Berlinale: This is the film adaptation of Kästner's "Fabian"

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Once, Dr.

phil.

Jakob Fabian, whom everyone just calls Fabian, a man who can do a lot but wants nothing, so once this moralist wanders through the backdrop of Babelsberg.

Cornelia, the only love he has known himself for in his life at least as far as he was able, has just sold her soul and heart and also him to the sound film and big money.

At least that's how he sees it.

He's looking for the exit.

He walks out of the studios, through streets where eighty, ninety years later “Babylon Berlin” and through overgrown backdrops where children's films were shot.

But he doesn't know that.

The year is 1931. And a country went to the dogs.

But it doesn't know that, doesn't even want to know.

Fabian, that's just the moralist, watched it.

Wrote down what he saw.

He stood next to it.

And goes to the dogs.

He couldn't help it.

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Dominik Graf, who actually - it is said - once swore never not to shoot scenes with men in Nazi uniforms, filmed Erich Kästner's “Fabian”.

“The story of a moralist”, as the tamed subline of the tamed novel was called when it appeared.

Kästner would have preferred “Going to the Dogs”.

Fabian is the story of a drowning person, one who cannot and does not like to swim with the flow of time, and who, to oppose him, lacks the fundamental trust in what is fundamentally good in human beings.

A perfect observer, as tender as it is cool, as close as it is distant.

A melancholic, disinterested in power and money, suffering from not being able to do otherwise.

A moralist whose traditional place, according to Kästner, is always the lost position and whose motto is “nevertheless”.

He is waiting for the victory of the decent, which he believes will not come.

Who doesn't know any system in which to function.

Fabian (Tom Schilling), Cornelia (Saskia Rosendahl) ask a beggar (Thomas Reimann) to come to their table and listen to his story

Source: ZDF

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A man who loses everything when he is ready to intervene, who drowns when he does.

With eyes wide as a gate and with sentences twisting madly into the heart of his presence, he criss-crosses the Babylonian, overheated, hallucinatory, miserable Berlin, through the pubs, the studios, the brothels, the night pages.

And through time.

In one train - as it says in the “railway allegory” with which Kästner opened his “Lyrische Hausapotheke” from 1932 and which is written in Fabian's film - in one train in which we are all seated.

And in which only the dead get out in the end.

"Fabian or the walk to the dogs"

Berlin, 1931. Jakob Fabian (Tom Schilling) works in the advertising department of a cigarette factory during the day and drifts through bars, brothels and artist studios with his wealthy friend Labude at night.

Source: DCM

“Fabian” came out in 1931, parallel to Gabriele Tergit's “Käsebier conquers the Kurfürstendamm” and Fallada's “Little Man, Was Now”, the other “Book of the Year 1932”.

A bestseller, celebrated by Benjamin and Hesse.

With the triad in mind, you get pretty close to what Berlin was, what Germany was before the Nazis finally took power.

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The “Völkischer Beobachter” was “Fabian” as a “Sudelroman”.

When the books burned on Berlin's Opernplatz, “Fabian” burned up at the top, and Erich Kästner, the moralist, stood by and watched.

Sometimes you see more than you want to

You can see how the books burn in Dominik Graf's film.

You can see a few men in freshly sewn Nazi uniforms walking through the streets, they are not nice, they have no inhibitions.

You can see freshly printed election posters praising Hitler as the savior of Germany.

You can see shaky, black and white original films from the thirties.

Sometimes you see more than you want to see, more at once, more metaphors.

That so many cigarettes are burned in "Fabian", for example, that one ponders whether it would be a good idea to equip the "Fabian" posters with one of these banderoles from the Minister of Health, warning of impotence and showing a night-black lung, has of course to do with Fabian's activity as a propagandist in a tobacco factory.

Of course, he also refers in advance to Heine's burning books as harbingers of burning people.

“Fabian” is just a Dominik Graf film.

We get to the film with the subway.

Get off at Heidelberger Platz, walk along the platform, it goes very slowly. People don't wear masks.

The way is long.

Upstairs.

You are in your early thirties, eighty years have passed by walking through one of the hatches into the present, of which there are still a few in Grafs “Fabian”.

At one point, people also stand on stumbling blocks.

Dominik Graf, Saskia Rosendahl and Tom Schilling while shooting in Görlitz

Source: picture alliance / Geisler-Fotopress

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Overall, however, in contrast to what Burhan Qurbani did last year with Remarque's “Berlin Alexanderplatz” and Christian Petzold in 2018 with Seghers' “Transit”, Graf did not adjust “Fabian” for the present into the present.

With the greatest possible casualness, Graf and his co-author Constantin Lieb use their hatches in Fabian's future and the novel as a warning that Kästner wanted him to be understood as.

“Fabian” does not hide the finger of the present - as “Babylon Berlin” likes to do - under a splendid furnishing ceiling, on the one hand (fortunately one would almost like to say) there was a lack of money, on the other hand with Graf the belief in the complete comparability of Weimar and Berlin.

Graf and Lieb can also afford casualness because they don't have to do a lot, especially not sharpen up much of what Kästner delivers in terms of timeliness.

About the commodity value of love, the relationship between man and market and power and the question of how one should live at all.

This is negotiated in the texts, the two narrators speaking off-screen like messengers of the gods.

And in the dialogues.

For example, between Fabian and his buddy and Schlagschatten Labude.

The millionaire's son, who not only looks at the situation, who wants to change it, who is torn apart, who feels betrayed and sold by everyone and who ends up lying in his father's villa with his skull shot by hand.

He just can't believe it.

A novel without a story

Graf relieves Kästner of the current political context of exploitation.

And thanks to Kästner for relieving him (and actually everyone else who adapted "Fabian") of the retelling obligation.

According to Kästner, the novel has no history at all.

Which is why Graf and Lieb in their book - “freely based on Erich Kästner”, but not that free either - not only do not stop at all the stops on Fabian's night journey into decline.

The sequence - the template is the original version published in 2013, reconstructed by Sven Hanuschek and even dirtier - is sometimes cheerfully changed, made more fluid and consistent.

As a plot, Graf's film works better than Kästner's novel.

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Which in turn is due, among other things, to the lack of a historical context of exploitation.

Graf's film is not just a time parable and a historical panorama.

It's a big, desperate, desperately beautiful love story.

At Kästner's, Cornelia will be gone at some point.

That would have been a shame.

To Saskia Rosendahl.

That's Cornelia.

You believe everything that Fabian is not ready to believe.

That it is not a maneuver and not just a career urge when she - the film lawyer from Babelsberg - goes to bed with the famous producer and becomes an acting star.

That it was almost a service of love.

Want to change the world: Albrecht Schuch as Labude in "Fabian"

Source: © Hanno Lentz / Lupa Film

It can be playful, questioning, expectant, self-confident, erotic, helpless.

How Tom Schilling gets out of Fabian, the sarcastic question mark incarnate, all facets of the inner conflict of the classic sideline.

And Albrecht Schuch in the Labude lives out down to the smallest movement that comes from the balancing act of a classic activist who does not give up believing in the possibility of a decent world.

One would like him to find an exit, to emerge again from the Elbe, in whose vortices he, the non-swimmer, drowns when he tries to save a child on the way to Cornelia.

That in the end not only the dead get off this train.

And maybe there will be a continuation of the three-hour ride.

But only one cigarette appears.

And the books are on fire.