Berlin! Berlin! Dispatches From The Weimar Republic, Berlin Stories from the Golden Twenties. (Kurt Tucholsky in Translation)($15.00Value)

Description

Berlin! Berlin! is a satirical selection from the man with the acid pen and the perfect pitch for hypocrisy, who was as much the voice of 1920s Berlin as Georg Grosz was its face. It shines a light on the Weimar Republic and the post-World War I struggle, which fore¬shadowed the Third Reich. 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 his country. He was a "small, fat Berliner," who "wanted to stop a catastrophe with his typewriter," wrote his contemporary, Erich Kästner. When he began to write, he had five voices-in the end, he had none. He was one of the most famous journalists in Weimar Germany, surrounded by women, but he died alone in Sweden, an enemy of the state, among the first authors whose books were burned and banned by the Nazis in 1933. But he is not forgotten. This book collects Tucholsky's news stories, features, satirical pieces, and poems about his home town Berlin, never published in America before. With a foreword by New York author Anne Nelson and an introduction by Ian King, the chair of the Kurt-Tucholsky-Society. Berlinica Publishing LLC is a multi-media publishing house based in New York City; with its sister company Berlinica Publishing UG based in Berlin. Berlinica offers English-language books from Germany, fiction and non-fiction, mostly about history, also as e-books. Upcoming is "Our West-Berlin" and "Springtime in America," by Roda Roda, the first book of a series by Weimar writers in the new world. Berlinica titles include Kurt Tucholsky's books "Berlin! Berlin!," "Germany? Germany!," "Rheinsberg," "Hereafter," and "Prayer After the Slaughter," a series of dramas from the Weimar Republic, a book about Mark Twain in Berlin, "Berlin 1945" with historic black-and-white pictures from the Soviet Army archives and "Berlin in the Cold War" . Berlinica also offers the comprehensive history book "Jews in Berlin" as well as "A Place They Called Home," about the children of German Jews returning. We sell "The Berlin Wall Today," a full-color guide to the remnants of the Wall by Michael Cramer and "The Berlin Cookbook," a full-color collection of traditional German recipes. Our program also includes the music CD "Berlin-mon amour," by chanteuse Adrienne Haan, and two documentaries on DVD, "The Red Orchestra," by Berlin-born artist Stefan Roloff and "The Path to Nuclear Fission," by New York filmmaker Rosemarie Reed. Berlinica also sells books beyond Berlin, namely a travel guide to Martin Luther and a book on the 1000-year anniversary of Leipzig. In reading "Berlin! Berlin!", that place and time in history becomes something universal. Berlin is today and now. The social and political battles fought then are the same challenging us today, the human observations as applicable today as they were then. (...) One encounters passages that ring eerily true today, about the complacent mainstream media, the absurdity of war, the disappearance of the middle class (... ) Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain are the names for writers on a level with Tucholsky. -- Ragazine, The On-Line Magazine of Art, Information & Entertainment Tucholsky would have been a standup comedian in different times; he covered the theatre, the cabaret, wrote poems, went on dates with actresses and liked to have fun with friends. He was a Liberal in the best sense. (...) The time between WWI and WWII in the Weimar Republic was different, though. He became an early, very early warner of what was lying ahead and what many people did not want to see. -- The Huffington Post In Weimar Germany, Tucholsky was big, the most brilliant, prolific and witty cultural journalist of his time. (... ) "Berlin! Berlin!" includes one of his best-known Panter essays, the nonsensical "Where Do the Holes in Swiss Cheese Come From?" When roused, he cranked up the gleeful malice that was H. L. Mencken's trademark. (...) He had an unmatched sense of humor, with very funny puns and images (...) The pith and the punch of his cabaret work translated brilliantly to his anti-Nazi satires. Too brilliantly, in the end. -- William Grimes, The New York Times Why Kurt Tucholsky? And why now? Ask most Americans for their impression of Berlin in the 1920s, and they'll come up with images from "Cabaret." Liza Minelli's "divine decadence" suggested a blend of naughty Moulin Rouge and tawdry Las Vegas. Today this seems like a distant past. But 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. From