Erich Kästner’s Warning Against Turning Back

There are texts that unmistakably belong to their own time and yet possess the unpleasant habit of refusing to stay properly buried there. Erich Kästner’s Little Marching Song (Marschliedchen) is one of them. The poem appeared in Die Weltbühne on 2 August 1932, initially under the title Because You Are Stupid (Denn ihr seid dumm) – an original title that leaves little doubt that Kästner had no intention of inviting his addressees to gentle self-reflection while wearing pedagogical kid gloves. He is not writing a cautious admonition but launching an attack, and he does so at a moment when Germany had every reason to listen more carefully. The Weimar Republic was in an existential crisis; democratic institutions were losing support, political violence had become part of everyday life, and in the Reichstag election of 31 July 1932, the NSDAP was no longer some noisy fringe phenomenon but had become the strongest party. Kästner, born in Dresden in 1899, was by then far more than the successful author of Emil and the Detectives; in his poetry and prose, he observed society with a mixture of moral seriousness, irony, and a sarcasm that occasionally gives the impression that language itself has decided to forget its good manners for a moment. The Little Marching Song is therefore not a retrospective reckoning. Kästner is writing before the catastrophe – he sees people marching towards something and shouts at them that they have chosen an exceptionally stupid direction. The tragedy is that they keep marching.

Formally, the poem is strikingly disciplined: its stanzas consist of four lines with an enclosed rhyme scheme and predominantly iambic pentameter. This order is no mere technical ornament. At the very beginning, those addressed are already marching in „ranks of four“ – and Kästner’s verses, too, stand in ranks of four. The iambic rhythm creates a steady forward momentum, so that the poem about marching effectively begins to march itself. It is an extraordinarily malicious construction: Kästner places his marchers inside a perfectly ordered linguistic formation while simultaneously demonstrating that order and reason are by no means the same thing. It is perfectly possible to proceed in the wrong direction with excellent organisation – and you can even keep in step while doing it. The title itself further undermines the martial pathos: Kästner does not grandly call his poem a Marching Song but a Little Marching Song – the diminutive shrinks the grand gesture and makes small those who consider themselves figures of world-historical importance. It is not particularly kind, but it is highly effective. This formally disciplined movement, however, is only one side of the poem. Its explosive force emerges where the soul boils while reason freezes. Heat and cold, emotion and rationality are set against each other. Kästner is not criticising emotion itself – political engagement without emotion would be a rather bleak affair – but the point at which emotion ceases to lead to thought and instead replaces it. That is precisely why the image of the march follows: people sing instead of speaking. The distinction is crucial. Speaking means exchange, disagreement and doubt. In collective singing, by contrast, the individual voice disappears into the chorus. Everyone knows the words and the rhythm, and nobody needs to waste any more time wondering whether the whole thing is actually nonsense. In this way, Kästner describes a basic mechanism of the crowd. It can provide the individual with strength and a sense of belonging, but it can also relieve them of that tiresome imposition known as forming an opinion of their own. It is enough if the man next to you sings loudly enough.

Kästner’s image of society is correspondingly bleak. He does not show a community of independently acting citizens, but a society in which people are willing to exchange individuality for belonging. Remarkably, however, he does not simply turn them into victims of political seduction. Again and again, the address is „you“ – you come, you love, you want – and this anaphora turns the poem almost into an indictment. Kästner does not vaguely blame circumstances or some mysterious spirit of the age. He addresses people directly, because a crowd consists of individuals, and anyone who marches along remains, despite the lockstep, a human being who has decided to go along. For Kästner, the crowd is no moral washing machine into which individual responsibility can simply be thrown. Although individuality is hardly mentioned explicitly in the poem, it is present everywhere precisely because of its absence. The marchers have no names, no biographies and no doubts. They appear as a collective defined by its common movement. Kästner thus shows what authoritarian models of community can do with the individual: they do not need a human being as an independently thinking subject, merely as a reliable component of a formation. And that certainly has its appeal. The individual can suddenly experience themselves as part of something greater. Together with thousands of others, they may feel powerful. The price is that they leave part of their independence at the cloakroom. Individuality in the Little Marching Song therefore means far more than personal distinctiveness. It means the ability not to join in automatically: to stop when others keep walking, to ask questions when others are shouting, and, in the worst case, to be the only person in the line who notices that everyone is heading straight for a wall.

This leads to a remarkable concept of power. It is striking how little Kästner actually writes about those who hold power. His addressees are those who are led. Political power does not appear merely as something exercised from above. It needs people to carry it. Those who may feel powerless as individuals create, through their collective obedience, the very power to which they subsequently submit. That is one of the most uncomfortable paradoxes of authoritarian rule: the powerless give power its power. The alternative stanza makes this connection particularly biting by depicting people marching before princes and ultimately existing merely as a parade. They demonstrate strength, but the strength does not belong to them. They place it at somebody else’s disposal. It is a remarkably poor bargain: you surrender self-determination and receive in return the exhilarating feeling of belonging to a power over which you yourself have no control whatsoever. The abuse of power therefore appears not exclusively as the action of an individual ruler, but as a social relationship requiring followers, consent, habituation or at least acquiescence. A leader without followers, after all, is ultimately just a man standing somewhere issuing orders that nobody finds particularly interesting.

Kästner is particularly radical in his treatment of the traditional military image of the hero. He strips away the pathos and does not portray the war dead as people who solemnly fall for their country or for honour. Instead, he reduces the event to its material core: people kill other people and die while doing so. In this way, he destroys the linguistic packaging of war. Militarism requires more than weapons and uniforms. It requires stories about honour, sacrifice, glory and heroism – stories capable of making the prospect of being killed by another human being sound like an attractive career choice. Kästner removes the packaging. What remains is a human being who dies. It is not an especially complicated insight. Apparently that is precisely why so much pathos is required to conceal it. And here, too, the same mechanism applies as with power: war also requires followers to sustain it, not heroes for it to produce. Kästner goes even further with the image of the „animal within man“. He does not claim that certain people are animals. Rather, aggression, hatred and cruelty belong to the possibilities contained within human beings themselves. The crucial point, however, is that the animal is fed. Hatred is therefore not simply there. It can be nourished. You can serve it fear, feed it grievances, dish up enemy images and offer, for dessert, the reassuring explanation that naturally everything is always somebody else’s fault. And there you have it: political power food.

At this point, a surprising path leads from 1932 into the present – and, of all places, into metal. More than ninety years later, we encounter a remarkably similar metaphor in The Wolf You Feed on Nita Strauss’s solo album. The title draws on the same idea: a human being contains conflicting sides, and what matters is which of them receives nourishment. With Kästner, however, things are even more uncomfortable. His human being does not merely feed what is destructive within himself. People throw food to the animal inside other people. An individual psychological question thus becomes a social one: which side of another human being are we strengthening? Hatred can be generated, cultivated and multiplied. All that is required is to keep topping it up. Soon enough, the bowl is full. The wolf makes an excellent projection screen for strength and independence, but political obedience has precious little to do with independence. Anyone marching in lockstep behind others is perfectly welcome to imagine themselves as a lone wolf. They are still following someone. Kästner’s image therefore does not end in self-destruction by accident. Anyone who keeps feeding the destructive side of human beings should hardly be surprised when, eventually, it sits before them well fed and content. The crucial question is not whether the wolf exists. The crucial question is who is filling the bowl – and why we allow them to do it.

Running parallel to this bleak image of humanity is the motif of the past. From the very beginning, the path leads into the „barracks of the past“; later we encounter old dynasties and finally the image of the clock being turned backwards. The political vision of those addressed has, strangely enough, hardly any future at all. Their future consists of the past. It is the familiar trick of political nostalgia: promising people tomorrow the beautiful yesterday, although that yesterday was never quite as beautiful as the present argument requires it to have been. Kästner’s image of the clock is therefore so effective because a clock can indeed be turned backwards, whereas time itself cannot. Moving the hands changes the clock. It does not change reality. Read politically, this means that laws can be repealed, freedoms curtailed, old symbols dragged out of storage and hierarchies restored. You still do not arrive in the past. You merely make sure that your own clock is wrong.

This brings us to the question of engagement and self-efficacy, because the poem itself is already an act of political engagement. Kästner is not observing events from a safe historical distance. He publishes his attack in 1932 while the movement he is criticising is becoming increasingly powerful. Literature here is not a decorative piece of furniture. It interferes. At the same time, the poem contains an appeal to individual agency, even though Kästner never states it explicitly. If people are responsible for joining in, it necessarily follows that they could also refuse to join in, object, or simply stop walking. The possibility of individual resistance is therefore the necessary counterpart to Kästner’s harsh attribution of responsibility. If the individual were genuinely powerless, the constant „you“ would make no sense. Kästner addresses people because people can act. And that is probably more uncomfortable than imagining that history is made exclusively by great men. That version allows everyone else to sit comfortably on the sofa and explain afterwards that, unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing they could have done.

In literary-historical terms, the Little Marching Song belongs to the politically engaged poetry of the Weimar Republic, combining a classical and tightly controlled form with everyday language, irony and direct social intervention. Kästner wants to be understood. His verses are not meant to be admired reverently. They are meant to hit. In this respect, he belongs to a tradition that includes writers such as Kurt Tucholsky, who did not regard literature merely as an aesthetic end in itself but as a means of intervening in social and political conflicts. In this understanding, literature is allowed to disturb the peace. Sometimes it positively has to. Because when everybody is happily marching in step, the person standing at the roadside shouting, „Have you people completely lost your minds?“ may not be the one with the problem. And that inevitably brings us to the present. One distinction must be made first: Germany in 2026 is not the Weimar Republic in 1932. Anyone who simply equates the two is not conducting historical analysis but saving themselves the trouble of doing any. Yet no such equation is necessary for Kästner’s poem to feel uncomfortably contemporary. Because Kästner does not merely describe parties or historical figures. He describes mechanisms. The glorification of a supposedly better past still exists. So does the belief that complex social problems must surely have wonderfully simple solutions. Enemy images still work. Fear works. Outrage works. And the desire to belong can still be considerably more pleasant than doubt. Nor does the rank of four require boots any longer. It can be digital. People can confirm one another’s convictions on social media, repeat the same slogans and despise the same opponents, gradually acquiring the impression that an overwhelming majority must surely agree with them because almost everyone in their immediate environment apparently does. The chorus has become technologically more sophisticated. The principle is remarkably old. Kästner’s opposition between singing and speaking thus acquires a new dimension: where everyone merely shouts together, understanding becomes difficult. And anyone who eventually stops regarding a political opponent as a human being with a different opinion and begins to see them instead as an enemy or a traitor might want to check who has been filling the food bowl lately.

The bitterest part of the poem, viewed from the present, comes precisely where Kästner becomes optimistic and ultimately believes that no state can be built with such people. We know what he could not know in 1932: it could. A criminal one. Kästner recognised with remarkable clarity the stupidity, hatred and backward-looking character of the development he was witnessing. What he underestimated was its capacity to succeed despite all of that. And perhaps this mistake is more valuable to us today than an accurate prediction would have been. Reason does not automatically prevail simply because it is reasonable. Democracy does not inevitably win because its opponents have bad arguments. And political stupidity possesses no built-in mechanism that automatically excludes it from power once a critical mass of stupidity has been reached. If it did, human history would contain considerably fewer chapters. In the end, Kästner’s poem therefore leads us back to the individual. Democracy requires people who do not willingly surrender their individuality to a crowd; people who question power before following it; people who do not gratefully adopt every fear offered to them; people who occasionally check who is feeding which wolf; and people who do not consider their own responsibility cancelled merely because ten thousand others are doing the same foolish thing. Kästner’s text is about 1932. But it asks a question with no expiry date: what happens to a society when enough people stop thinking for themselves and mistake the comforting feeling of belonging for being right? History’s answer is not particularly reassuring. And perhaps that is why, more than ninety years later, the Little Marching Song does not read like a document properly filed away in the archives of a vanished era. The uniforms change. The slogans change. The media change. The food bowl occasionally gets a new design. But the temptation to exchange thought for certainty, individuality for belonging and responsibility for obedience has proved remarkably durable. And whenever the soul begins to boil again, it might be sensible to check whether reason is still alive – before somebody gets the idea of forming ranks of four again.

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