For twenty-five years, from 1907 to 1932, Kurt Tucholsky wrote polemical articles, feuilletons, theatre- and book-reviews, travel sketches, poems and cabaret songs. Then, for the last three years of his life, he was an ex-writer who expressed himself in his diaries and letters, but no longer in print. This deathly silence was part of his complete repudiation of Germany after the Nazi take-over. To have gone on writing – to have inveighed impotently against the coming to pass of what he had worked all his life to prevent – would have been to concede a defeat too bitter to contemplate. Erich Kästner described Tucholsky as ‘a short, fat Berliner who tried, with his typewriter to avert the coming catastrophe.’ The means proved insufficient.

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Kurt Tucholsky was born in Berlin in 1890, the son of a prosperous Jewish businessman. Some of his childhood was spent on the blustery Baltic coast, for which he developed a lasting affection, and in whose landscape, people and language (all of them ‘platt’, ‘low’ or ‘flat’) Castle Gripsholm is a declaration of faith. In 1907, while still a law-student, he published Rheinsberg: A Picture Book for Lovers, a holiday story, a brief escape from the city into nature and love, a bitter-sweet not-quite-idyll of the sort he later developed in Castle Gripsholm. He took a doctorate in law – many of his fiercest attacks were reserved for the Weimar legal system, with its class justice and vicious political bias – and after the War, where he fought on the Eastern Front, he resumed his career as a writer and journalist.

Working mostly for the weekly, Die Schaubühne, later Die Weltbühne, he soon found himself contributing under four pseudonyms as well as – decreasingly – under his own name. (A first selection of his pieces was accordingly called Mit 5 PS, 5 HP.) This ‘blithe schizophrenia’ is an extraordinary procedure that illuminates his nature as a man and a writer: firstly, it had a strongly practical side:

‘it was useful to have a fivefold existence – because who in Germany will credit a political writer with humour? a satirist with seriousness? a whimsical fellow with knowledge of the penal code or a chronicler of cities with comic verse? A sense of humour loses you credence.’

Then, it was playful: the deployment of his five ‘homunculi’ as ‘the five fingers of one hand’ – although they had a fair degree of independence from one another, and sometimes fell out and conducted arguments among themselves! Lastly, it provided cover for Tucholsky himself, who, as he says near the beginning of Castle Gripsholm, disliked divulgence and confession in literature, and – appearances often to the contrary – kept his personal sphere intact. In the same way as his use of pseudonyms, Tucholsky’s work combines practical value, discretion and playfulness.