About the Author

Kurt Tucholsky was a brilliant satirist, poet, storyteller, lyricist, pacifist, and Democrat; a fighter, lady's man, reporter, and early warner against the Nazis who hated and loathed him and drove him out of Germany after his books were burned in 1933. His contemporary Erich Kaestner called him a "small, fat Berliner," who "wanted to stop a catastrophe with his typewriter." The New York Times hailed him as "one of the most brilliant writers of republican Germany. He was a poet as well as a critic and was so versatile that he used five or six pen names. As Peter Panter he was an outstanding essayist who at one time wrote topical sketches in the Vossische Zeitung, which ceased to appear under the Nazi regime; as Theobald Tiger he wrote satirical poems that were frequently interpreted by popular actors in vaudeville and cabartes, and as Ignatz Wrobel he contributed regularly to the Weltbühne, an independent weekly that was one of the first publications prohibited by the Hitler government." Tucholsky, who occupied the center stage in the tumultuous political and cultural world of 1920s Berlin, still emerges as an astonishingly contemporary figure. As an angry truth-teller, he pierced the hypocrisy and corruption around him with acute honesty. Imagine a writer with the acid voice of Christopher Hitchens and the satirical whimsy of Jon Stewart, combined with the iconoclasm of Bill Maher. That's Tucholsky in a nutshell. Like Hitchens, Tucholsky wrote a mixture of literary essays, social observations, and political commentary. His irony made the line between his "serious writing" and his "entertainments" almost invisible. Ian King was awarded a doctorate in 1977 by his home university, Glasgow in Scotland, for his thesis on Kurt Tucholsky's political development, which was also published in Germany. He has written on Tucholsky for British academic journals, an American literary encyclopaedia and recently for the German Dictionary of National Biographies. He was also co-editor of Volume 3 of Tucholsky's Complete Works and has lectured on the subject in the UK, Germany, Israel and Norway. He co-edits the conference volumes of the Kurt Tucholsky Society, was its vice-chair from 2005 to 2009 and has been chair since then. He was a professor of German in Sheffield and London and now works as a translator. Anne Nelson is an author, lecturer and playwright who specializes in media and international affairs from a human rights perspective. Nelson's most recent book is "Red Orchestra: the Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler." It was selected as a New York Times "Editor's Choice" in 2009. Its German edition, published by C. Bertelsman, was widely reviewed and described as a "masterpiece" in the Frankfurter Rundschau. A screenplay based on the book is now in circulation. Nelson's dramatic writing include the 2001 play, "The Guys," produced across the U.S. and as a feature film starring Anthony LaPaglia and Sigourney Weaver.