The School of Dictators is both a warning and a call to action, a striking book of chronic relevance. Anonymous puppet masters establish a regime of coercion and run a school for dictators, enabling them to replace the sitting head of state at any time after an assassination, while the public remains oblivious. Erich Kästner spent twenty years planning to write this play, and when it finally premiered in 1956 and was performed at the Munich Kammerspiele in 1957, the audience was shocked. "Kästner hasn't hit us this hard before," was written in the Munich Evening News at the time. Kästner himself commented: "You can't laugh something to death, only yourself. I have had to realize this over the years, and so the play has become increasingly bitter for me.".