Fabian und der Gang vor die Hunde

The camera glides quietly through a Berlin underground station. Its path leads
along the tracks and finally up a flight of stairs into the daylight. When it arrives
on the street, it is 1931, and the camera travels back in time from the present
to the late Weimar Republic. Dominik Graf makes a statement in the very first
sequence of his film adaptation of »Fabian und der Gang vor die Hunde«. The world
of Erich Kästner‘s novel has not disappeared, it lives on in and beneath our
everyday reality. »Fabian« is a radical break with all the slick literary adaptations
that shamelessly exploit their source material and which are literally flooding
German and international cinema. Graf stays close to Kästner‘s novel about an
idealistic cynic who is unable to escape his role as an observer and becomes
someone who takes action, and tells a heartbreaking love story in the process.
But he also repeatedly goes beyond his original. In its most radical moments,
which casually focus on the rise of the NSDAP and the disintegration of Weimar
society, »Fabian« resembles an avant-garde essay on the seeds of Germany‘s
past that seem to be sprouting again.