Innocence and mischief – Desmond O’Neill on the humorist and social commentator Erich Kästner

A literary anniversary almost entirely unnoticed in the English-speaking world this year was that of Erich Kästner (1899-1974), one of the most delightful and incisive of German humorists and social commentators. Best known outside Germany for Emil and the Detectives, first in a series of ground-breaking books for children, as well as Das Doppelte Lottchen, origin of serial movie versions of The Parent Trap, his wider output deserves to be more widely appreciated.
His absurdist and irreverent sense of humour is an uneasy fit with the canon of his native literature. As he noted, humour was “rare in literature, and rarest of all in German literature. And in the histories of German literature, pride is taken in that very fact”. His comic sense would have fitted comfortably into a Flann O’Brien column. Writing at the time of the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s birth in 1949, he postulated that there would be a Goethe-Derby among German universities producing articles including “Goethe and the Control of Clothes Moths”; “Goethe’s Disapproval of Dogs on the Stage”; and “Goethe and the Fire Brigade”!
His delightful autobiography, When I Was a Little Boy, mentions that he had visited Dublin although there is little evidence of when this occurred. He played tennis in London in 1938 with that most English of Irishmen, Bernard Bracken, and he may have extended his visit to Dublin. Another possibility would be a visit in the postwar years in his role as president of PEN, the writers’ organisation.
The autobiography catches neatly his trademark apposition of wide-eyed innocence and mischievous spirit. In the foreword, he posits that all proper books should have a foreword. A book with a foreword he likened to house with a garden: a book without a foreword to the Dresden tenement where he was born. Prolific in output in many literary formats, including journalism, reviews, novels and poems, his finest work reflected the energy of the Weimar republic and the artistic movement Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity).
Realism is a notable and ground-breaking feature of the Emil books, embedded in the gritty milieu of Berlin. It notably portrays the struggle of working-class family life with Emil’s single working mother a reflection of Kästner’s own mother supporting her family as a hairdresser.
The runaway success of the Emil books has somewhat drawn attention away from his other outputs. His novel Fabian (1931), much admired by Graham Greene, was daringly modern and explicit in terms of the free-living aspects of the Weimar period: unsurprisingly his books were burned by the National Socialist regime in 1933, and all banned except Emil and the Detectives. Kästner chose to stay in Germany rather than exile, a form of internal exile. He managed to write the script for a film version of the Adventures of Baron von Munchausen in 1943 under the pseudonym of Bert Citizen, arousing the ire of Goebbels when this was discovered and narrowly escaping execution by the SS at war’s end.
His insights into the human condition are their most appealing and accessible in his collections of poetry. Paralleling the wit, satire, lyricism and common touch of earlier poets such as Heinrich Heine and Wilhelm Busch, he promoted the opportunity of poetry to act as sounding boards and instrumental supports in the challenges of everyday life. This comes to fruition in his Dr Erich Kästner’s Poetical Medicine Cabinet (1936), the title itself an echo of Heine’s description of the human insights of the Bible as the “Medicine Cabinet of Humanity”.
In the droll foreword Kästner describes the collection as a reference work devoted to the care of the average inner life. He lists the contents of the typical home medicine cabinet but questions their utility in the face of the desolate loneliness of furnished room or the cold, wet, foggy autumn evenings. What remedies should someone resort to when seized by angel of jealousy? What should someone gargle who is fed up with life? What use are lukewarm compresses to someone whose marriage is falling apart?
Kästner proposes that other remedies are needed to alleviate loneliness, disappointment and other heartache, chief among which are humour, anger, indifference, irony, contemplation and exaggeration. The analogy of therapeutic efficacy is carried through in a framework for prescription of the poems to 36 human conditions and states, listed in alphabetical order from when ageing makes you sad (wenn das Alter traurig stimmt) to irritation with one’s contemporaries (Zeitgenossen).
The poems are short, notable for brief sentences whose economy of measure contains surprises of consolation and calm embedded in the language of everyday life, reminiscent of the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer or Seamus Heaney. Sadly, few of his poems are translated into English and currently in print – fresh translations would be a fitting anniversary tribute for this versatile and gifted artist.