The German Genius

movement which, despite its sober style, was a satirical force in Weimar.
    The work for which he is most well known is Emil und die Detektive ( Emil and the Detectives ; 1928), which sold 2 million copies in Germany alone and set up a genre of children’s detective stories. (R. W. Last described Kästner as “one of the greatest writers for children of all times.”) But he wrote for adults too, to such effect that his works were banned in 1933 and burned along with those of Brecht, Joyce, Hemingway, and the Mann brothers. He was twice arrested by the Gestapo but stayed in Germany where he was eventually banned from writing.
    Fabian , his best known work for adults, was originally titled Der Gang vor die Hunde (Going to the Dogs) and surprised many who only knew him through his Emil stories. Published in 1931, the novel is set in Berlin: “In the east resides crime, in the centre swindling, in the north misery, in the west lechery, and to all points of the compass destruction lurks.” Fabian is employed as an advertising copywriter by a cigarette company, charged with conceiving slogans to perpetuate a corrupt, disabling system. Loose sexuality, fetid family relationships, and unemployment come together in a pessimistic satire condemning the Germany that would allow Hitler’s rise, a world where, taking Fabian and Emil together, only the children are innocent.
    At the same time Kästner breathed new life into poetry, much of which appeared in cabaret, becoming known as “public poetry,” holding up a mirror to the age:
    Was man auch baut—es werden stets Kasernen
Whatever is built—always turns into barracks.
     
    The fact that Kästner wrote in many different forms was a reflection of his understanding that the situation in Weimar Germany was urgent. He was less interested in creating “art” than in having an effect on his readers. What he said about Tucholsky was equally true of himself: he wanted to prevent the cataclysm he saw coming with his typewriter. Although he (and Tucholsky) failed in that, as Clive James has said, the journalists in Weimar Germany nevertheless enriched German-speaking culture by saving it from the “stratospheric oxygen-starvation of the deliberately high-flying thesis.”
    A N EW G RAMMAR FOR M USIC
     
    Edgar Vincent, Viscount D’Abernon, the British ambassador to Berlin, described in his memoirs the period after 1925 as an “epoch of splendour” in the city’s cultural life. Painters, journalists, and architects flocked to the city, but it was above all a place for performers. Alongside the city’s 120 newspapers, there were forty theaters providing, according to one observer, “unparalleled mental alertness.” It was also a golden age for political cabaret, satirical songs, Erwin Piscator’s experimental theater, Franz Lehar’s operettas, jazz, and Josephine Baker, though Harry, Count Kessler, in his diary, says he found her unerotic even when naked (he was homosexual).
    Among this concatenation of talent, three figures from the performing arts stand out: Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Bertolt Brecht. Between 1915 and 1923 Schoenberg composed very little, but in 1923 he gave the world what one critic called “a new way of musical organisation.” Two years before, in 1921, Schoenberg, embittered by years of hardship, announced he had discovered “something which will assure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.” 24 This was what became known as “serial music.” Serialism is not so much a style as a “new grammar” for music. Atonalism, Schoenberg’s earlier invention, was partly designed to eliminate the individual intellect from musical composition; serialism took that process further, minimalizing the tendency of any note to prevail. Under this system a composition is made up of a series from the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, arranged in an order that is chosen for the purpose and varies from work to work. Normally, no note in the row or series is repeated, so that no single note is given more importance than any other, lest the music take on the feeling of a tonal center, as in traditional music with a key. Its melodic line was often jerky, with great leaps in tone and gaps in rhythm. Huge variations were possible under the new system—including the use of voices and instruments in unusual registers. Rudolf Serkin spoke for many when he said he loved Schoenberg the man “but I could not love his music.” 25
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