Herr Wendriner Makes a Phone Call

The left-wing Berlin-born journalist, satirist, critic, and poet Kurt Tucholsky studied law but turned to journalism even before completing his degree. His service in the German army turned him into a pacifist and a bitter critic of nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism, and human stupidity. After 1924, he spent most of his time abroad, mostly in France, Switzerland, and Sweden, where he killed himself in 1935, overwhelmed and depressed by events in Germany. Although he left the Jewish community in 1911, he remained unable to marginalize his Jewishness and wrote sixteen caustic monologues about the fictional Herr Wendriner, whom he cast as the archetypal materialistic, ultra-assimilationist, spiritually empty bourgeois Jew of the Weimar period.