When Kurt Tucholsky suddenly became a bank trainee
A quarter pound dollars: Kurt Tucholsky
Quelle: picture-alliance / akg-images
In 1923 there was hyperinflation in Germany. It is the year of the crisis – also for authors’ royalties. Then Kurt Tucholsky comes up with an ingenious plan. He’s starting over at 33 – and going where the money is.
AWhen the writer Kurt Tucholsky hit the crisis in 1923, hyperinflation prevailed in Germany. Several current books about the year 1923 (by Christian Bommarius, Peter Süss and Jutta Hoffritz) tell the story, with slightly different nuances, like this:
Actually, Tucholsky is one of the most successful authors of the Weimar Republic. He, who starts with “Rheinsberg. Ein Bilderbuch für Verliebte” – a still charming little book about a Berlin couple on a weekend outing in the country – landed a bestseller in 1912, was a literary and theater critic for the magazine “Die Weltbühne” in the 1920s. He also writes for revue and cabaret stages. He publishes under various names (Ignaz Wrobel, Peter Panter, Kaspar Hauser, Theobald Tiger), also has many pseudonyms because he writes so much.
But he can live less and less on author fees, because the sums agreed in advance are worth less and less the moment they are finally paid out. The money expires – rapidly. So it happened that Tucholsky (almost) didn’t write at all for a few months and went where the money was: in a bank.
“I’m going to start all over again,” he writes to his flame, Mary Gerold, when he accepts the offer of his friend, the banker Hugo Simon, and joins the Bett, Simon & Co. bank on March 1, 1923 as an apprentice. At 33, Tucholsky is no longer really young, but he needs the money – and is now learning how to count bills, cut coupons, and process securities. His salary is now adjusted daily for inflation. “The greatest journalist of the Weimar Republic, a mixture of Heine and Lichtenberg, he is now a bank trainee! So Times are crazy,” sums up Peter Süss in “1923”. Tucholsky does his new job well, with humor: “A quarter pound dollars? Sliced or whole?”
On August 8, 1923, he served Heinrich Mann at the counter. Then the two writers go to lunch: “He has a couple of long, sticky teeth like an old woman, but overall he looks very good and confident,” noted Tucholsky about Mann, whose great successes (“Professor Unrat”, “Der Untertan”) meanwhile a long time ago – namely still in the empire – lie.
More flattering is the practical lyric that Tucholsky bestows on his boss Simon in his birthday song: “The whole of Holland should always owe him / the crackling notes of real guilders! / And he shall always heal / with good fat English pounds. / He wishes a lot of both / The tiger from the variety register.”
Tucholsky has more plans
Theobald Tiger remains a real Tucholsky in the bank. After six months of turbo training, he was promoted from a cashier’s apprentice to the bank director’s personal secretary. He knows that a Tucholsky is not busy counting money. When inflation was defeated in November 1923 with the introduction of the Rentenmark, Tucholsky gave notice to banker Simon.
On February 15, 1924, he signs a new contract with the “Weltbühne”. He has agreed to go to Paris as a correspondent. Because a “Weltbühne” salary is not enough for this, Tucholsky also hires at the “Vossische Zeitung” and others at the same time. “Tucho” is not intended to cover current politics, but to renew the German image of France, which reached its low point with the occupation of the Ruhr and inflation in 1923. On April 6, 1924, Tucholsky took the train to Paris. He banishes himself from Germany, like Heinrich Heine once did.
It is said that all writer’s life is paper. In this series, we present evidence to the contrary.
