About the Author

Kurt Tucholsky was a was a brilliant satirist, poet, storyteller, lyricist, pacifist, and Democrat; a fighter, lady's man, one of the most famous journalists in Weimar Germany, and an early warner against the Nazis. Erich Kaestner called him a "small, fat Berliner," who "wanted to stop a catastrophe with his typewriter". When Tucholsky began to write, he had five voices-in the end, he had none. His books were burned and banned by the Nazis, who drove him out of his country. But he is not forgotten. Ian King was awarded a doctorate in 1977 by his home university, Glasgow in Scotland, for his thesis on Kurt Tucholsky's political development, which was also published in Germany. He has written on Tucholsky for British academic journals, an American literary encyclopaedia and recently for the German Dictionary of National Biographies. He was also co-editor of Volume 3 of Tucholsky's Complete Works and has lectured on the subject in the UK, Germany, Israel and Norway. He co-edits the conference volumes of the Kurt Tucholsky Society, was its vice-chair from 2005 to 2009 and has been chair since then. He was a professor of German in Sheffield and London and now works as a translator. Anne Nelson is the author of The Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler. She teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

Reviews

In Weimar Germany, Tucholsky was big, the most brilliant, prolific and witty cultural journalist of his time.-William Grimes, The New York Times
"Kurt Tucholsky was one of the most brilliant German Jewish writers and satirists of his time. He had to leave his beloved Berlin because of his biting, yet witty stories against militarism and Nazi Fascism. Today's Berliners adore him as one of the greatest sons of this city. The world has yet to discover his genius."-Peter Schneider, author of The Wall Jumper and Eduard's Homecoming
"A representative selection from the man with the acid pen and the perfect pitch for hypocrisy, who was as much the voice of 1920s Berlin as Georg Grosz was its face."-Peter Wortsman, Author of A Modern Way to Die and Ghost Dance in Berlin
"Kurt Tucholsky was one of the most brilliant writers of republican Germany...More than any other person, he foresaw what was coming....What his readers had enjoyed as the capricious fantasies of a clever satirist has now been enacted in bitter reality, even to a satirical forecast of his own mode of death."-From the New York Times' 1936 Obituary