Fabian: The Story of a Moralist

Fabian: The Story of a Moralist (Fabian: Die Geschichte eines Moralisten) is an autobiographical novel by the German writer Erich Kästner, published in 1931, with the subtitle "The Story of a Moralist." Set in Berlin in the late 1920s, as the Great Depression sweeps across Germany, the story spans only about two weeks. Jakob Fabian, thirty-two, holds a doctorate in literature and works as a copywriter at an advertising agency; he lives alone in rented rooms, has a heart condition, and could be fired at any moment. Like a ghost he drifts through cafés, newspaper offices, bars, cabarets, amusement parks, and brothels, coolly observing a grotesque world in which newsrooms manufacture false reports and people numb themselves with sensation, while he still clings to a slightly out-of-place sense of morality. He falls in love with Cornelia, a doctor of law, but after he loses his job she abandons him for the sake of her prospects; his closest friend Labude throws himself into political action with high ideals, meets with defeat, and, misled into believing his postdoctoral thesis has been rejected, finally shoots himself. Having lost his job, his love, and his friend, Fabian returns to his hometown, jumps into a river to save a drowning boy, and drowns; the child survives. With a cool, swift, reportorial style, Kästner intertwines individual fate with social disintegration at the end of the Weimar Republic, and the book is regarded as a literary exemplar of German New Objectivity.