German Satirist Erich Kästner
Below the paywall: His satirical anti-war song, "Prince Carnival"
BERLIN (4. March 2024) — This column was inspired by a recent concert of songs with lyrics by German humorist Erich Kästner (1899-1974). Located near the old Artists’ Colony (Künstlerkolonie) in Wilmersdorf, this very fine concert was to be the last one — or so they told us — by singer Peter Siche, accompanied by pianist Klaus Schäfer.
Immediately, I wanted to acquire Kästner’s powerful German songs and translate some of them into lyrical English, starting with one here (below the paywall). To English/American readers, Erich Kästner is probably best-known for his 1929 novel “Emil and the Detectives” and for the film “Münchhausen,” first shot in Germany, 1942. Although they burned his books as being “against to the German spirit,” Nazis allowed Kästner to write the script for “Münchhausen.” Side-stepping their own hypocrisy, the Nazis credited the work to a pseudonym “Berthold Bürger”.
Otherwise, Kästner had a long-enduring career as a writer who questioned authority. He was questioned more than once by the Gestapo, critical of his books. In 1933, the year they took power, Kästner was denied membership in the then-new (and Nazi-controlled) National Writers' Guild (the RDS) because of his "culturally Bolshevist attitude.” Aside from a brief flight to Switzerland that year, however, Kästner was allowed to continue living in Berlin, a sort of shunned domestic exile. While limited in what he could publish, he said he wanted to serve as a witness to events here. (He also did not want to abandon his aging mother.)
As such Erich Kästner was the rare Berlin writer who was actually on the scene, May 10, 1933, watching young idiots burning his own books at Bebelplatz. (Occurring soon after Hitler took power, this famous event was actually staged by the Nazi Troll-in-Chief, the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.)
Here, I offer my English interpretation (below) of Kästner’s biting satirical song I call “Prince Carnival.” (He titled it Prinz auf Zeit or “Part-Time Prince.”). Listeners may hear this recording of the German version (music arranged by Uli Schreiber), performed by Herr Siche and Herr Schäfer, whose work I recently enjoyed.
Kästner’s “Prince Carnival” evokes the cynicism of everyday observers who witnessed the decadent carousing of their political leaders — of royalty and/or the controlling upper class. As times grew rough, especially during World War I, hundreds of thousands were dying of the war and poverty. The fortunes of Germany’s middle class fell — everyone watching both their liberal and conservative political leaders building ideological walls of supreme indifference, barricading themselves from the awful truth about the fates of everyday people, all around them.
To me, “Prince Carnival” evokes a pervasive unrest — and “prohibited ideas” heard in generations of gritty, dark underground cabarets, here and there, of that time and this. Visually, I can also relate this song to images from a 1964 American film, Masque of the Red Death, an adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe tale, featuring actor Vincent Price.
Also, for what it’s worth, I imagine Tom Waits singing this, my “American” version of Erich Kästner’s “Prince Carnival”….