No one before or after Kurt Tucholsky has captured the horrors of the "Great War," as World War I was known, quite like he did. The famed Weimar writer, who would become one of Germany's best-known satirist and journalists, describes surviving in the trenches and fighting a losing battle, the arrogance of the officers and the desperation of the loved ones back home. His writing is similar to that of Heinrich Heine, his role model, in that it appears superficially simple but is replete with hidden meanings. His works are touching, stirring, and precisely to the point. He brings alive the war that still looms even into our own 21st century. This is the first bilingual anthology in German and in English of his works on World War I.
The First World War was the "Great War". Everything that happened after this war, even into our own 21st century, is contingent on the years between 1914 and 1918. The Great War also shaped Kurt Tucholsky who emerged from the war.. His style is biting, satirical, and penetrating, full of Berlin gallows humor. This bilingual anthology contains English translation of his short stories as well as a rendition of his poetry about World War I, all representative of his style.
Author Biography:
Kurt Tucholsky was a brilliant satirist, poet, storyteller, lyricist, pacifist, and Democrat; a fighter, lady's man, reporter, and early warner against the Nazis who hated and loathed him and drove him out of Germany after his books were burned in 1933. His contemporary Erich Kaestner called him a "small, fat Berliner," who "wanted to stop a catastrophe with his typewriter." The New York Times hailed him as "one of the most brilliant writers of republican Germany. He was a poet as well as a critic and was so versatile that he used five or six pen names. As Peter Panter he was an outstanding essayist who at one time wrote topical sketches in the Vossische Zeitung, which ceased to appear under the Nazi regime; as Theobald Tiger he wrote satirical poems that were frequently interpreted by popular actors in vaudeville and cabartes, and as Ignatz Wrobel he contributed regularly to the Weltb�hne, an independent weekly that was one of the first publications prohibited by the Hitler government." Tucholsky, who occupied the center stage in the tumultuous political and cultural world of 1920s Berlin, still emerges as an astonishingly contemporary figure. As an angry truth-teller, he pierced the hypocrisy and corruption around him with acute honesty. Imagine a writer with the acid voice of Christopher Hitchens and the satirical whimsy of Jon Stewart, combined with the iconoclasm of Bill Maher. That's Tucholsky in a nutshell. Like Hitchens, Tucholsky wrote a mixture of literary essays, social observations, and political commentary. His irony made the line between his "serious writing" and his "entertainments" almost invisible. The fashionable outsider watched the political "center" disappear, and, in the end, he found himself catapulted out of society altogether. His career was sandwiched between the two most deadly events of his century: the bloodbath of World War I and the scourge of Nazism. Just as the first war launched Hemingway's lifelong career as a wounded tough guy with a soft spot for guns and broads, Tucholsky discovered the reflexes of an escape artist. He was equally elusive as a writer. In today's world, a journalist isn't supposed to write plays, and a playwright isn't welcomed as a novelist. But in 1920s Berlin, Tucholsky was dealing with postwar realities that required shouting from the rooftops, and any rooftop would do. Peter Appelbaum MD, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Pathology, Pennsylvania State University. His has authored Loyalty Betrayed: Jewish Chaplains in the German Army During the First World War and Loyal Sons. German Jews in the First World War, coming out September. He also has unearthed poetry written by German Jewish soldiers, and translated many of those, making them available in English for the first time. James W. Scott, Ph.D., is Emeritus Professor of German at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania. His scholarly presentations have ranged from Rilke's prose and Kafka's short fiction to cabaret in East Germany and communicative testing. At present he is editing Ebernand von Erfurt's Kaiser und Kaiserin and preparing a new translation of Iwein, an Arthurian epic by Hartmann von Aue.
