Though little known in the English-speaking world, Erich Kästner’s slim novel originally translated in 1932 as “Fabian. The Story of a Moralist” is a brilliantly astute rendering of life in Weimar Berlin, straightforward and yet surreal, witty and perverse.
The opening consists of a clever tracking shot in Berlin’s Heidelberger Platz metro today, gliding through the station and up the stairs into daylight, when the time frame suddenly shifts to 1931. Jakob Fabian , 32, lacking professional direction, works as an advertising copy writer for a cigarette company.
The encounter takes place in a nightclub . He offers to walk her home, only to discover they’re both boarding in the same house. Graf satisfyingly teases out the electric connection between these two, capturing Fabian’s love-induced sense of purpose alongside Cornelia’s calming intelligence, and the way their story is developed makes us feel even more invested in the relationship than Kästner’s words.
Graf is especially eager to make audiences draw parallels between then and now, underlining wherever possible an equivalence between the heated pre-War atmosphere of dissipated pleasure-seeking and today, deliberately acknowledging all the history in-between — he even incongruously includes a shot of people walking over “Stolpersteine,” those brass plaques covering cobble stones that commemorate people deported to Nazi concentration camps.
I've investigated and researched so much about the Weimar. It's a HUGE topic. Hope this does it justice. My script is on the back-burner, for now.