Kurt Tucholsky
Kurt Tucholsky · Arts & Literature
Le plus grand satiriste de la république de Weimar, plume centrale de Die Weltbühne, auteur de Château Gripsholm et de Deutschland, Deutschland über alles ; ses livres brûlés en 1933, sa nationalité retirée
9 janvier 1890, Berlin — 21 décembre 1935, Göteborg (Suède)
Allemagne, France, Suède
Kurt Tucholsky is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Le plus grand satiriste de la république de Weimar, plume centrale de Die Weltbühne, auteur de Château Gripsholm et de Deutschland, Deutschland über alles ; ses livres brûlés en 1933, sa nationalité retirée
Origins and early life
Kurt Tucholsky was born in Berlin on 9 January 1890 into an assimilated Jewish family, the son of the banker Alex Tucholsky, and this fiche states plainly that he left the Jewish community on 1 July 1914 and was baptized a Protestant in the summer of 1918 at Turnu Severin in Romania while serving in the army, a step he later described with characteristic irony and which changed nothing in the eyes of those who hunted him.
He took a doctorate in law and became a journalist, writing from 1913 for the Schaubühne, later Die Weltbühne, the small weekly that became the sharpest political review in Germany and of which he was for a time the editor.
Work and career
He published under his own name and under four pseudonyms — Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger, Ignaz Wrobel and Kaspar Hauser — writing poems, cabaret songs, court reports, film criticism, love stories and political polemic, often four pieces in one issue in four different voices. He attacked the German judiciary for its indulgence toward the political right, the officer corps for its unbroken militarism, the Prussian state for its cruelty to the weak, and he warned of the coming catastrophe earlier and more precisely than almost anyone; his line that soldiers are murderers cost him a famous trial.
Rheinsberg (1912) and Schloss Gripsholm (1931) show the other Tucholsky, tender and funny. In 1929 he published, with the photomontagist John Heartfield who has his own fiche here, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, a savage picture-book about his country. He left Germany in 1929 for Sweden; in 1933 his books were burned and his citizenship revoked, and he wrote that he had 'stopped being a German'. Ill, silenced and cut off, he died at Göteborg on 21 December 1935 from an overdose of sleeping tablets.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Deutsche Biographie ; Kurt Tucholsky-Gesellschaft ; Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Le plus grand satiriste de la république de Weimar, plume centrale de Die Weltbühne, auteur de Château Gripsholm et de Deutschland, Deutschland über alles ; ses livres brûlés en 1933, sa nationalité retirée
Source: Deutsche Biographie ; Kurt Tucholsky-Gesellschaft ; Encyclopaedia Britannica
