In the English-speaking world Erich Kästner is chiefly known as the author of Emil and the Detectives, the first of a long series of children’s books. But in German-speaking lands his reputation rests on two other genres. He is known as a poet, writing Gebrauchslyrik (‘useful poetry’), comparable perhaps to John Betjeman in England, but dark where Betjeman is genial. The other celebrated work is his first novel, Fabian (1931), a satirical portrait of the last years of the Weimar Republic — the state that came into being at the end of World War One with the collapse of the Kaiser’s German Empire in 1918 and that lasted until Hitler’s Third Reich (that began in 1933).

The central character is Jakob Fabian, thirty-two, well-educated but pretty hopeless, and working in Berlin as an advertising copywriter. He wanders like a latter-day Candide (the naïve protagonist of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book of the same name) through the ‘telephone bars’ with their easy pickups, the fairgrounds where working people compete to win a stick of salami, and (when he loses his job) the unemployment exchanges whose every applicant inevitably lands up in the wrong place. He comments on events but cannot influence them. He loses his girlfriend to the cinema and sees his best friend commit suicide. Finally, he returns to his home town, but there the peace is of the grave.

Such a summary makes Fabian sound despairing, and so it is, but the book is redeemed by strong humour, the vividness of its many cameo-like scenes, and the accuracy and insight it consistently shows about both people and society. Fabian is a partially-developed character, and the rest are flat, so the novel is poised between satire and semi-autobiographical realism, which may weaken it artistically, but sometimes strengthens its interest. The scenes which show Fabian’s attachment to his mother for instance increase the book’s emotional depth, and hint at another novel, never written.

Fabian has always been a controversial book. On publication, it was attacked by the German right as sexually explicit and hostile to tradition. Nowadays it is more likely to be viewed as sexist in its view of women, particularly lesbians. At the Nazi book-burning of 1933, Kästner was the only author present to see his book burned. This unflinching observer can still touch us today.

‘There was a mirror on one side of the lift. Fabian took out his handkerchief and rubbed the red blotches from his face. His tie was askew. His temple was burning; and the pale blonde was looking down at him. «Do you know what a megaera is?» he asked. She put her arms around him. «Yes, but I’m prettier.»’ p11