Picking the Raisins

...What difference does it make...

...He wrote for many newspapers and magazines, but his career was made on Siegfried Jacobsohn's Welt-biihne, whose social commentary and cultural criticism had an impact on literate Germans far beyond the scope of its limited circulation (at most some 15,000...

...The concrete evidence to support this supposition may be scanty, but every so often a policeman is toppled by a typewriter, a rascal is turned out, a calamity, if only a minor one, is averted...

...That is lost in translation...

...SATIRICAL WRITINGS By Kurt Tucholsky Translated by Harry Zohn and Karl F. Ross Funk & Wagnalls...

...The game of picking raisins from the Tucholsky cake is still being played...

...What If...

...6.95...

...Though vehemently on the Left, the Weltbiihne was not Communist...

...Reviewed by RICHARD HANSER Author of documentary films, "Germany Today" and "Berlin Powderkeg" The entire breed of Restons and Kemptons, of Lippmanns and Lern-ers, would do well to avoid reading Kurt Tucholsky and the Ordeal of Germany before rolling a fresh sheet of copy paper into the typewriter at the start of a day's stint...

...It is the timbre that somehow evaporates in these translations, and with it goes the reason for offering the pieces in English in the first place...

...it renounced "any kind of strict dogma" and was the forum for a wide range of viewpoints...

...For 20 years I have been pained by one thing?that I have not been able to succeed in removing one policeman from his post...

...He served on the Eastern Front but boasted afterward that he never raised his hand against the enemy (nevertheless, he rose to a higher rank than did Adolf Hitler...

...includes some clever Englishing of Tucholsky's clever verse, but such items as "How To Make A Bad Speech" and "What Do Women Do Before Going Out...

...What If...

...Readers, it was said, would pick his pseudonyms out of the magazines "like raisins from a cake," and whether comical or serious he achieved a popularity unprecedented for a German journalist...

...Still, this one was well worth doing and is well worth reading...

...As with most significant writers of the Weimar period, World War I and its immediate aftermath were the seminal events that conditioned Tucholsky's outlook for the rest of his life...

...In the original they are light, lively and almost unfailingly entertaining in the manner of, say, Benchley or Lardner but with a distinctive timbre that was Tucholsky's own...

...For 20 years he informed, instructed and entertained a wide and appreciative audience...

...But he was also a cultural and literary critic of the calibre of H. L. Mencken, and in addition he produced wonderfully witty verse and corrosive satire...

...In answer he wrote his own definitive comment on the futility of his journalistic career: "I am slowly going crazy from reading how I have ruined Germany...

...That's not the reason for wielding one's pen...

...Poor sketches in Tucholsky's background as the son of a well-to-do Berlin businessman and banker, and makes the routine suggestion that his later social crusading may have had its roots in some vague sense of guilt about his comfortable middle-class origins...

...217 pp...

...Tucholsky became its star contributor and, for a time, its editor...

...All the disasters he had predicted, and warned against, duly occurred, and the eerie accuracy of his forecasts did nothing to stave off the ultimate calamity, which was Hitler...

...He was not alone in his disillusion with the power of his pen and of the press in general...

...Otherwise the fingers hovering over the keys might find themselves stricken with a sudden paralysis instead of getting on with yet another column deploring the state of the world, or predicting the next national calamity, or castigating the malefactors who are leading the country straight to Gehenna...

...He wrote his suicide note in French...

...What more could a journalist ask in the way of a satisfactory and rewarding career...

...That is apparently enough to keep the journalists going from one edition to the next...

...While the treatment of Tucholsky in the context of the Ordeal of Germany, 1914-1935 is satisfactory, it lacks a strong projection of the man as a personality aside from his work...

...It was said of him that "he wanted to halt a catastrophe with a typewriter," yet though few typewriters were ever more brilliantly put to the service of social justice, political decency, and peace, the catastrophe came just as inexorably as if he had never written a word...

...Kurt Tucholsky was not only the journalist par excellence but in ex-celsis, and it is hard to think of anyone in recent times who matches him...

...In the role of political commentator he achieved the stature and authority of a Lippmann, and as an instant analyst of news events he had all the snap and acuteness of a Reston...

...Professor Harold L. Poor of Rutgers has now written the first full-length chronicle in English of Tuch-olsky's career, and it is practically a paradigm of the frustrations of the liberal journalist...

...On major matters, on the larger issues, it is perhaps best to remember the saying of another witty and disillusioned German, Georg Lich-tenberg, who died in 1799: "That one can convince one's opponents with printed argument is something I haven't believed since the year 1764...

...Tucholsky himself had often been accused of contributing to the German debacle with his relentless attacks on Weimar and its leaders...

...But in complete disillusion and total despair, Kurt Tucholsky poisoned himself at the age of 45, persuaded that none of his work had had any effect, accomplished any good, made any difference...

...His revulsion at what was happening in Germany was so intense that he could scarcely bring himself to speak the language any more...

...He was both brilliant and prolific, sparkling as well as serious...

...Stewart Alsop recently hazarded that reporters and commentators write for 10 per cent of the total population at "a generous estimate...

...At the end Tucholsky was left only with what he once called the "small stupid satisfaction" of being right, and it was evidently not enough...

...The day came when Tucholsky stopped writing light pieces, because there was no longer anything to joke about...

...But as editor of the pungently satirical Simplicis-simus, he found that "what we tried to laugh away were in fact the apocalyptic beasts of the abyss," impervious to debunking...

...And Norman Mailer has just been quoted as saying, "I don't really believe you can affect politics by writing...

...He came back from service with an uncompromising passion against everything military and almost everything German, especially what he called the "barracks mentality" of his countrymen, which became his particular target...

...There is, fortunately, not much of this rule-of-thumb analysis to burden the narrative, and the basic elements of Tucholsky's career are clearly given...

...How I say something," he once wrote to a friend, "is often better than what I say...

...unhappily confirms Tucholsky's own opinion that he was not a good subject for translation...

...The playful pen names were a kind of disguise for his lighter efforts...

...Who cares...

...He doubted anyone in Germany would believe that "a political writer is capable of humor or that a satirist can be serious...

...The run of journalists, however, have to proceed on the assumption that what they are doing has some point, makes an impression, serves a purpose...

...Between these chores he wrote successful cabaret sketches and popular song lyrics...

...It is rather to annoy the others and to give those on our own side some courage and strength...

...Fritz Schoen-berner, his Weimar contemporary, has written that he once "sincerely believed that it was sufficient to debunk and deride human stupidity in order to defeat this hydra with its innumerable heads...

...come off less successfully...

...Missing, too, is any really vivid sense of the atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, its cultural ferment, its moral disintegration, the ominous turmoil?social, political, emotional—which, as Richard Hughes has said, suggested a Wagnerian drama staged by Hieronymus Bosch...

...Should long thoughts of Tucholsky intrude at such a moment, the impulse to comment, expose, or pontificate might well dissolve into despairing cries of: What good does it do...

...In 1935, in exile, he told his friend Arnold Zweig: "Ich bin ein aufgehbrter Schriftsteller"—roughly, "I am a ceased writer...

...That book has yet to be written...

...He wrote as many as 150 articles, poems and sketches for it yearly, under his own name and four pseudonyms?Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger, Kaspar Hauser, and Ignaz Wrobel...

...Not only has he had a surprising revival in postwar Germany, where his books sell in the tens of thousands, but a collection of his satirical writings, both prose and verse, has recently been issued over here...

...He also gave up his slashing polemical articles, because he saw that what he wrote was having no effect...