Kästner The Flying Classroom

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78269-073-3
Verlag: Pushkin Children's Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Martin's school is no ordinary school. There are snowball fights, kidnappings, cakes, a parachute jump, a mysterious man called 'No-Smoking' who lives in a railway carriage and a play about a flying classroom. As the Christmas holidays draw near, Martin and his friends - nervous Uli, cynical Sebastian, Johnny, who was rescued by a sea captain, and Matthias, who is always hungry (particularly after a meal) - are preparing for the end-of-term festivities. But there are surprises, sadness and trouble on the way - and a secret that changes everything. The Flying Classroom is a magical, thrilling and bittersweet story about friendship, fun and being brave when you are at your most scared. (It also features a calf called Eduard, but you will have to read it to find out why.)

Erich Kästner was born in Dresden in 1899. He began his career as a journalist for the New Leipzig newspaper in 1922, but moved to Berlin in 1927 to begin working as a freelance journalist and theatre critic. In 1929 he published his first book for children, Emil and the Detectives, which has since been translated into 60 languages, achieving international recognition and selling millions of copies around the world. He subsequently published both Dot and Anton and The Flying Classroom, before turning to adult fiction with his 1931 satire Going to the Dogs. After the Nazis took power in Germany, Kästner's books were burnt on Berlin's Opera Square and over the period of 1937-42 he faced repeated arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo, resulting in his blacklisting and exclusion from the writers' guild. After the end of World War II, Kästner moved to Munich and published The Parent Trap, later adapted into a hit film by Walt Disney. In 1957 he received the Georg Büchner Prize and, later, the Order of Merit and the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for his contribution to children's literature. Kästner died in Munich in 1974.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kästner, Erich

Weitere Mitwirkende

Trier, Walter

Bell, Anthea

Leseproben

Foreword Part Two

Yesterday evening, when I’d eaten my supper and was sitting idly in the hotel lounge, I really meant to go straight on writing. The glow of the Alpine sunset had faded away. The peaks of the Zugspitze and Riffelwände mountains were sinking into the shadows of nightfall, and on the other side of the lake the smiling face of the full moon gazed over the dark forest.

Then I discovered that I’d lost my green pencil. It must have fallen out of my pocket on the way back to the hotel. Or maybe Eduard, the pretty calf, had eaten it, thinking it was a blade of grass. Anyway, there I sat in the lounge, unable to write anything. Because although I was staying in a very posh hotel, there wasn’t a green pencil for me to borrow anywhere in the entire place. Oh, wonderful!

In the end I picked up a children’s book that its author had sent me, and began reading. But I soon put it down again. The book made me really cross, and I’ll tell you why. Its author tries to tell any children who read his book that they are having non-stop fun the whole time, and they’re so happy they hardly know what to do with themselves! That dishonest gentleman acts as if childhood were made of the very best cake mixture.

How can a grown-up forget his childhood so entirely that a day comes when he simply doesn’t know how sad and unhappy children can sometimes be? (I would like to take this opportunity of asking you, with all my heart, never to forget your own childhood! Will you promise me that? Word of honour?)

For it makes no difference whether you’re crying over a broken doll, or maybe, later, because you have lost a friend. It’s never a question of exactly what makes you sad but of how much you grieve for it. Heaven knows, children’s tears are no smaller than the tears shed by grown-ups, and often they weigh more heavily. Don’t get me wrong, ladies and gentlemen! We don’t want to be unnecessarily soppy. All I’m saying is that you have to be honest even if it hurts. Honest right to the bone.

In the Christmas story that I am going to tell you, beginning in the next chapter, there’s a boy whose name is Jonathan Trotz, although the others call him Johnny. That little fourth-year boy is not the central character of this book, but a short account of his life fits into my story here. He was born in New York, his father was German, his mother was American, and they fought like cat and dog. In the end Johnny’s mother ran away, and when he was four years old his father put him on board a steamer setting out from New York for Germany. He bought the boy a ticket for the crossing, he put a ten-dollar note in Johnny’s little brown wallet, and he hung a piece of cardboard round Johnny’s neck with his name on it. Then they went to see the ship’s captain. And Johnny’s father said, ‘Please will you take my son over the ocean to Germany? His grandparents will meet him when he gets off the ship in Hamburg.’

‘That’s all right, sir,’ replied the captain. And then Johnny’s father went away as well.

So the boy crossed the ocean all by himself. The passengers were very kind to him. They gave him chocolate, they read the notice round his neck and said, ‘Well, aren’t you in luck, going on such a long sea voyage at your age!’

When they had been at sea for a week they arrived in Hamburg, and the captain waited by the gangway for Johnny’s grandparents to turn up. All the passengers disembarked and patted the boy’s cheeks once again. ‘O Johnny,’ said a Latin teacher in the vocative, ‘may all go well for you!’ And the sailors going ashore called, ‘Keep a stiff upper lip, Johnny!’ Then some workmen came on board, to repaint the ship so that it would look sparkling clean before the voyage back to America.

The captain stood on the quayside holding the little boy’s hand, looking at his wristwatch from time to time, and waiting. But Johnny’s grandparents never turned up. They couldn’t, because they had been dead for many years. Johnny’s father, who simply wanted to get rid of the child, had shipped him off to Germany without a second thought.

At the time Jonathan Trotz didn’t understand what happened to him. But he grew larger, and there were many nights when he lay awake crying. And he will never in his life really recover from the grief he felt at that time, although you can believe me when I tell you he is a brave boy.

However, a reasonable solution was found. The captain had a married sister; he took the little boy to live with her, visited him when he was in Germany, and when he was ten years old sent him to boarding school at the Johann-Sigismund Grammar School in Kirchberg. (This boarding school, by the way, is the scene of our Christmas story.)

Sometimes Jonathan Trotz still goes to see the captain’s sister in the holidays. The family there are very nice to him. But usually he stays at the school. He reads a lot. And secretly he writes stories.

Perhaps he will be a writer one day, but no one can tell yet. He spends half-holidays in the big school grounds, talking to the great tits. They fly down to perch on his hand and look at him inquiringly with their little eyes when he speaks to them. Sometimes he shows them a small, brown wallet and the ten-dollar bill inside it…

I told you the story of Johnny’s life only because the dishonest writer whose book I was reading in the hotel lounge last night says children are always cheerful, in fact quite beside themselves with joy the whole time. If only he knew!

The serious business of life begins long before you start to earn a living. That’s not where it begins, or where it ends either. I emphasize these well-known facts not to make you feel you’re the cat’s whiskers, heaven forbid! And I don’t emphasize them to make you scared. No, no! Be as happy as you can! And be so cheerful that your little tummies hurt with laughing!

Only don’t pretend to yourselves, and don’t let other people pretend to you. Learn to look misfortune in the eye. Don’t be afraid when something goes wrong. Don’t just cave in when you have bad luck. Keep a stiff upper lip. You must learn to be tough and develop a thick skin!

You must be able to stand up to blows, as boxers know. You must learn to take them and put up with them. Otherwise you’ll feel groggy the first time life slaps you down. Because life wears a large size of boxing glove, ladies and gentlemen! If life has hit out at you, and you weren’t prepared for it, a little housefly has only to cough and it will knock you flat.

So keep a stiff upper lip and develop a thick skin, understand? If you stand up to the first blows of fate, you’re well on the way to winning. Because in spite of the blows that you have received, you’ll have the presence of mind to activate two very important qualities: courage and intelligence. Remember what I tell you: courage without intelligence doesn’t amount to anything, and intelligence without courage is no good either. At many times in the history of the world, stupid people have been brave and intelligent people have been cowardly. That wasn’t the way to go about it.

Only when the brave have become intelligent and the intelligent have become brave will we really be sure of something that we often, but mistakenly, feel is an established fact: the progress of mankind.

By the way, as I write these almost philosophical remarks I am sitting on my wooden bench again, at the wobbly table, in the middle of the large and colourful meadow. I bought myself a green pencil this morning in the general store here. And now it’s late afternoon again. Newly fallen snow is glittering on top of the Zugspitze mountain. The black and white cat is crouching on the woodpile, staring at me. She must be under a magic spell! And down from the mountain comes the sound of the cowbell round my friend Eduard’s neck. He will soon be here to nudge me with his little horns and fetch me home. Gottfried the peacock butterfly didn’t visit me today. I hope nothing has happened to him.

And tomorrow, at last, I shall begin writing my Christmas story. It will be about brave people and scaredy-cats, about clever people and stupid people. There are all kinds of children in a boarding school.

I’ve just thought of something: do you all know what a boarding school is? It’s a kind of school where you live as well as having lessons. The boys stay there. They eat at long tables in a big refectory, and they have to lay the tables themselves. They sleep in big dormitories, and in the morning the caretaker comes and pulls a bell rope, and a bell rings very loudly. And a few of the boys from the top class are dormitory prefects. They keep watch like hawks to make sure that the others jump out of bed on the dot. Many boys never learn to make their beds neatly, and so when the others go out on Saturdays and Sundays they stay in the boarding house writing lines. (Not that the lines teach them how to make their beds.)

The parents of the boarders live in cities far away, or in the country where there are no secondary schools. And the children only go home in the holidays. Many boys would like to stay at home when the holidays are over. Others would rather stay at school even in the holidays if their parents would let them.

And then there are other students who are day-boys. They live in the town where the school is, and they don’t...