2012 translation by Cyrus Brooks
A book club discussion of Fabian: Die Geschichte eines Moralisten (1931) by Erich Kästner, translated into English by Cyrus Brooks in 2012, entitled Going to the Dogs: The Story of A Moralist
Read and discuss works by German authors in this series hosted by the Goethe-Institut Washington. All books can be read in English translation or in the German original; our discussion will be in English.
Please Note: In order to participate in the online discussion (carried out over Zoom), registrants must obtain access to the book on their own. Hard copies of the book can be ordered through multiple vendors online; the eBook is also available for download to Kindle, iPad, and other digital reading platforms.
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Fabian: Die Geschichte eines Moralisten / Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist, by Erich Kästner
Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter … weak heart, brown hair,” a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job without security in the short or the long run.
What’s to be done? Fabian and friends make the best of it—they go to work though they may be laid off at any time, and in the evenings they go to the cabarets and try to make it with girls on the make, all the while making a lot of sharp-sighted and sharp-witted observations about politics, life, and love, or what may be. Not that it makes a difference. Workers keep losing work to new technologies while businessmen keep busy making money, and everyone who can goes out to dance clubs and sex clubs or engages in marathon bicycle events, since so long as there’s hope of running into the right person or (even) doing the right thing, well—why stop?
Going to the Dogs, in the words of introducer Rodney Livingstone, “brilliantly renders with tangible immediacy the last frenetic years [in Germany] before 1933.” It is a book for our time too.
Going to the Dogs is the NYRB Classics Book Club selection for November 2012.
Source:
NYRB
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Erich Kästner (1899-1974) was born in Dresden and after serving in World War I studied history and philosophy in Leipzig, completing a PhD. In 1927 he moved to Berlin and through his prolific journalism quickly became a major intellectual figure in the capital. His first book of poems was published in 1928, as was the children’s book
Emil and the Detectives, which quickly achieved worldwide fame.
Going to the Dogs appeared in 1931 and was followed by many other works for adults and children, including
Lottie and Lisa, the basis for the popular Disney film
The Parent Trap. In 1933 the pacifist Kästner was banned from German publication and subsequently found employment as a film scriptwriter. After World War II, he worked as a literary editor and continued to write, mainly for children.
Cyrus Brooks translated works by Alfred Neumann, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Leonhard Frank as well as Kästner’s
Emil and the Detectives,
Emil and the Three Twins, and
Lottie and Lisa.
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Discussion of Kästner's novel will take place virtually via Zoom on Tuesday, February 22, at 6:30pm Eastern. Please RSVP via Eventbrite in order to receive discussion prompts and the Zoom invite link.
Discussion prompts from the facilitator will be emailed to all participants RSVP'd via Eventbrite in advance of the discussion. The Zoom invite and additional directions/tips for accessing the Zoom discussion will be emailed to all participants no less than 48 hours before the discussion begins. The discussion will take place in English.
This month's facilitator will be
Sophie Duvernoy, a Germanist, Weimar scholar, and literary translator. Sophie is a current PhD candidate in German Literature at Yale University, where she focuses on the literature and aesthetic theory of the Weimar Republic. Sophie wrote the English translation of Gabriele Tergit's 1932 satire
Käsebier Takes Berlin /
Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm, published by New York Review Books in 2019.
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