Recently, in a public meeting in Paris, which was incidentally very German-friendly, one of the speakers said something really charming, of which I made a note. He spoke about what Germans are like, analyzed them not without skill, and then said, just incidentally, “Germans are like the model pupil.” If the Leipziger Neuesten Nachrichten hadn’t forbidden it, I would have cheered.
After six in the evening, couples stroll in the Berliner Tiergarten arm-in-arm, and holding hands, and they’re quite right to do so. It goes like this:
I saw a dog recently. He was on his way to work. It was a sort of stuffed sofa cushion, decorated with long tassels of skin, wobbling down the Leipziger Strasse in Berlin. He was dead serious, he looked neither to the left nor to the right, he sniffed at nothing, and certainly did nothing else. He was definitely on his way to work. What else could he have been doing? Everybody around him was doing it.
The monkey (of the public): „It’s a good thing they’re all behind bars!“ The old Simplicissimus
Tucholsky, Kurt & Links, Roland (ed.) (1984) Das Lächeln der Mona Lisa: Auswahl 1926 bis 1927. Volk und Welt
Tucholsky, Kurt (2015) Das Lächeln der Mona Lisa: Gesammelelte Artikel aus der ‘Weltbühne’, Severus
Tucholsky, Kurt & Kästner, Erich (ed) (2015) Gruß nach vorn, Anaconda
Tucholsky, Kurt; King, Ian (ed) & Ille, Steffen (ed) (2015) Die Zeit schreit nach Satire, Ille & Riemer
„I was just a fresh student teacher at the time“, some people say; it’s what they had read in books. I was not a fresh student teacher at the time, but I can still clearly remember the time after I had graduated, and all the revision for exams and everything was over, sitting at the feet of a great teacher, whose lectures I had disgraced, in the university, and some things suddenly became clear to me. I suddenly understood everything which just three years ago had been completely in the dark; then I saw connections, and paid attention, and didn’t sleep for a second; then I was an attentive and useful student. Then, when it was too late. And that is why I want to be student again.
Now, when everyone is wrapping up the war; when the last memoirs are congealing into books, when the time is very gently approaching in which the heroes of yesterday become the invalids of tomorrow, now, here is someone who wants to unburden his conscience. The midday sun reveals all, it must be said, he has carried it for seventeen years, he can’t carry it any longer. But let’s hear what he has to say:
Die Weltbühne in English Translation 