Ingar Solty on the formidable legacy of Kurt Tucholsky…

German authors, especially from the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, are usually quite well known in the Anglophone world. This is particularly the case with regard to English-speaking socialists, given that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were German and that, before German fascism came to power in 1933, the German labor movement had been the strongest worldwide.

Early 20th-century German authors like Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Anna Seghers therefore have a high currency and enjoy an ongoing interest in the U.S., the U.K. and beyond, especially now that the global financial crisis has led to the global rise of the far right which bears eerie similarities with the inter-war period, energizing a return to that time’s anti-fascist authors for guidance in the historic moment we are in.

In Germany itself, one of the key authors of the period was Kurt Tucholsky. The man with the unpronounceable Slavic name is surprisingly unknown and unacknowledged in the Anglophone world, even though he ranks among the most cited and best-loved German authors to this day.

And few could know who he was, because the few translated works of his that do exist, such as the bestselling novella Castle Gripsholm, ² his magnificent Deutschland, Deutschland über alles picture book (published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1972), ³ and the selected Satirical Writings, ⁴ which are essentially identical with the edited volume Germany? Germany!, ⁵ are long out of print (helped in this, I must admit, by my buying as many copies as I could in order to distribute them among my York University comrades).

This year (2020), the 130th anniversary of Tucholsky’s birth and 85th anniversary of his death, is a good time to remember him and to promote new translations of his work.

In order to introduce Kurt Tucholsky, let us begin with a few superlatives: Tucholsky ranked among the best-paid critics during Germany’s short-lived Weimar Republic (1918–33). Even now, his wit – always political, usually funny, often sarcastic, sometimes cynical, frequently melancholic, and increasingly embittered – is unmatched in German-speaking countries.

Through the decades, authors have attempted to emulate it but never succeeded. Tucholsky created thousands of bonmots. And until today, his humor – sometimes undermining the ruling class with one swipe, sometimes plain silly – creates the sentiment captured by one of his books’ titles: Learn to Laugh Without Crying (1931).

Allegedly the shortest book in the world is the Comprehensive Book of German Humor. Kurt Tucholsky was living proof that Germans can actually be amusing. Some of his texts are legendary: as evidenced by most scholarly conferences, millions of academics have undoubtedly followed his “Advice for a Bad Speaker” (GW8: 290–292 and 1967: 109–111); tens of thousands of people have followed his “Creed of the Bourgeoisie” (GW6: 251–254 and 1990: 48–50), while millions of workers and traitors to their class of origin found solace and comfort in his ceaseless mockery of it, both petit et grand. Furthermore, billions of dog-hating people have found solace and com…