Katharina Thalbach reads: Kästners Berlin

Who doesn't know Kästner's famous Berlin novels such as “Emil and the Detectives”, “Pünktchen und Anton” and “Fabian”? And do you also know his reports and poems about Berlin? His miniatures about imagination, courage, or what reading meant to him as a child and why he wanted to be the best son of all time? What is it about Dr. Goebbels' white mice and why did Erich Kästner, who had to watch his books being burned on what was then Opera Square in 1933, remained in Germany even though he was no longer allowed to publish? Kästner continued to live in Charlottenburg and worked under a pseudonym for the entertainment industry. After his apartment was destroyed by bombs in 1944, he left the city, which, as he writes two years later, had become “my bosom girlfriend, so to speak.”

The author, born and raised in Dresden, owed his most productive time to her, this vibrant metropolis of the 1920s and thirties, to this juggernaut full of contradictions. Berlin provided him with plenty of material: political tensions, cranky figures, social breaks, rapid careers, abrupt crashes, and the proverbial Berlin survival joke — the everyday life of a city with millions of inhabitants that, between the desire for pleasure and insecurity, grumbled against National Socialism.

And who else belongs to Berlin, if not Katharina Thalbach? Her accurate sense of wit and melancholy makes her the ideal voice for this potpourri about Kästner's Berlin. After “Käsebier conquers Kurfürstendamm” and “Gilgi — eine von uns”, she continues her series of scenic readings from the Weimar period at the Berliner Ensemble.