A mixed bag of Kästner's writings about snow and the strange German cult of winter-sports holidays, something that he was extremely fond of, although his heart problems meant that he was mostly restricted to sitting on sunny traces watching the skiers exert themselves. We get the snowy bits of several of his full-length books for children or adults (Das fliegende Klassenzimmer, Drei Männer im Schnee, Der Zauberlehrling), plus a couple of short stories and newspaper articles, some lyrics, and a large selection of postcards and letters written to his mother from places like Garmisch, Oberstdorf, Kitzbühel and Davos. Most of the material is from the 1930s.

There's a lot of amused observation of the complex social world of the alpine Grand-Hotel, of the odd ways city-dwellers behave on holiday in the mountains, of the ingenious ways indigenous people find to make money out of them, and so on. He's amused by the way farm-boys turn into sex-gods when they declare themselves to be ski-instructors, by the interesting sexual ambiguity of ski costume, and by the strange rules of the fancy-dress ball (the unfortunate who turns up at an "Apache Ball" in Native American dress, unaware that to the fashionable mind, an Apache is a French gangster...). And, like every observer of the winter-sport theme before and since, he jokes about the prevalence of broken legs and bemoans the way mass tourism is ruining the mountains. Not that that stops him boasting (for the censor's benefit) about finding himself lunching at the next table to Reichsführer Rudolf Hess and friends. I imagine his mother would have been able to guess how he really felt about that.

This is a nicely-produced book, issued by Kästner's long-standing Swiss publishers and helpfully annotated by Sylvia List, but about half the book is taken up by the long extracts from the three full-length books, which most people likely to pick this up will have read already, and which are probably rather frustrating if you don't know the rest of the story. The other half is either unpublished material or less well-known pieces, and it's probably worth getting the book for those. I particularly enjoyed the short story "Zwei Schüler sind verschwunden," featuring Matz and Uli from Das fliegende Klassenzimmer, which I hadn't seen before. ( )