Professor: I don't really know. Nobody ever talks about
money.
Emil: Then I expect you have plenty.
Dialogue from Emil and the Detectives
“It is sufficient to remember that the German bourgeoisie,
with its incomparable technology, philosophy, science and art, allowed the
power of the state to lie in the hands of a feudal bureaucratic class as late
as 1918 and decided, or, more correctly, was forced to take power into its own
hands only when the material foundations of German culture began to fall to
pieces.”
Leon Trotsky: Proletarian Culture and Proletarian Art
The story of Kästner's Emil and the Detectives illuminates
Germany in the 1920s, before German culture began to fall to Pieces under the
death blow of Fascism. Published in 1929
and in English in 1931, Kästner would have been politically aware enough to
know that the book and himself were living on borrowed time. While the Nazis
burned his books, he, however, did not suffer the same fate despite being
interviewed by the Gestapo twice.
There are many reasons why adults return to their childhood
books. For some, it is a comfort read or just the pure joy of reading. Emil and
the Detectives was one of my first reads as a child. Not sure why I was drawn
to it, why I chose a foreign author rather than a British one, we will never
know. I borrowed it from my school library because it wasn't on the school
reading curriculum. I want to say that I was aware of its political overtones,
but I was drawn to it by chance, as I was not yet politically conscious of the
world around me, which would arrive when I reached sixteen. Nevertheless, the
book will always evoke fond childhood memories.
Perhaps because children and adults, for that matter, face a
return to the darkness that fell on Europe with the rise of fascism, that Emil
and the Detectives still resonates today. It makes sense that a group of kids
from 1929 would represent society's underdogs, at risk from the forces of
fascism, not only in Germany but in America, too.
The text from the 1931 translation by Margaret Goldsmith
gives a flavour of the children's class consciousness in Kastner’s book: “I
don't understand that at all," little Tuesday declared. "How can I
steal what already belongs to me? What's mine is mine, even if it's in a
stranger’s pocket! ”These things are difficult to understand," the
professor expounded. "Morally, you might be in the right. But the law will
find you guilty all the same. Even some grown-ups don't really understand these
things, but they are a fact. Or this dialogue
Emil: Are your people well off? Professor: I don't really
know. Nobody ever talks about money. Emil: Then I expect you have plenty. ”[1]
As Uma Krishnaswami correctly writes, “Emil and the
Detectives positions itself squarely on the side of ordinary people and
against oppression meted out by the powerful. When a suspicious-looking man,
Herr Grundeis, steals the money Emil Tischbein’s mother gave him, young Emil
doesn’t go to the police. Instead, he dashes off to find the thief. In the
process, the boy sleuth gathers a motley band of friends, including the
unforgettable Pony Hütchen and, of course, the endearing Little Tuesday,
without whose faithful vigilance the plan could not unfold. Naturally, the kids
are victorious in the end.”[2]
Why read Kästner Now
Emil’s story raises perennial questions: how childhood
experience is shaped by class, how working-class solidarity takes root in
everyday life, and how the state and the market shape civic trust. Studying
such literature trains workers and students to read cultural texts as
expressions of material conditions.
So Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (1929) is best
read not simply as a children’s adventure but as a social document of the late
Weimar Republic: a work that reflects class contrasts, urban life, and the
moral questions facing youth in a capitalist society. Again, for workers and students,
Kästner offers an accessible entry point into how literature can both reflect
social conditions and contribute to political education. For a political
framing of Kästner’s broader milieu and politics.[3]
Erich Kästner’s stories, poems and satires—written amid the
political turmoil of the Weimar Republic—are rich in social observation: they
identify petty‑bourgeois anxieties, the erosion of democratic habits, the
everyday humiliations of children and workers, and the moral cowardice of
elites. Reading Kästner in the workplace helps workers develop a literary
sensibility while equipping them to connect cultural forms to concrete
political tasks: building class consciousness, exposing bourgeois ideology, and
preparing collective struggle.
One of Kastner’s most crucial works is Fabian or Going to
the Dogs. As Bernd Reinhardt perceptively writes, “ Fabian has certain
autobiographical traits and who more than once in his literary work blames
'stupidity' for social ills, referring to dumb Nazis, stupid Germans, and so
on. The voiceover that features from time to time in the film quotes a passage
from the novel where the fights between Nazis and Communists are compared to
dancehall brawls. Like many other intellectuals, Kästner underestimated the
danger of the Nazi movement. After the war, he admitted that they should have
been fought earlier, because “threatening dictatorships can only be fought
before they have taken power.”[4]
Erich Kästner (1899–1974), a pacifist and satirist whose
works were famously burned by the Nazis, though Emil and the Detectives was initially spared due
to its popularity.
[1]
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner E. Hall (Translator) Puffin Paperback
– 21 Sept. 1959
[2]
Why You Should Read (or Reread) Emil and the Detectives-www.umakrishnaswami.com/blog/why-you-should-read-or-reread-emil-and-the-detectives
[3]
See the WSWS discussion of Kästner’s Fabian work and its relation to the Weimar
social crisis, on Fabian and the dangers of the 1930s.
[4]
German Film Award in Silver for Dominik Graf’s Fabian: Going to the Dogs-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/13/fabi-n13.html
