Zum letzten Mal | Fabian - Der Gang vor die Hunde von Erich Kästner | für die Bühne bearbeitet von Gero Vierhuff

In the organizer's words:

Berlin at the end of the 1920s. The city is in a fever, full of lust, adventure, opportunities and risks. Alcohol is flowing in torrents, the nights are danced through, there is a lot of money to be made in love, left-wing and right-wing extremists are fighting fierce battles on the streets and the army of the unemployed is growing daily. In these uncertain times, Dr. Jakob Fabian, a literary scholar, is happy to earn his living as a copywriter for a cigarette factory, even if the work has little to do with his actual interests. He lives as a subtenant with a widow who would otherwise no longer be able to afford the apartment. At night, he drifts through the pubs with his friend Stephan Labude, also a literary scholar who is currently working on his habilitation. The women are permissive and choose the men according to their wishes. Jakob Fabian drinks with journalists and gets to know their cynical view of the world. News is hyped up and scandalized so that the paper sells well. The editors agree that the republic stands on feet of clay. One crack and everything collapses. Jakob Fabian sees the world on the brink of a great upheaval, and he does not believe that the sensible people will shape it. The uncertainty is so great that young people have no interest in starting a family. Fabian falls in love with Cornelia von Battenberg, a lawyer who works in film. He could imagine anything with her. Then the cigarette company throws him out, even though he is their best copywriter. Finding a new job is not easy. The little money he has melts away and Fabian finds himself increasingly on the wrong track.

"Fabian" is considered an important political novel in Germany before 1945. Written in 1930/31, Erich Kästner captures the decadence and increasingly unstable economic and social conditions, the weakening of the democratic center and the strengthening of the political fringes at the end of the Weimar Republic. The parallels to our time are obvious. In 1933, the National Socialists declared this novel degenerate and burned Kästner's books along with the works of many other German authors.

Originally, the novel was to be subtitled "Der Gang vor die Hunde". However, the first version of this, along with some of the hefty chapters, was rejected by its first publisher and was not published in its original form until 2013. Instead, a censored version of the book was published with the subtitle "Geschichte eines Moralisten". Kästner wrote in an epilogue on the occasion of a new edition in 1956 about the aim of the novel: "He wanted to warn of the abyss that Germany, and thus Europe, was approaching! He wanted to use [...] all means at the last minute to force people to listen and come to their senses." He saw the storm signs of the coming crisis all too clearly and described them with the subtle, intelligent humor of satire. "The moralist does not hold up a mirror to his epoch, but a distorting mirror."