Der gekränkte Idylliker – Poesie lesen von: Erich Kästner

In the organizer's words:

Erich Kästner is the most popular German writer alongside Mascha Kaléko and Christian Morgenstern. The part of his work that has endured to this day, above all the poems and children's books (especially the famous "Emil and the Detectives"), was written in a period of just six years, between 1928 and 1934. The first four volumes of poetry in particular, published in quick succession, Herz auf Taille (1928), Lärm im Spiegel (1929), Ein Mann gibt Auskunft (1930) and Gesang zwischen den Stühlen (1932), prove to be great testimonies to the diagnosis of the times. In them, Kästner deals with the post-war period, the decadence of the 1920s and foreshadows the horrors of looming fascism. With the first volume, the famous Kästner tone is already fully present: the serene resignation, the matter-of-fact statement in a parlando of either four or five verses. He was called a smiling moralist, he himself spoke of himself as an offended idyllic. The fact that his books were burned by the Nazis was due to his radical reckoning with German militarism, e.g. in the famous poem "Kennst du das Land, wo die Kanonen blühn?", in which he describes how privates' buttons grow under their ties and German children are born with their hair parted. But there are also poems about bottled happiness, the three-lined Oh of longing, farewells in the suburbs and sentimental journeys with a sobering end. "One should not be grateful to the powers that created the heart", he wrote.
It is surprising that he of all people, the clairvoyant, missed the moment to immigrate because he considered Hitlerism to be a quickly passing evil. He later said that he had wanted to stay in order to be an eyewitness. During the war, he was forced to waste his talent on the trivial and on the screenplay (written under a pseudonym) for the Ufa anniversary film Münchhausen. After the war, he was no longer able to match the outstanding quality of his early work.

In reading and discussion: Max Czollek | Tanja Maljartschuk
Moderation: Irina Bondas