Das doppelte Lottchen

Das doppelte Lottchen was one of the most famous children’s books of all time in Germany. It was written by one of my favorite authors as a child, Erich Kästner, and my American readers know it as The Parent Trap. Since we are doing movies this week, here are the links to an early version made by Disney and the 1950s German original underneath, with the author himself as the narrator.

https://ok.ru/video/310902983310

The literal translation of the title is “Little Lotte, doubled.” I cannot help but think of Erich Kästner now as Erich, doubled, since I have recently learned a lot about the man I revered as both a politically progressive journalist and writer in the first half of the last century and a man who intuitively understood children well. He wrote the most unimaginably inventive literature that guided them through the difficult years of growing up. One of his most famous books, Emil and the Detectives, was a lesson about what can be achieved with solidarity when individualism fails.

What I learned shifted the picture in a not too positive direction. He was a deeply troubled soul, drowning his sorrows in alcohol and dying, eventually, a miserable death of esophageal cancer after life time of smoking. Those self-regulating habits covered a long, complicated history with women, who he betrayed, exploited, cheated on and eventually dumped – all, but his overly dominant mother. In some ways even she was kept at a distance after a childhood enmeshment that lasted into adulthood – they wrote each other daily, and his letters were full descriptions of his sex life in every sordid detail, reports on his adventures and the Vd he contracted, and regular proclamations that no one mattered more to him than she. But he lived far enough away that it was only letters. All this accompanied by his dirty laundry that she washed and sent back until he was in his 50s.

Born in Dresden in 1899 he would have been 100 years old last Saturday. His mother pushed him to excel, often threatening suicide and having him drag her back from the bridges;

It is rumored that his real father was a doctor in a household where she worked as a domestic; his official father seems to have been in the picture only by name, excluded by the folie á deux of mother and son. Gifted, precocious, Kästner went on to receive a doctorate in literature and worked in Berlin as a journalist, writer and poet during the Weimar Republic. As a representative of the Neue Sachlichkeit his poetry combined distancing, satire and a sharp eye for the political developments of the day.

His progressivism did get him in trouble, in some ways. He was arrested twice by the Gestapo, his books were publicly burnt – and yet….. He stayed in Germany for all of the Nazi rule, saw his friends emigrating, incarcerated and committing suicide or being killed, while he had some understanding with Goebbels that he was to engage in a large movie project to distract the masses: the Tales of the Baron von Münchhausen. Which he did.https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x101n37

After the war he became a newspaper editor in Munich, had a secret relationship and child with someone while being officially together with his companion from the Berlin years. His output dwindled, he never wrote poetry again and refused to discuss what had happened during the 3rd Reich. He even limited the contact to his mother who did not live to see her only grandchild.

Then again, he was a committed pacifist and actively fought, demonstrated and agitated against a re-armament and military build-up of the new German Republic. Marching in the streets, if need be. As I said, Erich, doubled.

Here is one of his poems that I have always liked. It riffs off a Goethe verse from Mignon’s Lament: Kennst Du das Land wo die Zitronen bluehen? You know that land where lemon groves bloom?

You know that land where canons bloom was a devastating parody of the German predilection for militarism.

Here is my English translation, obviously minus the rhymes, the German version is declaimed by Kästner himself in the link.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2I9FQNFzDA