Erich Kästner (23.2.1899 Dresden – 29.7.1974 Munich)

As the only child of a laborer and a hairdresser, Erich Kästner grew up in modest circumstances in Dresden. After completing secondary school, he attended a teacher training college from 1913 – he would later compare the atmosphere and teaching methods to those of a military barracks. He dropped out of his training as a primary school teacher shortly before completing it and was drafted into the army in 1917. The brutality he experienced during the First World War made him an anti-militarist; he also contracted a lifelong heart condition.

After the war he graduated from Strehlen Teachers’ Academy but soon gave up his goal of becoming a teacher. Having graduated from secondary school in Dresden in 1919, he began studying German literature, philosophy and history in Leipzig in the fall of the same year, obtaining his doctorate in 1925 with a dissertation on a literary history topic. In 1927 Kästner moved to Berlin, where he worked for major daily newspapers until 1933 and the weekly magazine Weltbühne, soon becoming one of the most widely read left-leaning liberal and pacifist journalists and writers.

The book that earned him a lifelong reputation as a children’s author was published in 1928: Emil and the Detectives. This ‘novel for children’ established a whole new genre of youth literature that addressed young readers on an equal footing, also reflecting a changing perception of childhood and youth during the Weimar Republic. In the years up to 1933, Kästner also wrote other children’s books such as Dot and Anton, The Flying Classroom, the novel Fabian and several volumes of poetry.

After the National Socialists came to power, Kästner was interrogated by the Gestapo and expelled from the Writers’ Association. Many of his works were also burned at the public book burning on May 10, 1933 on Berlin’s Opernplatz – an event which he himself attended. Kästner did not emigrate, however: as he said after 1945, he wanted to remain an eyewitness and chronicler of events; given the close relationship he had with his mother throughout his entire life, he was also reluctant to leave on her own.

His behavior during this period was by no means free of contradictions: while he recorded his critical views on Nazi politics in a secret diary, he nonetheless provided theater texts, comics and film scripts for the regime’s entertainment industry. Writing  under a pseudonym and only with the special permission of Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels ̶ , for example, he produced the screenplay for Münchausen in 1942 – a film commissioned by the UFA to mark its 25th anniversary. Shortly afterwards, Kästner was banned permanently from publishing in Germany and abroad. He rejected attempts by National Socialist cultural propaganda to use him for their purposes abroad, however.

After the end of the war, Kästner made himself available as a journalist for a new democratic beginning in Germany. Moving to Munich in the fall of 1945, he headed the features section of the Neue Zeitung from its first issue on October 18, 1945 until March 1946, continuing to work for the paper as a freelance journalist for another two years. By means of what he referred to as ‘literary tutoring’, he sought to ensure that authors banned or forced into exile during the Nazi era were heard again. In addition to sketches, scenes, essays and newspaper articles, he also wrote song lyrics for the cabaret Die Schaubude that was established in August 1945. From 1946 to 1948 he published the youth magazine Pinguin, and he founded the cabaret Die Kleine Freiheit in Munich in 1951. From 1949 to 1951 he was president of the all-German PEN Center, and from 1951 to 1962 he headed the PEN Center of the Federal Republic of Germany. 

Erich Kästner enjoyed literary success above all as a rediscovered author of children’s books, as well as with his satirical cabaret verses and critical essays on contemporary issues. In his political speeches and activities he remained true to his the anti-militarism and pacifism he had developed early on: he was involved in campaigns against nuclear armament by the Bundeswehr as well as protests against rearmament and emergency legislation. He received numerous awards in the 1950s, including the City of Munich Literature Prize in 1956, the Georg Büchner Prize a year later and the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1959. Problems with his health and his private life increasingly affected his productivity, however, and he withdrew almost entirely from the literary scene from the mid-1960s onwards. Erich Kästner died of cancer in a Munich clinic in 1974 and is buried at Bogenhausen cemetery.