[1] He received the international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1960 for his autobiography Als ich ein kleiner Junge war [de].

[6] His mother, Ida Amalia (née Augustin), had been a maidservant, but in her thirties she trained as a hairstylist in order to supplement her husband's income.

When he was living in Leipzig and Berlin, he wrote her fairly intimate letters and postcards almost every day, and overbearing mothers make regular appearances in his writings.

[7] Kästner wrote about his childhood in his autobiography Als ich ein kleiner Junge war [de] (1957, translated as When I Was a Little Boy).

After the end of the war, Kästner went back to school and passed the Abitur exam with distinction, earning a scholarship from the city of Dresden.

However, his increasingly critical reviews, and the "frivolous" publication of his erotic poem "Abendlied des Kammervirtuosen" (Evening Song of the Chamber Virtuoso) with illustrations by Erich Ohser, led to his dismissal in 1927.

That same year, he moved to Berlin, although he continued to write for the Neue Leipziger Zeitung under the pseudonym "Berthold Bürger" ("Bert Citizen") as a freelance correspondent.

His Gebrauchslyrik (Lyrics for Everyday Use) made him one of the leading figure of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, which focused on using a sobering, distant and objective style to satirise contemporary society.

In the autumn of 1928, he published his best-known children's book, Emil und die Detektive, illustrated by Walter Trier.

After the Nazis' rise to power, he visited Merano and Switzerland and met with exiled writers, yet he returned to Berlin, arguing that there he would be better able to chronicle events.

His Necessary Answer to Superfluous Questions (Notwendige Antwort auf überflüssige Fragen) in Kurz und Bündig explains Kästner's position: I'm a German from Dresden in Saxony My homeland won't let me go I'm like a tree that, grown in Germany, Will likely wither there also.

He was denied membership of the new Nazi-controlled national writers' guild, Reichsverband deutscher Schriftsteller (RDS), because of what its officials called the "culturally Bolshevist attitude in his writings prior to 1933."

The film was a prestige project by Ufa Studios to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of its establishment, an enterprise backed by Goebbels.

In early 1945, he and others pretended that they had to travel to the rural community of Mayrhofen in Tyrol for location shooting for a (non-existent) film, Das falsche Gesicht (The Wrong Face).

In his diary for 1945, published many years later, Kästner describes his shock at arriving in Dresden shortly after the bombing of the city in World War II (February 1945) and finding it a pile of ruins in which he could recognize none of the streets or landmarks among which he had spent his childhood.

His autobiography Als ich ein kleiner Junge war includes a lament for Dresden (quoted from the English translation, When I Was a Little Boy): "I was born in the most beautiful city in the world.

After the end of the war, Kästner moved to Munich, where he became culture editor for the Neue Zeitung and publisher of Pinguin [de], a magazine for children and young people.

During this time, he wrote a number of skits, songs, audio plays, speeches, and essays about National Socialism, the war years, and the stark realities of life in post-war Germany.

He became further disillusioned as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer remilitarized West Germany, made it a member of NATO, and rearmed it for possible military conflict with the Warsaw Pact.

In 1960, Kästner received the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Als ich ein kleiner Junge war, his autobiography.

He was also instrumental in the founding of the Internationale Jugendbibliothek, a library in Munich that collects and preserves children's and youth books from all over the world.

In the 1920s, he recorded some of his poems of social criticism and in some of the films based on his books he performed as the narrator, as he did for the first audio production of Pünktchen und Anton.