Erich Kastner's "Going to the Dogs"

4/7/18

I always thought that if lived before, it was in Weimar Berlin. Or maybe I was a New Yorker hanging out there Isherwood style. It feels so familiar and at home to me. I also have always felt that if we could somehow come to understand late Weimar, we could understand how it happened, that is the hijacking of  one the world's most cultured societies and its descent into genocidal madness. I may have finally given up on that thought.

However, I have just finished Erich Kastner's Going to the Dogs: the story of a moralist. Like a 1936 instagram from Weimar Berlin right before the Nazis took over. (Not translated until 1990 as Fabian.) . Although covering much the same territory as Isherwood (and the musical incarnation Cabaret,)  Kastner's postcard arrives to us from an insider, one whose own culture is being transformed. In it's own day damned as "improper," Kastner's book brings us an objective description of a  culture "going to the dogs." Kastner objectively describes long journeys into Berlin nights through a world of the 30's version of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. It's interesting that even as Kastner's Fabian describes himself as a moralist, his participation in this world is basically described without judgment. In the early scenes, it comes off more as amoral than immoral.

That is until Fabian becomes emotionally involved with an aspiring actress who has her own Weinstein moment and chooses to enter into a relationship with a manipulative and predatory filmmaker. Their love cannot withstand this corruption. There is a clear economic base to late Weimar capitalism as a fatally flawed economic system destined to dehumanize and debase  its participants. Looking deeper, however, we see Kastner is clearly pointing to a spiritual failure, a spiritually empty society with no redemptive resilience in the face of a dehumanizing system.  It is that spiritual failure that may come as close as we can to understanding not only what happened but why it happened. 

As we look at our own late neo-liberal society, we can find the connections with Weimar. A veneer of moralism  covers over a spiritually deadly culture. Anger against perceived cultural liberal elites rages within marginalized white working people and sustains the President's base even as his own behavior runs counter to all professed values. 

In the end, without spoilers, the fate of our Fabian may be a metaphor for the society. If we are going to resist a slow but inevitable slide into an American form of fascism, we will need to be always alert as to what is going on around us.  And this much is clear...we have to be creating a sustainable spiritual core to keep us alive in the struggle. This short but powerful novel is yet another resource in that ongoing project.