Erich Kästner

Independent activity Pacifism 1899–1974 ○ Died of illness in Munich

Pacifist poet and author of Emil and the Detectives who watched his own books burn in 1933

German writer, born in 1899 in Dresden, the son of a master saddler. In Weimar Berlin he wrote poems and reviews for Die Weltbühne and other papers and became a leading poet of the New Objectivity; he published the children's novel Emil and the Detectives (1929) and the novel Fabian (1931). A pacifist, he signed the Urgent Call in 1932. At the Berlin book burning of 10 May 1933 he stood in the crowd and watched his own name called and his writings thrown into the flames with the cry "Against decadence and moral decline!" He did not emigrate, but the Gestapo arrested and questioned him twice, and refusal of membership in the Nazi writers' chamber barred him from publishing at home. After the war he ran the arts pages of Die Neue Zeitung in Munich and was president of the West German PEN Centre. He died in Munich in 1974.

Also known as: Emil Erich Kästner · Erich Kastner