This volume brings together Marcel Reich-Ranicki's very personal favorites by Kästner. His selection of 121 poems includes not only well-known works but also lesser-known poems by the "singer of the common people and poet of small freedoms," as Reich-Ranicki characterizes Erich Kästner: "Erich Kästner offered nothing more and nothing less than grace and spirit, humor and reason, and has now become one of the classics of German literature of the last century.".