Erich Kästner

Erich Kästner
Erich Kästner, 1961
Born	Emil Erich Kästner (1899-02-23)23 February 1899 Dresden, Saxony, German Empire
Died	29 July 1974(1974-07-29) (aged 75) Munich, West Germany
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	German
Period	1928–1969
Genre	Children's literature, poetry, satire, screenplays
Notable awards	Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing 1960
Partner	Luiselotte Enderle
Children	Thomas Kästner
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Emil Erich Kästner (German: [ˈʔeːʁɪç ˈkɛstnɐ]; 23 February 1899 – 29 July 1974) was a German author, poet, screenwriter and satirist, known primarily for his humorous, socially astute poems and for children's books including Emil and the Detectives. He received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1960 for his autobiography Als ich ein kleiner Junge war.

Kästner was born in Dresden, Saxony, and grew up on Königsbrücker Straße in Dresden's Äußere Neustadt. (The Erich Kästner Museum is located nearby, on the ground floor of a villa on Antonstraße that used to belong to Kästner's uncle Franz Augustin.)

Kästner's father, Emil Richard Kästner, was a master saddlemaker. His mother, Ida Amalia (née Augustin), had been a maidservant, but in her thirties she trained as a hairstylist in order to supplement her husband's income. Kästner had a particularly close relationship with his mother. When he was living in Leipzig and Berlin, he wrote her fairly intimate letters and postcards almost every day, and overbearing mothers make regular appearances in his writings. It has been rumored that Erich Kästner's natural father was the family's Jewish doctor, Emil Zimmermann (1864–1953), but these rumors have never been substantiated. Kästner wrote about his childhood in his autobiography Als ich ein kleiner Junge war (1957, translated as When I Was a Little Boy). According to Kästner, he did not suffer from being an only child, had many friends, and was not lonely or overindulged.

In 1913, Kästner entered a teacher training school in Dresden. However, he dropped out in 1916 shortly before completing the exams that would have qualified him to teach in state schools. He was drafted into the Army in 1917 and was stationed with a heavy artillery company. The brutality of the military training he underwent and the slaughter he witnessed strongly influenced his later antimilitarism. The merciless drilling he was subjected to by his training officer, Sergeant Waurich, also caused a lifelong heart condition. Kästner portrays this in his poem Sergeant Waurich.