I really really like Kästner's poems. They get dark, they get snarky, they are political, they don't stop for anybody, except for their author's sentimentality. He doesn't do sentimentality very well – but he knows it, and he can laugh about it.

More Kästner poems, these here designed to help you during your everyday life. And – surprisingly – they do. Well, some of them do, but that's how every collection of poem works.

The first Kästner poems I ever read – overlaps with the others, but reading a Kästner poem twice is good for the soul, anyways.

Das doppelte Lottchen (English: Lottie and Lisa) is exactly what I loved to read as a child. The story of the twins Liese and Lotte, who were split up soon after birth when their parents separated. Once the two very different girls realise they are twins at a summer camp, they decide to switch places.

Konrad goes into a magic wardrobe and comes out in a very weird world. Everything in this book is designed to be fun to children and optionally offend adults at the time. For example the rich suburban villa district where deceased generals play with tin soldiers. The roller-skating circus horse made redundant by automation. A school where difficult parents get educated and punished. A futuristic city where a completely automated slaughterhouse suddenly starts working in reverse and begins sucking in finished handbags and spitting out calves.

Goddamnit, this book might have been good. Instead it is infuriating – Kästner inserts sermons (in italics, at least, to make them easier to skip) into an already heavily moralising story, and tells children about social injustice, money and the revolution. Other than that, it's a decent story about a rich girl and a poor boy, their friendship, their worries and woes and joy.