4.0
Going to the Dogs
ByPublisher Description
Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . . . weak heart, brown hair,” a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job without security in the short or the long run.
What’s to be done? Fabian and friends make the best of it—they go to work though they may be laid off at any time, and in the evenings they go to the cabarets and try to make it with girls on the make, all the while making a lot of sharp-sighted and sharp-witted observations about politics, life, and love, or what may be. Not that it makes a difference. Workers keep losing work to new technologies while businessmen keep busy making money, and everyone who can goes out to dance clubs and sex clubs or engages in marathon bicycle events, since so long as there’s hope of running into the right person or (even) doing the right thing, well—why stop?
Going to the Dogs, in the words of introducer Rodney Livingstone, “brilliantly renders with tangible immediacy the last frenetic years [in Germany] before 1933.” It is a book for our time too.
What’s to be done? Fabian and friends make the best of it—they go to work though they may be laid off at any time, and in the evenings they go to the cabarets and try to make it with girls on the make, all the while making a lot of sharp-sighted and sharp-witted observations about politics, life, and love, or what may be. Not that it makes a difference. Workers keep losing work to new technologies while businessmen keep busy making money, and everyone who can goes out to dance clubs and sex clubs or engages in marathon bicycle events, since so long as there’s hope of running into the right person or (even) doing the right thing, well—why stop?
Going to the Dogs, in the words of introducer Rodney Livingstone, “brilliantly renders with tangible immediacy the last frenetic years [in Germany] before 1933.” It is a book for our time too.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesGoing to the Dogs Reviews
4.0
“I really liked this. This takes place in Berlin mid 1930’s before World War II gets started. The economy is bad and people are starting to get laid off. The workers are protesting in the street and the cops show up to stop them and a violent clash breaks out. Men can barely support themselves let alone a family. To deal with their depression, disillusionment and dissatisfaction with themselves, their jobs and their lives they frequent the “illegal” sex clubs where they “visit” with the girls and drown their sorrows. This is just the novels setting, this backdrop is subtly changing and is alive and also serves as an important side character. The protagonist Fabian is having a bad time in Berlin being a moralist. It sure is hard to survive whilst simultaneously attempting to do the right thing, the moral thing.”
About Erich Kastner
Erich Kästner (1899–1974) was born in Dresden and after serving in World War I studied history and philosophy in Leipzig, completing a PhD. In 1927 he moved to Berlin and through his prolific journalism quickly became a major intellectual figure in the capital. His first book of poems was published in 1928, as was the children’s book Emil and the Detectives, which quickly achieved worldwide fame. Going to the Dogs appeared in 1931 and was followed by many other
works for adults and children, including Lottie and Lisa, the basis for the popular Disney film The Parent Trap. In 1933 the pacifist Kästner was banned from German publication and subsequently found employment as a film scriptwriter. After World War II, he worked as a literary editor and continued to write, mainly for children.
Cyrus Brooks translated works by Alfred Neumann, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Leonhard Frank as well as Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, Emil and the Three Twins, and Lottie and Lisa.
Rodney Livingstone is a professor emeritus in German studies at the University of Southampton and a translator of books by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Weber, and Walter Benjamin, among others. In 2009 he was awarded the Ungar German Translation Prize of the American Translators Association.
works for adults and children, including Lottie and Lisa, the basis for the popular Disney film The Parent Trap. In 1933 the pacifist Kästner was banned from German publication and subsequently found employment as a film scriptwriter. After World War II, he worked as a literary editor and continued to write, mainly for children.
Cyrus Brooks translated works by Alfred Neumann, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Leonhard Frank as well as Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, Emil and the Three Twins, and Lottie and Lisa.
Rodney Livingstone is a professor emeritus in German studies at the University of Southampton and a translator of books by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Weber, and Walter Benjamin, among others. In 2009 he was awarded the Ungar German Translation Prize of the American Translators Association.
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