Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner for the #1929Club

Title: Emil and the Detectives
Author: Erich Kästner
Translator: W. Martin
Publication: Overlook Press, hardcover, originally published in 1929
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
Setting: Germany between the wars

Description: Emil is devoted to his mother and knows that she works hard to support him. His father is dead and the grandmother who used to share their home now lives with Emil’s aunt and her family in Berlin. When his mother puts ten-year-old Emil on a train to Berlin to visit his relatives she warns him to be careful of the money she is sending with him. But when Emil falls asleep on the train, he is robbed – and he is sure the man in his compartment with the bowler hat did it! Unwilling to face his family without the precious 140 marks, Emil follows the man off the train into an unfamiliar part of Berlin. Fortunately, he encounters a street-smart boy named Gus, who takes a liking to Emil and organizes all the boys in the neighborhood to become detectives. Together, they will corner the man with the bowler hat and get Emil’s money back!

My Impression: I chose this book for Karen and Simon’s #1929Club because it is a classic kidlit book I had never read. I was expecting something vaguely fantastic like Pippi Longstocking but, instead, I found a quirky story with a laconic and omniscient narrator and gritty Berlin backdrop. The story was unusual when written because it puts Emil in very realistic urban setting with city children and a thief who is more convincing than Enid Blyton’s bad guys. Emil’s luck changes when he is befriended by Gus, who organizes dozens of boys to help pursue the man in the bowler hat, Mr. Groundsnow:

[Emil] kept his eyes peeled on the thief, who was enjoying his meal – paid for, no doubt, with Mom’s savings. He was afraid of only one thing: The scumbag would stand up and run off again. Then he could just forget about Gus and the horn and everything.

But Mr. Groundsnow did him a favor and stayed put. Of course, if he’d had any clue about the conspiracy that was drawing around him like a sack, he would have ordered the first airplane out of there, at least. His situation was starting to get dicey . . .

Maurice Sendak wrote the introduction to my edition. He received the book from his sister when he was about ten and describes how he loved the vivid sense of the city Kästner creates and all the eccentric characters Emil meets. Sendak says he struggled with guilt about enjoying the book as his family, living in Brooklyn, followed the German atrocities leading to WWII. The Sendaks lost family members in the Holocaust. However, Kästner was a journalist and left-wing thinker whose outspoken adult books were condemned by the Nazis. In 1933, his books, except for Emil, were “burned in a large square next to the Berlin opera house, the square crowded with approving onlookers.” Despite his dislike of the Nazis and their restrictions on what he was allowed to publish, he stayed in Berlin to document what he saw. Sendak gave himself permission to go on enjoying the book.

Kästner was also the author of Lisa and Lottie, which was adapted into many films, including Disney's 1961 movie "The Parent Trap" starring Hayley Mills and Maureen O'Hara, which was remade in 1998 with Lindsay Lohan playing the twins.

Source: Library