... what is not in your reading books

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... what is not in your reading books is a collection of prose texts and poems by the German writer Erich Kästner , which the Vice-Rector Wilhelm Rausch (* 1932) published in 1968.

When he looked through more than a hundred reading books, Rausch noticed that around 20 articles by Erich Kästner could be found in the reading books for ten- to fifteen-year-old students. However, these were only excerpts from his children's books and a few well-known poems and sayings. In the books for the upper level of the grammar schools, however, there was not a single contribution by Erich Kästner. Wilhelm Rausch tried to close this gap.

content

The book contains various texts and poems that turn against the indolence of thought, against philistinism and against narrow-minded nationalism.

Kurt Schmidt, instead of a ballad

The Ballad of Kurt Schmidt tells of the bleak life of a worker and ends with his suicide after a long day.

Contemporaries, loads of them

“Zeitgenossen, Haufenweise” is one of Kästner's best-known poems, in which he makes fun of the heartless behavior of his fellow men.

The four Archimedean points

Kästner is of the opinion that the physical point that Archimedes was looking for to unhinge the world would correspond to four points so that the human world could be unhinged:

1. Everyone should listen to their conscience.
2. Everyone should look for role models.
3. Everyone should always remember their childhood.
4. Everyone should acquire a sense of humor.

questions and answers

Kästner sees an imaginary garden in which questions are sown and the answers grow. He differentiates between the following forms:

• Useful questions that yield nutritious answers.
• Ornamental questions that produce pleasant, colorful answers.
• Pompous questions, which Kurt Tucholsky called "proppleme" and which take up a lot of space.
• Parasitic questions and answers that settle on real answers and live secondhand.
• Inedible and poisonous answers that hardly differ from the edible ones.
• Weeds that proliferate between aromatic herbs and green answer cabbage.

Sometimes gardeners stop at powerful answers and jokers stick paper flowers between real flowers, which short-sighted botanists then write long books about. Particularly worth seeing are special beds with answers to questions that would not occur to an ordinary citizen.

Smart, yet brave

In May 1945, Kästner pointed out that the attempt to rebuild the fatherland would not only depend on bricks, plaster of paris, cotton imports, seed potatoes, plywood, nails, early vegetables and wage tax surcharges, but also on the new character to be revised.

Address at the beginning of school

In this fictional address to ABC shooters , Kästner shows himself pessimistic about school and the state: He wonders whether there is any point in giving advice to children and comes to the most important piece of advice he would like to give them along the way :

"Don't let childhood drive you out!"

Letter to my son

Kästner writes to his then still hypothetical son. Kästner is optimistic and says “one fine day there will be you.” He wants to show his son the world and wants to be his father and not a prophet.

Is politics an art?

Kästner believes that a petty merchant who made only a fraction of the mistakes statesmen made would never get out of bankruptcy and prison. But the peoples seem to be made of cast iron. You can plunge them into the deepest abysses and they still remain whole.

literature

• Erich Kästner: ... what is not in your reading books . Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1987, ISBN 3-596-20875-0 .