Was Erich Kästner a cuckoo child?
In addition, Erich Kästner’s biological father was most likely the Kästners’ family doctor, the Jewish doctor Dr. Emil Zimmermann, was. Apparently very few people knew anything about it, especially not Emil Kästner and probably not the biological father himself, with whom there were no further relationships. If Erich Kästner ever learned anything about what can be assumed, this shared secret connected mother and son even more and explains, on the one hand, Ida Kästner’s rejection of what she considered to be a too passive husband and, on the other hand, the son’s indifference towards Emil Kästner, at least until the mother’s death.
From then on, the mother made no effort to educate and educate her son. First of all, this meant an increase in Kästner’s income, because the “official” father’s wages were only enough for normal living expenses. First a room was sublet, then Ida Kästner learned to do hairdressing at the age of 34 and opened a hairdressing business in the family’s bedroom, with her son occasionally helping out. The parallels to the situation in “Emil and the Detectives” are unmistakable.
Instead of becoming a teacher, Kästner would rather study
The family’s tenants were always teachers, from whom mother Kästner sought suggestions on how to support her offspring. His report cards regularly only had A’s, so at the age of 13 he took the entrance exam for the transition class from community school to teacher training college and passed it brilliantly. After a year he was a student at the Fletcher teachers’ seminar in Dresden. The education was co-financed by the state, but the mother bore most of the costs. She took Erich to the theater, learned to cycle and swim to teach her son and went on long hikes with him. The “official” father was always excluded from all these joint activities.
Although his mother would have liked Erich to become a teacher, she supported his desire to study. Kästner became an intern at the König-Georg-Gymnasium, where he brilliantly passed his Abitur in 1919.
Part-time jobs during my studies, then a job as an editor
Studying in Leipzig began in the winter semester of 1919/20. Erich Kästner listened to German studies and theater history, as well as philosophy and history. Due to the post-war problems and inflation, this time for Kästner became a mixture of studying and earning a living. Soon he only received a few packs of cigarettes for his scholarship and so he worked at the Leipzig trade fair and as an accountant for the city building company.
He was also a trainee under German studies professor Albert Köster and wrote theater reviews for the newspaper studies institute that he attended. The teacher there, Dr. Morgenstern, a well-known Leipzig theater critic, sent his students to premieres and premieres and demanded that the reviews be sent to him that same night so that they remained completely uninfluenced by the daily press. Despite the mammoth program, Kästner also wrote “for himself”. A satirical gloss on currency devaluation (“Max and his tailcoat”) sent to the “Leipziger Tageblatt” led to his immediate engagement as editor. This meant that Kästner was able to easily make the step towards financial independence in a difficult economic time.
The mother continues to do his laundry
In 1925, the 26-year-old received his doctorate with the thesis “Frederick the Great and German Literature. The response to his work “‘De la littérature allerande'” received his Dr. phil. Although the son was now a relatively well-earning editor, the “laundry line” remained ” between mother and son throughout her life. Since Kästner moved out, mother and son wrote to each other almost every day and the laundry that was always sent home meant for Ida Kästner the unbreakable bond with her son. Even when she heard that her son had been bombed out in Berlin in 1944 She took the train from Dresden to Berlin and brought him his laundry.
Unfortunately, the time in Leipzig ended abruptly with the publication of Kästner’s Evening Song of the Chamber Virtuoso in the “Plauener Volkszeitung” and the scandal that was subsequently provoked by disfavored employees of the own newspaper. He was released and arrived in Berlin in September 1927. Here Kästner experienced an almost fairytale rise. His poems, essays and reviews have been published and published in renowned newspapers such as “Weltbühne”, “Tagebuch”, “Vossische Zeitung”, “Berliner Tageblatt”, “Montag Morgen”, “Dresdner Neuesten Nachrichten” and others gave him a life as a freelance writer and journalist who was able to enjoy Berlin’s café, pub and cabaret culture to the fullest.
“Emil and the Detectives”, “Pünktchen and Anton” and other children’s books
From 1928 onwards, the books that finally made Kästner’s name a household name appeared in quick succession: the volumes of poetry, the audio and stage play “Life in this Time”, the novel “Fabian” and, above all, the children’s books. The following year, Kästner published “Emil and the Detectives”, which was a great success first as a book and in 1930 as a UFA film and made its author famous. Other successful children’s books followed, some of which were made into films or provided models for the theater.
While Kästner’s poems were based on social satire, which exposed individual bad attitudes and social deficiencies, the children’s and young adult books showed an ideal or at least curable children’s world. This led to the partly justified criticism that in Kästner’s children’s and youth literature there was an idyllicization of conditions and that even the most serious economic and social conflicts were suddenly solved in a miraculous way by sympathetic millionaires. But for Kästner, literature for the younger generation was not only an opportunity to stage the ideal world, but the “prevented teacher” also saw it as his educational duty because, for him, education was the only legitimate means of influencing society .
Book burning 1933: Erich Kästner’s books are also burned
The most successful time in Kästner’s life came to an abrupt end in 1933: With the words: “Against decadence and moral decay! For discipline and customs in the family and state! I consign the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser and Erich Kästner to the flames!” Goebbels had also declared Kästner, a member of the Protection Association of German Writers and the PEN Club, a banned writer; In 1934 his account was blocked and he was arrested for a few days, interrogated but released again.