Some of the posters lining the city walls visible in the background of scenes admonish the reader to “Learn to swim!” while others illustrate the political frontlines of the time (“Hitler–Against Hunger!”). The setting is Berlin, 1931, and the protagonist, Jakob Fabian, is trying to stay adrift in the capital of the doomed Weimar Republic, making a somewhat rhetorical if not outright ironic case for “the victory of decency” in the midst of an era marked by sexual escapades and social breakdown. Fabian has a doctorate in German studies and talks about writing the great novel of his time, but survives by filing advertising copy by day while touring hot spots at night with his best friend Stephan Labude, a rich kid pushing the communist cause. Will Fabian learn to swim through these treacherous times? The great German writer Erich Kästner’s (1899–1974) answer, in his loosely autobiographical novel Fabian (originally published in 1931, with the subtitle The Story of a Moralist and some cuts imposed by the publisher), is a punchline typical of his satirical wit, even as it couldn’t be more despairing: there is no future for moralists in amoral times, and the downfall of the Weimar Republic is imminent.
Kästner was instantly proven right on the second count, although his life contradicted his art on the first: the author managed to survive the Nazi era by receding into “inner emigration” even as his books were burned as “contrary to the German spirit.” As a cosmopolitan and pacifist who remained annoyingly popular thanks to his satirical wit, he was a thorn in the side of the totalitarian regime and, despite being punished with an occupational ban, he managed to stay afloat by publishing works in Switzerland, mainly in the comical register he is famous for (his hugely inventive children’s books rightfully remain classics to this day), and dabbling in film (he was given a special permit to script the glorious 1943 UFA fantasy Münchhausen, for which he used the pseudonym Berthold Bürger, the surname surely a bow to Brecht). Kästner remained a major public figure in the postwar era but published less and less, a certain resignation creeping in due to his ongoing dismay with the development of West Germany, a nation that failed to fully engage with its dark past during the reconstruction years and subsequently saw a “return to normal” with the postwar economic boom and a controversial rearmament policy.
Only after Kästner’s death was his most prolific phase from the Weimar days, and his somewhat overlooked “adult” work, rediscovered. The first film version of , directed by Wolfgang Gremm, appeared in 1980 and was, alas, respectable and conventional on all counts—in other words, entirely missing out on the true nature of Kästner’s equally satiric and sad cri de coeur. In 2013, a reconstruction of ’s ur-text was published, restoring the on-the-nose title originally given the work by the author: . Now fully reinstated by German
