Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935)

This 1929 collection creatively brings Tucholsky's essays, songs, monologues and one-liners together with pictures found or modified by the celebrated photomontage artist John Heartfield in a coordinated satirical attack on the values and institutions of the Weimar Republic. Their targets include things we might think of as universal social problems, like capitalism, nationalism, the growth of inequality in society and the inherent bias of the police and criminal justice system against the show more poor, as well as more specifically German problems (militarism, bureaucracy, exaggerated concern for order and authority, beer and bockwurst obsession, Bavarian contrariness, antisemitism, lack of aesthetic sense in public architecture).

It's all a bit scattershot, and at times it's hard to distinguish where Tucholsky sees really serious problems and where he just sees soft targets. And occasionally, as in the parody of a virulent nationalist reviewing Erich Maria Remarque's book, he's just a bit too much in love with his own cleverness. What he comes up with — the reviewer implausibly making Remarque out to be a Jew ("Erich Salomon Markus") who never saw active service — is far too near the unsubtle way actual Nazi propaganda worked to be funny...

However, what is clear, because he keeps coming back to it and because he devotes the only extended non-comic piece in the book to it, is that he sees the justice system as the core of the problem. The failure to purge the bench in 1918 and the way new judges are trained and appointed means that hard-core conservative, authoritarian attitudes, out of step with the rest of society, have carried over from before the war, and are only becoming more and more entrenched. Of course, even in the 21st century there are plenty of Tucholsky's successors around the world who have had their difficult moments with the law and will say similar things about judicial bias, but it is striking in a German context because of how closely it parallels what people were saying in the sixties and seventies about the failure to purge the bench in 1945...

What is also striking when you read the whole book is how Tucholsky, writing four years before Hitler came to power, is already convinced that Germany has missed its chance to sort itself out (in 1918), and is now well on its way down into the abyss. The only hindsight going on here is the reader's.

Clever, inventive, and often still very funny ninety years later. But sad, too, because, like most satire, it never reached enough of the people it was meant to convince. show less

Although Tucholsky is mostly remembered as a satirist, it seems to be this (mostly-) harmless lightweight summer holiday novella that is far and away his best-known book nowadays, something that probably has a lot to do with the machinations of those who put together reading lists for modern-languages courses, and a little more with our universal preference for comic fiction over hard facts.

Tucholsky plays on this contradiction himself, introducing the story with a (presumably fictitious) show more correspondence between the author and his publisher, Ernst Rowohlt, who points to the difficulty of selling politics books in these troubled times and asks Tucholsky for something light and ironic between coloured boards, preferably a love story. Tucholsky responds by saying he doesn't do love stories, but he is just about to go on holiday, so he'll see what he can come up with. But he doesn't see how he can do anything at all if Rowohlt insists on keeping up that ridiculous 15% allowance for free copies that appears in paragraph 9 of his standard contract...

The story itself is a rambling, cheerful account of the narrator's holiday trip to Sweden with his girlfriend Lydia, during which they stay for some weeks in an apartment in a side-wing of Gripsholm Castle (inspired by a real holiday Tucholsky and Lisa Matthias took in 1927). There's no plot to speak of: one of the narrator's friends turns up for a few days, one of Lydia's friends arrives a bit later, they hatch a half-baked plot to liberate a little German girl who is having a miserable time in a holiday home run by the tyrannical Frau Adriani. And that's about it, the rest is, after all, something like a jokey love story, describing the way two people who like each other but haven't quite got to the point of living together cope with the enforced intimacy of being alone together in a foreign country. It's clearly a success, but both seem to feel by the end of the book that it will be nice to return to something less intensive when they get back to Berlin. show less

In 1929 Tucholsky published a Letter to a Catholic {woman} as a slim pamphlet in a red wrapper. As his correspondent notes in the Introduction, she had been very excited to see it on sale everywhere and discussed, as Tucholsky's articles were wont to be, by everyone. Tucholsky had published this letter with her permission but she wanted to remain anonymous--until she personally broke her anonymat to an acquaintance who irritated her by claiming Tucholsky was putting on a show and there was show more no "Catholic woman" in conversation with him.

At the beginning of this conversation lasting about 18 months or so, was Marierose Fuchs' critical article about the work of a number of popular cultural and journalistic figures, including Tucholsky. The article had been published in the Catholic periodical Germania, the official paper of the Deutsche Zentrumspartei (in the letters just "Zentrum"), in the Weimar period the leading party of the political (is there any other...) Catholicism.

Tucholsky replied to Fuchs personally, protesting some of what she said but also taking the opportunity to lay out his opinions on religion and politics in greater detail. They continued on to exchange letters and books, with the older Tucholsky falling into the posture of a mentor, not that there was ever any question of "converting" this good Catholic girl to his Communist-adjacent way of thinking.

Some details I wish to remember in particular: Fuchs (who btw was 72 when this book was first published in 1970) describing how anxious she was for the safety of Tucholsky's letters when she went rummaging in the wreckage after the war--she had buried them when the Nazis came to power--and how she cried when precisely the longest and most "beautiful" one turned up from the ruin missing pages--and how, rereading them after the war, she couldn't believe what she had found objectionable about Tucholsky's opinions as a young woman. Most important, her saying that he was right, had always been right.

Twice he urged her to read Kafka, and talked about having met him, in the most glowing terms.

From one of the last letters, February 21, 1931:

" In life the fronts are never called: Catholicism and Bolshevism. They may be that, when one compares methods (there the two are again very similar)--but there is exactly that unreasonable self-overestimation that I so reproach the Church with. It can't compete even numerically. Believe me: already today there are countries filled with people who either belong to completely different Asian religions, or for whom the Church is nothing.

The fronts are called in the materialistic struggle: Bolshevism and Capitalism. Oh, yes, I know... "d' spirichual" {Tucholsky jokes in Berlin's idiom, "det Jeistige"}. Spare me the yarns: people want to eat, they want not to have tuberculosis... dear Fuchs, I have one objection against Christianity:

it has never helped anything.

What does the history of the Christian, the super-Christian, lands look like? Bloodcurdling. Then? Then it's nothing, serves nothing, helps nothing--after such a war you still want to talk about it? Comforting wounds... indeed. Who has so failed, must fall silent."

As Tucholsky went into exile, buffeted by ill winds between France, England, Sweden, the slight correspondence between two almost comically opposed people (in more than just the political sense) petered out. Four years later Tucholsky would kill himself, at 45. show less

Sehnsucht nach der Sehnsucht (Yearning after yearning) is a collection of this unforgettable, tragically prescient man-of-letters' more or less light verse on the topic of love. While hardly a feminist, Tucholsky was clear-eyed about the faults of his own sex:

Frauen sind eitel? I bewahre.
Das ist nichts gegen männliche Exemplare. ...

(Women are vain? Gimme a break. That's nothing compared to male specimens...)