Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist

Publisher: NYRB Classics Dr. Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter…weak heart, brown hair,” a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job without security in the short or the long run. What’s to be done? Fabian and friends make the best of it – they go to work though they may be laid off at any time, and in the evenings they go to the cabarets, flirt with girls, all the while making a lot of sharp-sighted and sharp-witted observations about politics, life and love, or what may be.  The book, in the words of Rodney Livingstone, “brilliantly renders with tangible immediacy the last frenetic years (in Germany) before 1933”. It is a book for our time too.