Kurt Tucholsky

Die Weltbühne ("The World Stage") was Siegfried Jacobsohn's left-liberal weekly; until 1918 it had been a theatre magazine called Die Schaubühne ("The Stage"). Tucholsky published his first article there in January 1913 and remained its leading contributor for the rest of his life. In twenty-five years he wrote more than 3,000 pieces for nearly a hundred publications, about 1,600 of them for this weekly. So that the paper would not look like a one-man show, from 1913 he also wrote as Ignaz Wrobel, Theobald Tiger and Peter Panter, and from December 1918 as Kaspar Hauser. Political leaders, court reports, satire, poems, book reviews and cabaret songs: there was hardly a column he did not fill.

His first target was the army. In the series "Militaria", begun in January 1919, he attacked the spirit of the Wilhelmine officer corps, brutalised further by the war and living on inside the Republic. That October he helped found the Peace League of War Veterans.

His next target was the judiciary. In the Republic's first years left-wing and liberal politicians such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Walther Rathenau and Matthias Erzberger were murdered one after another. Watching the trials of right-wing Feme murderers, Tucholsky found that the judges as a rule shared the defendants' monarchist and nationalist views and sympathised with them. In "German Judges", a three-part article of April 1927, he indicted the Republic's reactionary justice; convinced that a second revolution was needed, he wrote in 1928 that "the German revolution is still to come". When Jacobsohn died in December 1926 he took over the paper, but soon handed it to Carl von Ossietzky.

His most lasting sentence appeared in "The Guarded Theatre of War", published under the name Ignaz Wrobel in the peace issue of Die Weltbühne on 4 August 1931. Criticising the military police who, safely behind the lines, killed deserters, he wrote: "Soldiers are murderers." The Reichswehr minister Wilhelm Groener brought charges against the editor, Ossietzky, for insulting the Reichswehr, but in July 1932 the court acquitted him, finding that the sentence did not disparage the Reichswehr. Tucholsky, living in Sweden, was not charged. Afraid of falling into the hands of the Nazis, he stayed away from the trial, and regretted it until days before his death.

For Tucholsky, sexuality was a question of how far the state may reach into private life through criminal law. The draft penal code laid before the Reichstag in 1927 moved the provision punishing sex between men to a new Paragraph 297 and made it harsher. In 1929 Richard Linsert edited a volume against it, Paragraph 297, "Lewdness between Men"?, and Tucholsky contributed a short piece under the name Ignaz Wrobel.

He pointed out that the draft's official justification admitted the arguments against such laws were "to be taken seriously", and even that the paragraphs could harm and destroy the innocent, yet tightened them all the same. For years Magnus Hirschfeld had let philosophers, sociologists, doctors and educators speak on the subject, but the legislators had hardly consulted any of them. Confessing that he himself could scarcely imagine sex between men, Tucholsky said that no one could make such a feeling the basis of a moral code and punish as criminals those who did not share it: "as long as the varieties of sexuality do not harm society, society has no right to intervene"; "a penal code is no moral primer". He also noted that acts permitted to an "ordinary" man were punishable for an unemployed man who prostituted himself out of despair, and attacked a law that treated a social problem with punishment. The piece ends: "The draft is a disgrace."

When the struggle over Paragraph 218, which punished abortion, peaked that same year, he joined it with "Die Leibesfrucht" ("The Fruit of the Womb"), alongside Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Döblin and Friedrich Wolf. He also supported Helene Stöcker by writing for her sexual-reform journal Die Neue Generation. The women of his stories Rheinsberg and Castle Gripsholm are independent characters who live their sexuality as they choose, unbound by conventional morals.

In 1933 Nazi students nailed books by Hirschfeld and Tucholsky together to a "pillory", and in the Berlin book burning of 10 May his books went into the flames with those of Marx, Heine and Freud.

Watching the investigations and trials against Ossietzky, Tucholsky concluded that the room for critical journalism in Germany had shrunk drastically. In 1929 he moved to Hindås near Gothenburg in Sweden (the Neue Deutsche Biographie dates the move to January 1930). From 1931 he wrote less and less; his last substantial contribution to Die Weltbühne, a set of aphorisms, appeared on 8 November 1932.

In 1933 the Nazis banned Die Weltbühne, burned his books in May, and in August put his name on the first list of those stripped of German citizenship. He refused to take part in the emerging exile press. Having lived abroad since 1924, he did not see himself as an émigré, and in January 1934 he wrote a curriculum vitae for an application for Swedish naturalisation. In his letters he called himself a "former German" and a "former poet". Unlike many exiles, he had no illusion that Hitler's dictatorship would soon collapse: most Germans, he saw, had come to terms with it, and other countries accepted Hitler's rule. He expected a war within a few years.

Even so, he worked behind the scenes for Ossietzky, now held in a concentration camp, supporting from 1934 the campaign to award him the Nobel Peace Prize. Ossietzky received the 1935 prize in 1936; Tucholsky did not live to see it. In his last letter, of 15 December 1935, to the writer Arnold Zweig, who had emigrated to Palestine, he criticised German Jews for failing to resist the Nazi regime.

After a stay in hospital with stomach trouble in October and November 1935 he could no longer sleep without barbiturates. On the evening of 20 December he took an overdose of Veronal sleeping tablets at his house in Hindås; found in a coma the next day, he was taken to hospital in Gothenburg and died there on the evening of 21 December. Among exiles the rumour spread that the Nazis had killed him, and his biographer Michael Hepp considered an accident combined with alcohol. But because he had voiced thoughts of suicide before, suicide is today taken to be the most likely explanation. His ashes were buried in the summer of 1936 under an oak near Gripsholm Castle in Mariefred, the setting of his story Castle Gripsholm.