I want to have a community garden, with a gazebo and not too small. It is so lovely to dig up radishes - God protect you, it was not meant to be! Erich Kästner, Hymn to Time. Why it can be useful to own neither a telephone nor a bicycle, what it has to do with the Saxon tribal character, and what community gardeners have in common with Goethe: Sylvia List has gathered in this delightful volume Erich Kästner's most beautiful stories and poems from provincial Germany. In depicting various curiosities, Schildbürger antics, turbulence, and other atmospheric disturbances, not only does the cheerful-melancholic idyllic Kästner have his say, but also the ironic skeptic, the engaged social critic, the satirist, the sharp observer, and the winking spectator, a witness of his time in his German homeland.