Erich Kästner's secret war diary. After Erich Kästner was banned as an author by the Nazis, he decided to keep a secret diary. To do so, he resorted to a blue-bound, unlabeled book that he hid among the other four thousand volumes in his library. From 1941 until the end of the war, Kästner wrote down what happened at the front and in Berlin. His notes from an everyday life increasingly marked by power cuts and bombing raids are a unique contemporary document and a harrowing report from inside the 'Third Reich'.