HAIFA, Israel — On December 21, 1935, the German writer and publicist Kurt Tucholsky passed away in the Swedish Gothenburg. He was 45 years old. Kurt Tucholsky, a satirist writer, the owner of a brilliant pen, a songwriter, did not write a single line during the last four years of his stay in Sweden. He was in a state of shock from the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany and from the cold reception he received in Sweden.
Kurt Tucholsky was born on January 9, 1890 into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin’s fashionable Moabithe district. Nineteen-year-old Kurt entered the law faculty of the University of Berlin, then studied at the Universities of Geneva and Jena and in 1914 received a doctorate in law, as did Heinrich Heine. His first book was published when the author was 22 years old. After World War I, Tucholsky edited a weekly satirical supplement to Berliner Tageblatt, where he published satirical poems and feuilletons. In the 1920s, Tucholsky was one of Berlin’s most popular writers. His songs and humoresques, performed in the theater cabaret Noise and Smoke, were particularly successful.
On July 1, 1914, Kurt Tucholsky left the Jewish community and, like Heine, converted to Protestantism in 1918. In 1915, Tucholsky was mobilized to the front as a soldier in a bomb battalion, where he soon became a pacifist — “Any glorification of the fallen in war means three dead in the next” — and a socialist. Disillusioned with socialists who failed to stop Nazism, he became a communist. Disappointed with the Communists and equating Stalin with Hitler, Tucholsky left the Communist Party. He tried to follow the path of Heine and moved to Paris in 1924. A graduate of the French Gymnasium in Berlin, Tucholsky was fluent in French and was drawn to French culture. He sneered at himself: “Having lived in Paris for a week, I understood France in the best way possible; having lived in it for three years, I don’t understand it at all.” He mocked German militarism in a joke comparing the French and Germans: “The French soldier is a disguised citizen, the German civilian is a disguised soldier.” Two years later he returned to Germany, then emigrated again and returned again. Throwing himself from party to party was accompanied by migration, culminating in his final immigration to Sweden.
After the assassination of the German foreign minister, the Jew Walter Rathenau, Tucholsky wrote a poem, Rathenau, on June 29, 1922, in which he angrily denounced the Teutonic mob who murdered the minister. In 1928, his collection “In Five Horsepower” (he wrote under his own name and four pseudonyms) was published, which collected poems and feuilletons previously published under four pseudonyms, and each literary mask had its own personality. Tucholsky’s search for himself reached the point of a complex split personality. He was uncomfortable in the world around him, and he created a world of five images. In 1929, the collection Mona Lisa’s Smile was released, which enjoyed, like the first, a huge success. The illustrated collection Germany “Above All” (1929) provoked fierce attacks by the ideologues of National Socialism.
Tucholsky earned the hatred of broad sectors of German society, especially right-wing nationalists, for his criticism of World War I veterans in his satirical pamphlets. In the same year he left for Sweden, where he lived until his death, except for 14 months living in Zurich with his beloved, the Swiss physician Hedwiga Müller. Tucholsky’s last lifetime collection, Learn to Laugh Without Crying, was published in 1932. After that, Tucholsky stopped writing and publishing because, unlike Thomas Mann and other German émigrés, he was convinced that fascism had won in Germany permanently and that his pen was powerless to change the views of the German people. He considered all Germans who had not emigrated after 1933 to be fascists.
Tucholsky’s creative handwriting betrays a Jew in the degree of his alienation from an insurmountably hostile society, but he can also be characterized in the spirit of Stefan Zweig’s “citizen of Europe” stance. Tucholsky’s lack of Jewish upbringing did not bring him any closer to contemporary German literature or to German society at the time. In the 1920s, Tucholsky was the highest paid journalist of the Weimar Republic and the most hated figure among the Nationalists. When he was already living in Sweden, on May 10, 1933, the Nazis celebrated Tucholsky’s outstanding literary achievements by burning his books. Along with Tucholsky’s books were burned the books of Heinrich Heine, with whom Tucholsky was often compared. The similarity was in his ridicule of German militarism, despotism, and anti-humanism. Tucholsky wrote: “The Germans are a people of judges and executioners, not of poets and thinkers.” The analogy with Heine was evident in Tucholsky’s ambivalent attitude toward Germany — his love-hate relationship was characteristic of Heine.
The same ambivalence characterized Tucholsky’s attitude toward Jewry. In his book “Mr. Wendriner Under the Dictatorship” (1932), Tucholsky draws a satirical image of a Jewish-German philistine, Mr. Wendriner, who is ready to admire fascist marches and the “new order” and to justify antisemitism toward Polish Jews, just to keep his business. In a letter to the German Jewish writer Arnold Zweig dated December 15, 1935, written six days before his death, recalling his withdrawal from the Jewish community of Berlin in 1914, Tucholsky wrote: “I know now that such withdrawal is impossible.” On August 23, 1935, he was stripped of his citizenship for “anti-German activities.” Tucholsky had no right to work in Sweden. In 1935 his request for Swedish citizenship was rejected.
Posthumously, Germans recognized Tucholsky as the greatest national satirical writer of the first half of the twentieth century. His books are reprinted, records of his songs are released, stamps with his image are printed, a street named after him has appeared in his city of Berlin, his works are filmed, and a charitable foundation named after him has been established. The branch of the PEN Club of Sweden, which rejected him as a citizen, established an international prize named after Kurt Tucholsky. Articles have appeared declaring Tucholsky a prophet of European unity.
Like Stefan Zweig, Tucholsky defined himself as a European: “This country I betray is not my country; this state is not my state; this legislative system is not my legislative system. Its banners are as meaningless to me as its provincial ideals. […] We are traitors. But we betray a state we do not recognize and deny, in favor of a land we love for peace. It is our true homeland: Europe.” Europe, however, in the form of Sweden, did not recognize Tucholsky as its citizen. Tucholsky hoped for reconciliation between France and Germany. He was an active supporter of a united Europe when Europe was even more divided than during World War I. He was wishful thinking.
Kurt Tucholsky’s life, with publications under four pseudonyms, for each of which he created his own biography, with his journeys from country to country, from party to party, with his resignation from the Jewish community, his baptism and his recognition of the impossibility of leaving Jewishness six days before his death, was a mixture of a carnival in which he changed tragic masks, attempts at escapism and an unsuccessful search for himself in a world that was hostile to him. The man with five faces, a baptized communist socialist, turned out in a moment of truth to be a Jew condemned to death in his own country and an unwanted foreigner in Sweden, which denied him citizenship. A brilliant writer, satirist, creator of a series of comic heroes, Dr. Tucholsky found himself disenfranchised, tragically deadlocked. In 1933, in letters to friends, he spoke of himself as a former German and a former poet. Like Stefan Zweig, Kurt Tucholsky believed that most Germans had accepted Hitler, as had most European countries, and that Nazism had won and therefore life was meaningless.
After four years of creative inactivity, Tucholsky committed suicide. Four years after his suicide, the leader of the Bavarian Revolution, the Jewish-born poet Ernst Toller, author of the biographical book “I Was German,” committed suicide in New York. Three years after Toller’s suicide in the United States, Stefan Zweig took his own life in Brazil. They were Germans, Austrians, Europeans, men of the cosmos. Their inner world could not withstand the challenge and onslaught of Nazism. From the broad panorama of the world, it was reduced to a narrow, unambiguously defined and unbearable rut of Jewry for them. Against their wishes, they were only Jewish.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.