Herr Wendriner's Worries

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: This is the first publication in England of selections from the work of Kurt Tucholsky, the German-Jewish journalist, publicist, and satirist, who committed suicide in Sweden in December, 1935, shortly before his forty-sixth birthday. For many years he was the chief contributor to the liberal Berlin weekly Die Weltbuehne, writing under the pseudonyms Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger, Ignaz Wrobel, and Kaspar Hauser, in addition to his own name. A pacifist and internationalist, Tucholsky was a stylist and a master of the small form, writing many lively short pieces, critiques, essays, reportages, monologues, and poems. Among his most memorable characters is Herr Wendriner, the personification of a Berlin business man, a completely assimilated, opportunist, spiritually empty Jew; this figure may be regarded as symptomatic of the Hassliebe that Tucholsky felt for Germany, Berlin, his fellow-Jews. Although Tucholsky has been tremendously popular in post-war Germany, he is almost completely (and...