Fabian: the story of a moralist

This novel, published in 1931, is set in Berlin at a time when Nazi violence is already evident on the streets. The central character, Jakob Fabian, works in advertising for a daily newspaper. The novel traces the changing outlook of Fabian and his close friends Stephan Labude, a postgraduate literature student, and Cornelia Battenberg, an aspiring actor. Each of the three has personal ambitions but for each of them success is dependent on decisions made by others. When Fabian, having been made redundant, abandons the city, and returns to his childhood home, he aspires to retreat to the Hartz Mountains to “find himself again”. His outlook is that “by the time he came back, the world would have taken a step forward or maybe two steps back. Whichever way it went, no situation could be worse than the present.”

The author, Erich Kästner (born 23 February 1899), grew up in Dresden. In 1917 he was conscripted into the army and he served in a heavy artillery company. His experience of war, even though he did not see action, shaped his antimilitarist views and also caused an enduring heart condition (in an autobiographical reference, he refers to Fabian being physically active “within the limits imposed by his weak heart”). The damage was believed to have been done by the gruelling regime of the company training sergeant; he wrote about his ill-treatment in the acerbic poem Sergeant Waurich, referring to him as “an animal”. After the war, he completed his secondary education and then studied at the University of Leipzig, receiving a doctorate in literature in 1925. He moved to Berlin in 1927 His first book of poetry was published in 1928 and later in the same year his children's book Emil and the Detectives was an instant success and led to numerous further books for children. Though condemned by the Nazi regime, he refused to go into exile, considering it important to stay so as to chronicle what was happening. He fled Berlin for Austria in early 1945 and settled in München after the war. There he worked in journalism and wrote further children's books as well as political satire. His 1957 autobiography won several prestigious awards.

The author describes the impact of the First World War on Fabian (again Kästner is writing autobiographically) and on a generation of young men:
“Damn the war! Of course to have escaped with a weak heart was mere child’s play but the souvenir was enough for Fabian. They said there were isolated buildings, scattered about the provinces, still full of mutilated soldiers. Men without limbs, men with ghastly faces, without noses, without mouths. Nurses whom nothing could scare poured food into these disfigured creatures, poured it through thin glass tubes, speared into scarred and suppurating holes where once there had been a mouth. A mouth that could laugh and speak and cry aloud.”