PERHAPS IT IS COINCIDENCE, perhaps prescience, but Berlinica Publishing has rereleased an out-of-print book in English translation called Germany? Germany! Satirical Writings: The Kurt Tucholsky Reader.
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One of the best-paid German journalists in the 1920s, Kurt Tucholsky was the canary in the coal mine of the Weimar Republic. His ire targeted the revanchist military, unreformed judiciary, cowardly government, and accommodationist politicians (namely, Social Democrats), whom he vilified as intellectually pedestrian and petty bourgeois, accusing them of turning a blind eye to the dangers of the political right.
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Over several weeks in the 1920s, he wrote an article per day, mainly for Die Weltbühne, a small, Berlin-centered weekly that was influential among intellectuals despite its modest circulation of 15,000. Die Weltbühne was the publishing organ of the intellectual left and was considered the conscience of the nation.
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Tucholsky wrote prodigiously under his own name and four pen names: Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger, Ignaz Wrobel, and Kaspar Hauser. This camouflage was deliberate,
for who in Germany believes that a political writer can be humourous, or a satirist can be serious? Who would credit a playful man with knowledge of the penal code, or who would believe that a describer of cities can write amusing verse? Humor discredits.
The author declared that he and his four literary personae were “five fingers of one hand,” fighting to destroy the old, militaristic Germany and build a new, democratic nation. This love-hate relationship with his country was his work’s leitmotif.
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Cursing both houses, Tucholsky charged that the cowardly, avaricious middle class, fearing a left-wing revolution, invited the right-wing dictatorship and were happy to “bear all the burdens as long as they are allowed to make money.”
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The timing of this book’s publication is fortuitous. It allows readers to reflect on disturbing parallels between Weimar Germany and the politics of 21st-century Western states, for instance: the success of populists; the unbridgeable gap between the “deplorables” and intellectuals writing in elite publications; and the failure of the political left to translate analysis into winning tactics. And that’s just the beginning. Consider the following: it seems tragically hard-wired in Western political systems that the right is instinctual, the left intellectual; the right fights for power, the left for ideas; the right is rallying, the left feuding; the right is cunning, the left politically naïve; the right looks for converts, the left for heretics; the right is pragmatic, the left idealistic. The left sabotages itself, fighting bitterly and mostly against, while the right fights cynically for the big prize: power.
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While political commentary was at the core of his work, judging from his personal letters, the lighter pieces sustained him both financially and mentally throughout the 1920s, until the state of affairs became unbearable.
Tucholsky’s tragedy was both political and personal. Having hoped, as his friend Erich Kästner put it, “to stop a catastrophe with a typewriter,” he gave up his quixotic quest in the late 1920s, exhausted. Conceding that the battle was lost and that Germany was a hopeless cause, he counted himself among
those who believe the German spirit to be almost unalterably poisoned, who have no faith in improvement and who consider this constitutional democracy to be a facade and a lie.
In hindsight, Tucholsky’s negativism was an agonizing blunder. Rather than defending or constructively engaging in Germany’s beleaguered first republic — fiercely attacked from the right, tormented by mountainous reparations claims, and a destroyed economy — the left unwittingly (or perhaps wittingly, in the case of the communists) prepared the ground for Nazism. And that was Weimar’s tragedy.
Tucholsky, who was neither a politician nor a psychiatrist, was neither practical nor helpful — just brilliant and right. He realized that “[a] travelogue says more about the writer than about the journey.” Even calling him a satirist — Germany’s greatest since Heinrich Heine — does not fully capture this brilliant man. Tucholsky, in the guise of a caricaturist, expected his sharp pen to bring people to their senses. Not for him Immanuel Kant’s counsel: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be built.” In 1932, Tucholsky abruptly stopped writing for publication. From his precarious Swedish exile, he anxiously observed Germany’s downward spiral. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. No time was lost in entrenching the new order: the last issue of Die Weltbühne appeared on March 7.
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On May 9, “Fire Slogans” were sent to student bodies to be read the next day at book burnings at all German universities. One of them raged: “against impudence and arrogance, for respect and reverence for the immortal German national spirit! Devour, flame, also the writings of Tucholsky…!”
On August 23, the first Ausbürgerungsliste (of 359) was published — an edict in the Reich’s official gazette annulling the citizenship of 33 Germans, including Kurt Tucholsky, as well as six other Weltbühne authors, and confiscating their assets. Tucholsky’s last years were harrowing. Having left Germany in 1924, he lived in Paris and Sweden, where he was allowed to remain on monthly visas. “For three years,” wrote biographer Harold Poor, “Tucholsky lived under the constant threat of deportation.” After this period of public silence, just before Christmas 1935, he killed himself.
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 for him. For today’s Anglophone readers, this new book reveals the brilliance and desperation of a quicksilver writer in dark times nearly a century ago and an ocean away. Bringing this complex genius to the attention of Americans in this era of alternative facts and “America First” sloganeering corroborates Karl Marx’s observation that history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fab ... tucholsky/
Kad se probude uspavane totalitarne aždaHe i počnu palacati jezicima i bljuvati vatru, dodje kraj jednoj civilizaciji. Sve su ovo o čemu mi pričamo i što vidimo na površini su simptomi dublje i ozbiljnije bolesti. Gledali smo u svojoj kući kako ide taj proces. Sad ga gledamo na globalnoj razini. 
... nisam čitala, hvala! 
