(One summer before World War I, a young couple escapes on ...)
One summer before World War I, a young couple escapes on a romantic weekend getaway to the small German town of Rheinsberg, north of Berlin, in the midst of a rural landscape filled with country houses and castles, cobblestone streets, lush forests, and dreamy lakes.
(A beguiling fable about a summer holiday in the Swedish c...)
A beguiling fable about a summer holiday in the Swedish countryside that transforms into a provocative parable about oppression and the evil awaiting Europe as the Nazis came to power.
Berlin! Berlin! Dispatches From The Weimar Republic
(A representative selection from the man with the acid pen...)
A representative selection from the man with the acid pen and the perfect pitch for hypocrisy, who was as much the voice of 1920s Berlin as Georg Grosz was its face.
Kurt Tucholsky was the most famous journalist, satirist, and writer of the Weimar Republic. He published various short stories, literary criticism, and pamphlets using various pseudonyms, including "Peter Panter", "Theobald Tiger", "Ignaz Wrobel" and "Kaspar Hauser."
Background
Kurt Tucholsky was born on January 9, 1890, into a well-off family belonging to Berlin's Jewish bourgeoisie. He is the eldest son of the Jewish banker Alex Tucholsky (1855-1905) and his wife Doris Tucholsky (1869-1943). He spent his early childhood in Szczecin, Poland. He also had a sister named Ellen, and a brother named Fritz.
Tucholsky had a strained relationship with his mother throughout his life and was really close with his father, who died as a result of syphilis when Kurt was only 15. Alex left a big fortune to his family, which helped all of his children to receive a good education.
Education
After the family returned to Berlin from Szczecin, Kurt enrolled in the French Grammar School. In 1903 he switched to the Königliche Wilhelms-Gymnasium, which he left in 1907. Tucholsky then studied law at the University of Jena, earning a doctorate in 1915, but he never practiced that profession. Instead, he pursued his passion for writing, at which he was prolific from an early age.
In 1912 Tucholsky published Rheinsberg, a very successful novella about a young couple from Berlin on a romantic weekend fling. His major output, however, took the form of journalistic pieces, primarily for the Schaubühne, a left-liberal weekly of cultural and political affairs edited by Siegfried Jacobsohn (renamed the Weltbühne in 1918). Even before World War I, Tucholsky wrote so many pieces in various genres - ranging from political glosses to cabaret songs - that he adopted four pseudonyms in addition to his real name: Theobald Tiger, Peter Panther, Ignaz Wrobel, and Kaspar Hauser.
From 1915 to 1918, Tucholsky served in the army on the eastern front, where he ran a library for soldiers and edited a newspaper for the air corps. He was so successful at drumming up support for war bonds that he was awarded a medal for his efforts. But after the end of the war and the collapse of the monarchy, Tucholsky became one of the most outspoken voices on the German left. A member of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) until its dissolution in 1922, when he joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Tucholsky was a passionate supporter of republican values. At the same time, he was harshly critical of the new republic's Social Democratic leaders, who called on the paramilitary, protofascist Free Corps to suppress leftist strikes and uprisings in 1919. When he, in turn, was attacked for not holding his fire until the new democratic regime had had time to be stabilized, Tucholsky replied with a programmatic essay, "We Negative Ones" (1919), in which he claimed that there was absolutely nothing laudable about Germany's revolution, its bourgeoisie, its officer corps, or its civil service. This attitude has led to persistent debates, continuing into the twenty-first century, about the wisdom of criticizing fragile democracies: although freedom of speech is an undeniable right, those who benefit most from it should employ it circumspectly - it is said - during times when the survival of republican government is at stake.
While he continued to write scathing political commentaries, Tucholsky adopted a lighter tone in the numerous chansons he penned for the lively cabaret scene of the Weimar era. One notable exception was his most famous song, "The Red Melody," a powerful indictment of General Erich Ludendorff by the ghosts of the millions who died in World War I. For a brief period at the end of the 1920s, Tucholsky was sympathetic to the German Communist Party, and from 1928 to 1931 he wrote pieces for its photojournal, the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung. That publication was especially noted for caustic photomontages by John Heartfield, who collaborated with Tucholsky on the book Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (1929), a bitterly sarcastic commentary on German politics and society.
One of Tucholsky's most popular satires was also one of his most controversial. From 1924 to 1926 he wrote a series of monologues by "Herr Wendriner," a fictitious Berlin businessman who was obsessed with finances, politically reactionary, culturally philistine - and Jewish. Tucholsky converted to Protestantism in 1918. Despite the undeniable humor of the Wendriner pieces, Tucholsky's critics (then and now) have claimed that at a time of mounting anti-Semitism, the monologues played into the hands of racist politicians. In 1966 the Jewish philosopher Gershom Scholem went so far as to call Tucholsky a Jewish anti-Semite. Defenders of the works assert that Wendriner's Jewishness plays an incidental role and that Tucholsky was mainly lambasting Germany's conservative bourgeoisie in general; if anything, he was chiding those Jews who assimilated too deeply into German society.
Tucholsky was so dismayed at conditions in Germany that he gladly accepted the offer to be the Paris correspondent for the Weltbühne and for the liberal Vossische Zeitung in 1924. Aside from short visits, he never returned to Germany thereafter. For reasons of health, he moved to Sweden in 1929. After Hitler came to power in 1933, visits to Germany were impossible: Tucholsky's works were consigned to the flames in Joseph Goebbels's notorious book-burnings of 10 May 1933, and he was stripped of his citizenship three months later.
Beginning in the 1960s, Tucholsky attracted much scholarly and public interest, both as a brilliant satirist of German society and as a highly problematic figure: his works raise persistent issues about the limits of critical engagement and about the nature of German-Jewish identity.
Tucholsky’s output includes aphorisms, book and drama reviews, light verse, short stories, and witty satirical essays in which he criticized German militarism and nationalism and the dehumanizing forces of the modern age. His poetry was set to music and performed widely in German cabarets.
Yet, while he had little influence in his time, Tucholsky’s legacy endures in Germany. His books are still in print, his vibrant articles and humorous aphorisms are frequently cited, and many schools and streets are named after him.
There is also a German Kurt Tucholsky Prize of €3,000 that is awarded every two years since 1995 by the Kurt Tucholsky Foundation for "committed and succinct literary works".
Tucholsky had a fraught relationship to Judaism: he officially abandoned the faith in 1914 and converted to Protestantism in 1918.
Politics
Tucholsky saw himself as a left democrat, socialist, a pacifist and anti-militarist. After fighting in World War I, he was active on behalf of the opposition party Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and the Peace League of War Veterans. He was a member of the USPD until its dissolution in 1922. After, he joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and supported republican values.
At the beginning of 1930, he moved to Sweden permanently and then stopped writing journalism almost entirely. After the National Socialists took power, Tucholsky was expatriated and his books were burned in public, he was also among the first authors and intellectuals whose German citizenship was revoked.
Personality
Tucholsky lived in Sweden although he was not permitted to work there. Money was tight and his health suffered, while National Socialism and the spread of fascist ideology throughout Europe depressed him. His friend, author, and journalist Carl von Ossietzky was taken to a concentration camp and horrifically tortured. Exiled in Sweden, Kurt Tucholsky felt like "a finished writer." His fighting courage was weakened.
Kurt Tucholsky died in hospital on December 21, 1935, from a suspected overdose by sleeping pills. Tucholsky's biographer Michael Hepp has called into doubt the verdict of suicide, saying that he considers it possible that the death was accidental. However, this claim is disputed among Tucholsky researchers.
Interests
Writers
Max Brod
Connections
Tucholsky was married three times. He got married to his first wife, Else Weil, on 30 August 1920. The couple divorced in 1924. He married Mary Gerold the same year and divorced in 1933. His third wife was Gertrude Meyer.
Father:
Alex Tucholsky
Mother:
Doris Tucholsky
Spouse:
Gertrude Meyer
Gertrude Meyer claimed she found Tucholsky's suicide note which read "Laissez-moi mourir en paix.". No one except her ever saw this note.
Kafka wrote about Tucholsky: "a wholly consistent person of 21. From the controlled and powerful swing of his walking stick which gives a youthful lift to his shoulders to the deliberate delight in and contempt for his own literary works. Wants to be a criminal defense lawyer."
