In 1923, during the worst of the inflation, he gave up the profession of writing for a year and went to work in a bank. His experience of office life produced probably his best-known creation, Herr Wendriner, a version of the ‘common man’ of the 1920s: a Berlin Jew, a self-seeking survivor figure, rascally businessman and the hero of many sketches and monologues. The year after, he returned to writing, but left Germany for Paris, ‘to take a rest from’ his fatherland and gain a little distance from developments there: governmental weakness and deceit, militarism and exploitation, partisan justice, right wing paramilitary groups and political assassinations. From then on, he was only in Germany on occasional visits. Based mostly in Paris, he wrote and travelled.

In 1929 he moved to Sweden and in that year one of his most celebrated volumes, the satirically entitled Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, appeared, his texts to photos and montages by John Heartfield. Its tone is perhaps more despairingly aggressive than that of earlier writings, but the range remains typical: there is a long and closely argued attack on German justice; the caption ‘Member of the Reichstag’ over the picture of a cockatoo; some glorious monologues – a midwife enraged at being compared to a corkscrew; a circular proposing the leasing of civil servants to private groups, to provide official dignity and a few ‘star turns’; ironic praise (from a rabid nationalist speaker) for the German army in the War, its ‘painless style of close combat’ and ‘humane barrages’. There is a grisly picture of two duellists after a ‘Studentenmensur’, their faces streaming blood from what would turn into the ‘scars of honour’ they had received from one another. Above it is a poem entitled, with appalling accuracy, ‘German judges of 1940’.

Tucholsky had always looked to the future, but what he saw there now made him incline to resignation and despair. His considerable popularity was not matched by any degree of actual political effectiveness: he doubted whether his work had got rid of a single official, or just one of those wicked, tortured and torturing ‘Anstaltsweiber’ (‘institution-women’ – like Frau Adriani) whom he particularly loathed. ‘Are the sadists going? Are the bureaucrats being thrown out? It makes me depressed.’ His writing now condensed itself into ‘Schnipsel’, ‘snippets’, that were either aggressive or troubled and pessimistic in character, though, somehow, they hadn’t lost their wit:

‘Germany is an anatomical curiosity: it writes with its left hand, but acts with its right.’