Going to the Dogs The Story of a Moralist

Kästner (1899-1974) had a message to convey about the crumbling of Berlin's moral standards, and he delivered it successfully .but it is Fabian himself who explains things best when he comments ironically, We live in stirring times . . . and they get more stirring every day.' Publishers Weekly
 
Like his hero Fabian, Kästner was not a cynic as a saddened idealist; the two conditions look much the same, but the latter is more painful .Fabian is a "key novel" of the Weimar Republic in its last years. It is a notably efficient novel, with little of the metaphysical resonance of [Thomas Mann s] Doctor Faustus or that book s soul-searching, but offering instead a series of moral tableaux, rendered the cooler by the chapter titles, in the form of newspaper headings. The Times Literary Supplement
 
Graceful, vivid and distinguished a little masterpiece of pathos and calamity. Michael Sadleir
 
Damned for its improper subject-matter, [Going to the Dogs] showed the crumbling Berlin of Christopher Isherwood s stories with something of Isherwood s sharp intelligence, but a far more tragic sense of implication. The Times Literary Supplement
 
I am a great admirer of Fabian [original title] and have read it at least twice. Graham Greene