Kurt Tucholsky

Harold L. Poor’s biography of the iconic German Jewish author, journalist, satirist, playwright, and poet is the most important and thorough work on Kurt Tucholsky in the English-speaking world; a labor of love by the Rutgers history professor that is still unmatched. For this book, Poor has not only spent years of research in American Universities, he also visited Tucholsky’s widow Mary Gerold in her home in Germany, his family in tow, and unearthed material, letters, and pictures previously unknown. This book is an entertaining and well-written gem that has finally been rediscovered.

“Harold L. Poor’s study is one of the best of a large and growing crop.”

Gordon Craig, The New York Times

“The book does offer an introduction to a very important period

and a witty, cosmopolitan, quite tragic man.”

Kirkus Reviews

“This biography, the first substantial treatment of its subject in English, does an excellent job of analyzing Tucholsky’s Hassliebe for Germany.”

Robert E. Neil, The American Historical Review

“Poor has placed the brilliant satirist in the context of the history of his country. ... a meticulously researched, copiously annotated study.”

Harry Zohn, The Germanic Review

“An (...)  academic exercise of the sort Tucholsky himself prophetically anticipated in his Plea Against Immortality.”

Ernst Pawel, Commentary Magazine

“Poor has provided a new focus of the Weimar Republic and its fate.“

Carl E. Schorske, The New York Review of Books

This one was well worth doing and it is well worth reading.”

Richard Hanser, The German-American Review

“A readable orientation to the history of the Weimar era.”

Wayne Wonderley, Richmond News Leader

“An interesting picture of the Germany of the 1920s as it headed inexorably toward Hitlerism and the devastation of World War II.”

Jerry Few, the Arizona Daily Star