Katharina Thalbach reads: Kästners Berlin

Who doesn't know Kästner's famous Berlin novels, such as "Emil und die Detektive", "Pünktchen und Anton" and "Fabian"? But are you also familiar with his reportages and poems about Berlin? His miniatures about the imagination, courage or what reading meant to him as a child and why he wanted to be the best son of all time? What's the story behind a certain Dr Goebbels' white mice and why did Erich Kästner, who had to watch his books being burned in 1933 on what was Opernplatz at the time, stay 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 a bombing in 1944, he left the city, which, as he wrote two years later, had become "my bosom buddy so to speak".  

This city, this pulsating metropolis during the twenties and thirties, this moloch full of contradictions, was the place where Kästner, who was born in Dresden, had his most productive period. Berlin provided an abundance of material: political tensions, eccentric characters, social divisions, rapid careers, abrupt downfalls and the Berlin survival humour that had become literal – everyday life in a city of millions reeling between hedonism and the uncertainties of National Socialism.   

And what other person belongs as much to Berlin if not Katharina Thalbach? Her sharp sense of humour and melancholy makes her the ideal voice for this potpourri of Kästner's Berlin. After "Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm" and "Gilgi – eine von uns", she now continues her series of staged readings from the Weimar period at the Berliner Ensemble with Kästner.