Home / Birthday profiles / Erich Kästner
Portrait of Erich Kästner

Birthday profile

Erich Kästner

Erich Kästner, German author and poet (died 1974)

Find birthday twinsOpen interactive profile
Born
February 23, 1899
Died
July 29, 1974
Zodiac sign
Pisces
Birth year
1899

About Erich Kästner

Emil Erich Kästner was a German writer, poet, screenwriter and satirist, known primarily for his humorous, socially astute poems and for children's books including Emil and the Detectives and Lisa and Lottie. He received the international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1960 for his autobiography When I Was a Little Boy. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in eight separate years. Kästner published his first book of poems, Herz auf Taille, in 1928, and by 1933 he had published three more collections. The English translation by Florence and Isabel McHugh, published as When I Was a Little Boy in 1959, won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1961.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Erich Kästner timeline

  1. Kästner published his first book of poems, Herz auf Taille, in 1928, and by 1933 he had published three more collections.
  2. The English translation by Florence and Isabel McHugh, published as When I Was a Little Boy in 1959, won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1961.
  3. He received the international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1960 for his autobiography When I Was a Little Boy.

The world when Erich Kästner was born

Erich Kästner was born in 1899. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Headlines and milestones

  • Top headlinePhilippine-American War begins
  • Technology milestoneFirst magnetic recording of sound
  • World population~1.59B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderWilliam McKinley
  • U.S. population72.0M

1899 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Erich Kästner's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure18992026
Population72.0M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.