Kurt Tucholsky (January 9, 1890 - December 21, 1935) was a German journalist, satirist and song text writer.

Born in Berlin-Moabit, he moved in 1924 to Paris and in 1930 to Sweden. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, his books were burned and he lost his citizenship. He probably committed suicide in Hindås near Göteborg and died in a hospital in Göteborg while in Swedish exile.

Tucholsky, like other writers and artists of the Weimar era, had the same combination of mordant objectivity and political insight that made them mock the illusions of those who thought that everything would somehow work out for the best. His poem about the production of Danton's Death , a nineteenth century warhorse restaged in Berlin in the early 1920s, only a few years after the German Revolution of 1918-19 was brought to grief, expresses this well:

DANTONS TOD

   Bei Reinhardt wogte der dritte Akt.
   Es rasten sechshundert Statisten.
   Sieh an - wie das die Berliner packt!
   Es jubeln die Journalisten.
   Mir aber erschien das Ganze wie
   eine kleine Allegorie.

   Es tost ein Volk: "Die Revolution!
   Wir wollen die Freiheit gewinnen!
   Wir wollten es seit Jahrhunderten schon - 
   laßt Herzblut strömen und rinnen!"
   Es dröhnt die Szene. Es dröhnt das Haus.
   Um Neune ist alles aus.

   Und ernüchtert seh ich den grauen Tag.
   Wo ist der November geblieben?
   Wo ist das Volk, das einst unten lag,
   von Sehnsucht nach oben getrieben?
   Stille. Vorbei. Es war nicht viel.
   Ein Spiel. Ein Spiel.

DANTON'S DEATH

   Act Three was great in Reinhardt's play —
   Six hundred extras milling.
   Listen to what the critics say!
   All Berlin finds it thrilling.
      But in the whole affair I see
      A parable, if you ask me.

   "Revolution!' the People howls and cries
   'Freedom, that's what we're needing!
   We've needed it for centuries —
   Our arteries are bleeding.'
      The stage is shaking.  The audience rock.
      The whole thing is over by nine o'clock.

   The day looks grey as I come to.
   Where are the People — remember? —
   That stormed the peaks from down below?
   What happened to November?
      Silence.  All gone.  Just that, in fact.
      An act.  An act.

English editions and books

• Grenville, Bryan P.: Kurt Tucholsky: The Ironic Sentimentalist. London 1981.
• Poor, Harold Lloyd: Kurt Tucholsky and the ordeal of Germany, 1914-1935. New York 1968.
• Tucholsky, Kurt: Castle Gripsholm. A Summer Story. Overlook Press. New York 1988.
• Tucholsky, Kurt: "Germany? Germany": a Kurt Tucholsky Reader. With translations by Harry Zohn, Karl F. Ross and Louis Golden. Manchester 1990
• Tucholsky, Kurt: What if - ?; Satirical writings of Kurt Tucholsky. Translated by Harry Zohn and Karl F. Ross. New York 1967 (1968).

External link

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Kurt Tucholsky

• http://www.tucholsky-gesellschaft.de/ (in German)
• http://german.about.com/library/bltucholsky.htm (biography in English)