I read this during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and decided to read it again today because I thought it reminded me of the current administration and wondered if I was correct. Sadly, I was. I hope this book will find a newer, larger audience, now more than ever. It deserves it.
Original Review
Had I read this without knowing who the author was, I would have thought this play was written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, not Erich Kästner. The premise is about how political power is not necessarily held by those in power. A president of a nation gives a speech after he is made president for life, survives an assassination attempt at the ceremony and declares, in a spontaneous act of statesmanship, amnesty for hundreds of political prisoners. He unwittingly sets loose a series of events leading to a cynical ending.
We learn early that the president takes his orders from his cabinet and is not what he seems. He is one of a dozen of doubles who are secretly trained and groomed to take the place of each other when needed to maintain the appearance of strong, long-serving president. They are all political dissidents who have been picked for their roles. Their families are fooled into thinking each is somewhere else in the world and none ever learn about their actual fates. “The School of Dictators” is run by a small, powerful clique that also provides a brothel and other services for its “presidents.”
In the end, the "president's" efforts to reform—to engage the citizenry in its own governing—fall flat, in large part because the people, having been ruled for so long, are unaware of how to act as free citizens. And rather than a revolution, the end result is a symbolic changing of the deckchairs of those who pull the strings behind the scenes. Kästner’s biting satire was first conceived when he was in “inner exile” during the Third Reich but written when the Federal Republic of Germany was still a young nation trying to establish itself. He wanted to make his characters representations of contemporary politics. Now, more than 60 years after it was published—before the advent of mass media politics—it seems more pertinent than ever.