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The wind turns. These words, in the farewell letter of a young man who has tired of his life, constitute one of two sentences that neatly sum up the famous story Dominik Graf revisits in his film Fabian, or Going to the Dogs. The other sentence is glimpsed on an advertising poster that crops up in a couple of scenes in the film. It says, ominously, Learn to swim.
Kästner's novel follows Jakob Fabian, a jaded yet altruistic young Germanist, in his explorations of Berlin— and himself—in the early 1930s. With Fabian, we dive into the excesses of the city's nightlife, a world of refined brothels, extravagant artists' studios and illicit bars, where young and not-so-young men and woman feverishly live it up, as if tomorrow may never come.
We witness the social and political disintegration that heralds the tumultuous collapse of Germany's Weimar Republic: street fighting between communists and police, soaring unemployment, which soon afflicts Fabian, and the inexorable rise of national socialism.
On his way through this turbulent world, Fabian falls in love. And in the wake of love, he encounters hope, then disappointment. He loses a good friend. He repeatedly bumps into signs of the catastrophe bearing down on Germany and himself.
Perspicacious and impudent satire, critical take on society, grand tragedy— Kästner's novel is an outstanding account of the times he lived in. In barely a few months after its release, it sold more than thirty thousand copies, before almost becoming another of the period's victims. Immediately after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Kästner's name appeared on the long list of writers whose works were burned by the Nazis. Fabian survived, however, and remains one of the most popular German novels of the 20th century.
Now, ninety years after the publication of Erich Kästner's classic, Dominik Graf gives Fabian new life. The vitality and impudence, as well as tragedy and urgency, which are the cornerstones of the novel, come together in Graf's film. We have the reserved observer, Jakob Fabian, superbly played by Tom Schilling. Until the very end, he resists conforming to the ever crueler world he lives in, and so never learns to swim in those waters. It will be Fabian's undoing, but ultimately remains the foundation of his dignity. We have his hopeless love story with actress Cornelia (Saskia Rosendahl), who suffers from her own pragmatism. We have his friend Labude (Albrecht Schuch), who is destroyed by his own idealism, as well as by the lies of a Nazi thug.
And we have Berlin. Graf cleverly spotlights the big city rhythms, and the growing fracture in society, so perfectly described in Kästner's novel. He allows cinematic collages to emerge, combining new images with footage from the 1930s to show Berlin bustling in black and white. At other points, he deploys split-screen techniques to show parallel scenes that evoke the visual experiments of expressionist cinema.
The film's essential originality and relevance stems from the way Graf projects the complexity of the lives and times at the heart of the story. Past, present and future intertwine. We see disfigured faces from the Great War—the war that brought Kästner's world into being. Then, alongside Fabian, we run into men in brown shirts and black leather boots, with swastikas on their arms. These encounters are all the more disturbing since we, present-day audiences, unlike the characters in the novel and its adaptation, know precisely what lies ahead.
As reminders, we glimpse traces of the historical future, such as the brass cobbles implanted in sidewalks as memorials to victims of the Nazis. And so, as we roam with Fabian through the Berlin of his time, we recognize—on a street sign, in an underground station, or in a minor character's demeanour—our own present-day Berlin.
Dominik Graf's Fabian reveals to us once more the narrative and emotional power of Kästner's novel. But it doesn't stop there. Like the original novel, Graf's film is released in a time of social uncertainty and political tension, to which the phrase The wind turns is just as applicable.
As we watch this brilliant and modern adaptation, we catch ourselves reflecting on our world, and we have to ask ourselves, What does it mean today to learn to swim?
by Hernán D. Caro, Berlin, journalist and editor of the Goethe-Institut's Humboldt Magazine
image: Fabian © Lupa Film photo Hanno Lentz
