His friend Dot, the daughter of a wealthy civil servant, dresses as a beggar and sells matchsticks to raise money for Anton. Together they foil a burglary.

Dot is a delightful creation. Though a tiny thing—she is given her nickname (Pünktchen in German) because she was so very small when she was born—she has enough imagination for ten schoolgirls. She tucks her dog Piefke into bed as the Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood and is furious when he refuses to eat her. She pretends to be Christopher Columbus sailing to America, splashing a bowl of salted water all over the carpet as she goes.

Anthea Bell fondly calls her "a remarkable proto-feminist". This she shares with Pony, Emil's cousin in Emil and the Detectives, who rides madly around Berlin on her bike and gives the boys what for. There's a wonderful scene in which she pertly tells Emil, "Woman's work is never done."

Lotte in The Parent Trap teaches herself to cook because her mother, a picture editor on the local illustrated paper, comes home from the office too tired to make dinner.

Dot and Anton, published in 1931, ends with a postscript. Kästner admits that some readers might write to him to say that Anton is too like Emil. He replies to the accusation with this:

I wrote about Anton, although he really is like Emil Tischbein, because I believe that we can't tell too many stories about boys like that, and we can't have too many Emils and Antons.

Perhaps you will decide to be like them? Perhaps, if you have come to like them and think they are good examples, you will be as hard-working, right-minded, brave and honourable as they are?

That would be the best reward I could have. Because Emil, Anton and all who are like them will grow up to be very good men. The kind of men we can always do with.

Kästner felt he was living through an age with too few Emils and Antons, Dots and Ponys; when thugs like those from the town in The Flying Classroom were burning books and hauling people off the streets to be imprisoned and tortured. He wanted his books to have a clear, didactic moral purpose.

A child reader will adore the pug dogs and cream cakes and Christmas lights, all winningly illustrated by Walter Trier—the Quentin Blake to Kästner's Roald Dahl. An adult, though, will see behind the pigtails and street chases, to signs of a Germany which had lost track of morality and reason.

"The young need something to model themselves on," Kästner wrote after the war, "just as much as they need milk, bread and air to breathe."