writer and I do not think of him that way now. Given what was to happen in Europe in the decade and a half following the publication of this novel, the “oh crumb, what is to become of us?!?” tone is merely realistic. Despite this the Kästner writing that I know and love from his children’s novels comes though. At some point in the novel Fabian befriends a destitute inventor, and hides him in his room for a while before the inventor is taken away. The interaction between Fabian and the inventor has that humour full of absurdity and warmth that brought me back to my childhood and reminded me why I loved “Pünktchen und Anton” so much. Coincidentally, “Pünktchen und Anton” must have been written within a year or two of “Fabian”.