The Blue Book

After Erich Kästner was banned as an author by the Nazis in 1933, he decided to keep a secret diary. For this purpose, he used a blue-bound, unmarked book that he hid among the other four thousand volumes of his library. For safety reasons, Kästner also made his entries in shorthand. From 1941 until the end of the war, Erich Kästner recorded events at the front and in Berlin, noting military reports and mass executions as well as the pub jokes about Goebbels and Hitler that soon could only be made in whispers. He documented his increasingly disrupted daily life, marked by power outages and bombings, until the unconditional surrender in May 1945, and reported on what happened in the months that followed. The current edition, edited by Sven Hanuschek together with Silke Becker and Ulrich von Bülow, includes Kästner's war diary as well as his collected notes for a novel about the Third Reich, a comprehensive foreword, and numerous newspaper articles that Erich Kästner kept in the Blue Book.