Emil and the Detectives
Emil and the Detectives (German: Emil und die Detektive) is a 1929 novel for children set mainly in Berlin, by the German writer Erich Kästner. It was Kästner's first major success, the only one of his pre-1945 works to escape Nazi censorship, and remains his best-known work, and has been translated into at least 59 languages. The most unusual aspect of the novel, compared to existing children's literature at the time, was that it was realistically set in a contemporary Berlin peopled with some fairly rough characters, not in a sanitized fantasy world; also that it refrained from obvious moralizing, letting the characters' deeds speak for themselves.
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[edit] Plot summary
The story begins in Neustadt, a (fictional) provincial German town which is the home of a grade school child named Emil Tischbein. His father is deceased and his mother raises him alone working as a hairdresser. She sends Emil to Berlin with 120 marks (a hairdresser's monthly salary then) to give to his grandmother and 20 marks for himself, sums that have taken some months to save from her modest earnings. On the way he is very careful not to lose the money and uses a needle to pin it to the lining of his jacket.
But on the train to Berlin, Emil meets a mysterious man named Max Grundeis. This man gives him mysterious chocolate which makes him fall asleep. When he wakes up, the money and Herr Grundeis are gone. Emil gets off the train in a different part of Berlin from where he intended to go. When he finds Herr Grundeis, he follows him. Emil dares not call the police since the local policeman in Neustadt had seen him paint the nose of a local monument red, so he feels that he is "a kind of criminal" himself, not entitled to police protection. However, while he is concealing himself, he is found by a local boy named Gustav who offers to help. Gustav assembles 24 local children who call themselves "the detectives".
After following Grundeis to a hotel and spying on him all night, Emil and the gang follow the thief to the bank. Emil gets his money back when Herr Grundeis tries to exchange the money for smaller bills. One of the boy detectives follows him into the bank and tells the bank teller that the money is stolen. Emil comes in and tries to tell the bank teller his story. He proves that the money was his by describing the holes left by the needle he used to pin the bills in the lining of his jacket.
Herr Grundeis tries to run away, but Emil's new friends cling onto him until a police officer alerted by Emil's cousin Pony Hütchen arrives. Once he is arrested, Herr Grundeis is found out to be a bank robber. Emil receives a reward of 1000 marks for capturing Herr Grundeis. After everything is straightened out, Emil's grandmother says that the moral of the story is: "Never send cash — always use postal service."
[edit] The 1933 sequel
In the 1933 sequel Emil and the Three Twins, Emil and the other characters have various amusing adventures on the Baltic shore, two years after the Berlin events of the original book.
The second book did not become as well known as the first, in large measure due to its writing being shortly followed by the rise of the Nazis to power, when publication of Kästner's books in Germany was forbidden and existing books ceremoniously burned (the first Emil book was considered too popular and too harmless, thus escaping the ban).
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The story has been filmed several times. An early German version from 1931 featured a screenplay by Billy Wilder, with uncredited writing work by Emeric Pressburger, and was a commercial success. There were subsequent versions filmed in 1935 (UK, a remake of the 1931 film), 1954 (Germany, again a remake of the 1931 film), 1964 (US, produced by Walt Disney Productions), and 2001 (Germany). There was also a 1952 British television series which condensed the story in three 35-minute episodes.
The filmed versions made various changes to the time and/or place of the plot. In some cases Emil and the other boys are made into Americans, and the theft takes place on a Greyhound bus rather than on a train. The 2001 German version updated the plot to account for the march of time; in 1929 Berlin, a private telephone was still a rare thing, and in the book only one boy (a doctor's son) has a phone at home — with the result that this boy is ordered to stay at home to coordinate operations, and is very frustrated at missing all the fun. In the 2001 film all the boys have mobile phones, and make much use of them in hunting the thief. Also, the 2001 version switched the characters of Pony Hütchen and Gustav (and gives the new Gustav a more expanded role than the original Pony).
