The German Genius

individual is alone, there will never be any clear answers to the problems and mysteries that trouble us; life may have its moments of extreme beauty and even happiness, but that is all they are, moments. Remarque said he believed that human nature in Germany was especially bleak and that it had been so since Goethe and Faust . 23
    A D ISAPPEARING H OMELAND W HERE O NLY THE C HILDREN A RE I NNOCENT
     
    While we may attach more importance now to completed or fully realized books , at the time of the Weimar Republic, two writers in Germany made more of a name for themselves from more traditionally ephemeral skills—satirical squibs in newspapers and magazines, songs and skits for cabaret, pointed book reviews, savage poetry, and whimsical—and not so whimsical—newspaper columns. In Berlin, in their way, Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) and Erich Kästner (1899–1974) were the equivalent of Karl Kraus in Vienna. They form a bridge between the full-time authors considered above and the full-time dramatists, considered next.
    Both of them filled almost entire magazines (again like Kraus) using many noms-de-plume, both were much influenced by their mothers (though Tucholsky’s relationship was strained), and both were turned into pacifists by their experiences in World War I.
    In their writings, however, both were extremely combative. Tucholsky, born in Berlin but brought up in Stettin (now in Poland) was precocious, poking fun at Kaiser Wilhelm’s taste in art when he was just seventeen. At twenty-three, he started writing for the theater magazine Die Schonbühne , later renamed Die Weltbühne (The World Stage), which he was subsequently to edit, and which under him became one of the most colorful Weimar journals. Tucholsky wrote all manner of articles—poetry, book reviews, lead articles, aphorisms (“Either you read a woman or you embrace a book”), even court reports—in the course of which he denounced the military, the judiciary, the censor, the bourgeoisie, and in particular the series of political murders carried out by the conservative revolutionaries, which he felt were inciting the “mob” in Germany into a mood where only the National Socialists would profit.
    He badly wanted the Weimar Republic to succeed but, as Erich Kästner was to remark, Tucholsky was a “little, fat Berliner” who sought to “prevent a catastrophe with his typewriter.” In 1924 he became Paris correspondent (and coeditor) of Die Weltbühne , paralleling the exile, and Francophilia, of his idol and fellow Jew, Heinrich Heine. From France he eyed Germany—and its changes—no less sharply, so much so that he was several times sued by victims who judged they had been libeled in his attacks.
    His work culminated in Deutschland, Deutschland über alles , bitter social criticism, illustrated by John Heartfield, in 1929, which he nonetheless claimed was a work of love for his disappearing homeland. “They are preparing to head towards the Third Reich,” he wrote prophetically.
    His typewriter was less effective than he hoped, and in 1930 he moved permanently to Sweden. Die Weltbühne itself had come under increasing fire. Carl von Ossietsky, who had replaced Tucholsky as editor, had run an investigation in the periodical revealing the Reichswehr’s illegal air rearmament and been imprisoned. Although he considered it, Tucholsky didn’t return to Germany to support Ossietsky, and always regretted this failure (he had himself been indicted for writing a piece in which he declared that “soldiers are murderers”). He never believed—as others did—that Hitler’s regime would disintegrate and, weakened by chronic sinusitis, he took an overdose of sleeping pills in December 1935. Before his death he had campaigned for Ossietsky to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, a campaign that was successful, but only a year after Tucholsky’s suicide.
    Kästner was born in Dresden, the son of a saddle maker and a hair stylist. He found his military training very brutal (he was only fifteen when World War I broke out), much preferring history, philosophy, literature, and theater, which he studied at the University of Leipzig after the war. He became a journalist on the Neue Leipziger Zeitung , using several pseudonyms, but was in Berlin from 1927, publishing poems, articles, and reviews in a variety of outlets, including the respected Vossische Zeitung and Die Weltbühne . He became a leading figure in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)