"Kästner never wrote the novel about the Third Reich"
Those who watched the movie "Kästner und der kleine Dienstag" will remember this screenshot towards the end which read, "Den Roman über das Dritte Reich hat Kästner nie geschrieben". And he didn't, but he left behind a diary published in 1961 under the title "NOTABENE 45" (Nota bene (it.) = take good note).
The book is set in the last years of the Second World War and the first few years of the occupation of Germany by the Allies. When the Nazis rose to power in Germany, Kästner’s books, alongside many others, were burned and he was not allowed to publish anymore. This did not keep him from writing. He kept a blue diary where he wrote down his thoughts and memories of the Third Reich. Unfortunately, the Nazis burned down his apartment and, thus, effectively burned most of his diaries. The only one that survived the fire was NOTABENE 45.
You can read the book online at www.archive.org
In this diary, Kästner himself is the main character. He writes about his escape from the Nazis in March of 1945 from Berlin to Mayrhofen, a small town in Austria.
His friends had put him on a list of filmmakers that were supposed to film "Das verlorene Gesicht" (The Lost Face), as propaganda for the "Endsieg". In truth, all these people on that list wanted to escape from the Nazi regime. He described his encounters with different people, his fear of being captured and the guilt of leaving his parents behind in Dresden. Erich Kästner died in 1974 in Munich.
Erich Kästner
Elsewhere on the internet I found the following interview [Source]:
Thank you, Mr Kästner, for taking the time to answer a few questions about your diary "Notabene 45". It covers the months between February and August 1945. Can you tell us briefly how life was for you during that time?
Erich Kästner – In that tangled half year I moved from Berlin to Tyrol to Bavaria. The country resembled a destroyed anthill, and I was one ant among millions of others that were zigzagging around. I was an ant that kept a diary. I recorded what I saw and heard while running. I ignored what I hoped and feared, while I played dead. I didn’t note everything I experienced at that time. That much is understood. But everything I wrote at that time, I have experienced. These are observations from the perspective of a thinking ant.
So this is the original diary and the entries in this book are genuine?
E.K. – When I was about to publish it, fifteen years later, I had to think about readers other than myself. I had to supplement the text. My task was to unfold the notes very carefully. I had to make the text legible, not only the shorthand, but also the invisible writing. I had to decipher. I had to attack the original, without touching its authenticity. It has remained the journal that it was. The mistakes I have carefully preserved, also the false rumours and the misdiagnosis. I am not a field marshal who makes diaries into a plea, and no statesman who turns pages from a diary into bay leaves. A diary with no errors and falsities would not be a diary, but a fake.
Have you ever considered writing a novel about the years 1933 to 1945?
E.K. – I wanted my diary notes to become the "dynamite for my own memory", material for a Bengal firework that I would one day burn, an infernal firework, visible far and wide for a long time, with thunder and bloody signs in the sky and people braided on a wheel, a circling wheel of fire. In other words, I thought of a great novel. But I did not write it.
Why not?
E.K. – The 1000-year Reich does not have the makings of a great novel. It is not for the great form, neither for a "comédie humaine" nor a "comédie inhumaine". You can not divide a list of millions of victims and executioners architecturally. You can not compose statistics. Those who try, bring into existence no great novel, but a deformed and blood soaked address book, artistically arranged, but full of fictional addresses and false names.
There are, however, great history books about the time. What about those?
E.K. – Historians were not idle. Documents are collected and evaluated. The overall picture is exposed for the looking back. Soon, the past can be visited. Also by school classes. One will be able to show and see how it came and had been. But reading in the large, in the Great Chronicle, can not be everything. It tells the numbers and draws the balance, that’s its job. The numbers are vouched for but the people are hidden, that's its limit. It reports what happened, the big picture. But the whole thing is only half of it.
Do diaries like yours fill the missing space?
E.K. – Diaries represent a present that is now past. Not as an inventory, but in snapshots. Not an overview, but an insight. Diaries contain illustrative material, amateur photos in memo format, scenes arranged by chance, snapshots from the past, when it still was present. This past, the unresolved, is like a restless ghost that wanders through our days and dreams and, by ancient ghost custom, waits for us to look at it, address it and listen. That we, scared to death, are pulling the nightcap over eyes and ears, does not help. It is the wrong method. It doesn’t help neither the ghosts nor us. We are not spared to look it in the face and say "Speak!" The past must talk, and we must listen! Before that we won't find rest.
One final question. While you were in Berlin in 1945 your parents were still in Dresden. That must have been very hard for you.
E.K. – Considering that every day ten to fifteen thousand planes drop bombs on Germany and that we, already without any resistance, must hold still and, like cattle in the slaughterhouses, actually do, made one's mind stop. On February 26 a courier brought terrible news. Dresden was wiped out. The undertow of fire of the burning New Town Hall had torn people from the Waisenhausstraße, flying through the air into the flames, as if they were moths. Others jumped into the fire-fighting pond to save themselves, but the water was boiling and so they were boiled like crabs. Tens of thousands of corpses lied between and under the rubble. So it goes!. And the parents lived! Grief, anger, and gratitude collided in my heart like fast trains in the fog.
Thank you, Mr Kästner. I just like to add that not everything in your diary is as devastating as this last example. There is a lot of humour and irony, and biting satire too. Now I don't want to use any more of your precious time. Thanks again, see you in your next book!
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