"He was a satirist with a heart," wrote the writer Hermann Kesten about him,

"a friend of children who never became childish, a desperate optimist who never forgot to laugh, and one of the cleverest speakers of our century."
Poems, songs, satires, epigrams, children's books, novels - Erich Kästner is a master in all forms. Johannes Kirchberg and Frank Roder do not approach his work reverently, but as the cabaret artist and stern satirist would surely have wished: cheeky and unique. "People are good - only people are bad" With this conviction of Kästner's, the Schiffs ensemble comes to the conclusion: "There is nothing good unless you do it".