Emil and the Detectives

Emil and the Detectives is a 1929 novel set mainly in Berlin, by the German writer Erich Kästner and illustrated by Walter Trier. It was Kästner's first major success and the only one of his pre-1945 works to escape Nazi censorship. The book was immediately popular and the original version sold an initial two million copies. First published in English in 1931, it has never been out of print and has been translated into at least 59 languages. It is Kästner's best-known work. Compared with similar literature at the time, its most unusual aspect was its realistic setting in a contemporary Berlin peopled with some fairly rough characters, not in a sanitized fantasy world; also that it refrained from obvious moralizing, letting the characters' deeds speak for themselves. Emil was the first name of Kästner's father. Plot summary The story begins in a provincial German town called Neustadt, home to 12-year-old schoolboy Emil Tischbein. His father has died and his mother is raising him alone while working as a hairdresser. She sends Emil to Berlin to stay with his aunt and grandmother, bestowing on him 140 marks, a sum that has taken some months to save from her modest earnings. On the way, he is very careful not to lose the money and pins it to the lining of his jacket using a sewing needle. On the train to Berlin, Emil shares his compartment with a mysterious man in a bowler hat who introduces himself as Herr Grundeis. Emil accepts some chocolate from the man and then falls asleep. When he wakes up, his money has disappeared and so has Herr Grundeis. Emil gets off the train in a different part of Berlin from where he intended. When he spots Grundeis in the crowded station, he follows him, determined to get his money back. Emil dare not call the police because the local policeman in Neustadt has seen him paint the nose of a local monument red (so he feels that he is "a kind of criminal" himself). While Grundeis is eating his lunch in a restaurant, Emil meets a local boy called Gustav and tells him about his mission. Gustav offers to help and assembles a gang of local children who call themselves "the detectives".