"He has bridged the ridiculous antithesis between professional and artist, between journalist and poet, and has created in himself this vivid type of author whose definition has to be left to his dearly loved jargon."
wrote Friedrich Sieburg in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1928. He talked about his colleague Kurt Tucholsky who would turn 124 today. He died aged 45. Way too early. But he still had enough time to leave hundreds of texts which elude any clear-cut definition.
Was he a poet? Was he a journalist? Even at his time people tried to force his writing into a corset: "He is a novelist!," they exclaimed when he published his first longer prose work Rheinsberg (1912). They shouted even louder when Ein Pyrenäenbuch (1927) and Schloß Gripsholm (1931) followed. But Tucholsky just laughed about it.
Most literary scholars still consider Tucholsky to be journalist. Because it's the easiest thing to do. Tucholsky published most of his works in newspapers, so he cannot possibly be a true poet, not even a mere novelist, they say. But his contemporary Emil Ludwig believed "that he is a bigger poet than most of the novelists of his epoch." And his language is in fact literary. But who says that journalism cannot be literary, that literature cannot have journalistic traits?
He didn't want to be immortal. Unlike novelists, he did not write for eternity, he wrote for the day. In his "Plea Against Immortality" he stated: "Don't peer into the future, there is nothing waiting for you. There is just one word for you if you are wise enough to voice it: Today."
Nevertheless, he reached immortality with his texts which he claimed to produce to be thrown away the next day, to wrap fish in the paper they were printed on.
Tucholsky was a traveler, a flaneur, an observer - of details which he used to explain the whole. He took pictures, snap-shots, arranged and re-arranged them to make his point clear. Once he said he was suffering from the Schriftsteller-Krankheit, the novelists' disease: "This obsession which cannot let things go, because you could still say it even better, even clearer, even shorter."
Sometimes he was bitter, cynical. Satire was his weapon. "What may satire do?," he asked. "Everything", he answered.
He used multiple pseudonyms to be able to express his views (and also because the little weekly, Die Weltbühne, he worked for "did not want to have four times the same man in one issue"). Ignaz Wrobel, Peter Panter, Kaspar Hauser and Theobald Tiger became his alter ego."It was supposed to be a game, invented to be a game", but "ended in cheerful schizophrenia".
I am truely happy to share my birthday with this man:
"A gentleman remembers the birthday of a woman, but forgets about her age." - Kurt Tucholsky
Thank you, Kurt!
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English language resource of Tucholsky's texts (By the way, the blogger calls him a "satirist")
News and interesting facts about the journalist-novelist-satirist
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