Two Germanys, Two Uses for One Dead Man
Tucholsky’s posthumous fate tells, in its own way, the divided story of post-war Germany. East Germany claimed him early and unambiguously: as early as 1950-1951, his texts appeared in the “Library of Progressive German Writers”; state television devoted documentaries to him (1962, 1963) and a biographical TV film in 1975; an official exhibition was dedicated to him in 1978-1979; in 1970, a postage stamp bearing his likeness appeared in the “Important Personalities” series; in 1990 — the very year of reunification, in almost the last breath of the East German state — East Germany still minted a commemorative 5-mark coin for his centenary.

This appropriation was not without ideological logic: a left-wing antimilitarist, a fierce critic of Wilhelmine elites and of Weimar’s class justice, ticks almost every box of the antifascist narrative East Germany built about itself. But it also flattens a man more unruly than this portrait suggests — Tucholsky, while claiming allegiance to the left, already refused in his lifetime the conformist demands of doctrinaire communists, once replying to those who criticised his taste for tailored suits: “Besser ein Anzug nach Maß als eine Gesinnung von der Stange” (“Better a tailor-made suit than an off-the-rack conviction”).

There is something even more troubling. East Germany defined itself as a “Friedensstaat” — a “peace state,” in contrast to a supposedly militarist West Germany. In fact, this self-designation stood in flat contradiction to one of the most militarised societies in Europe: nearly two million people active or in reserve within armed or paramilitary formations in the 1980s (the National People’s Army, border troops, the Stasi, riot police, factory militias); compulsory military service from 1962, refusal of which jeopardised one’s studies and career; militarisation beginning as early as kindergarten, with six-year-old children singing songs in praise of the people’s army; and, from 1978 onward, a compulsory school subject, Wehrkunde, devoted to military education. Genuine pacifism, meanwhile, was carried not by the state but by its opponents: the movement “Schwerter zu Pflugscharen” (“Swords into Ploughshares”), born in East German Protestant parishes precisely in reaction to this compulsory military instruction, was monitored and repressed by the regime — before becoming one of the crucibles of the peaceful revolution of 1989.

Celebrating an antimilitarist who died in 1935, while building one of the most militarised societies on the continent under the banner of peace, is not a mere surface inconsistency: it is the mark of a regime that needed a risk-free antimilitarism — that of a dead man who could never object to the barracks, the conscript, or the Wehrkunde.

In the West, recognition came more slowly and more cautiously — the Federal Republic of the 1950s and 1960s, still populated by former military and administrative cadres of the Nazi era, sat uneasily with a man who had described in advance, with such acuity, the persistence of German militarism across regimes. It would take until 1988 for the Kurt-Tucholsky-Gesellschaft to be founded in the West, tasked with perpetuating his legacy — and until 1995 for a prize bearing his name to be created.

This double memorial genealogy is more than an archivist’s curiosity. It sheds light, nearly a century later, on a German debate that has lost none of its relevance: that of rearmament, its democratic transparency, and the relationship a society maintains with its own militarist tendencies — a debate readers of this dossier will find, in a very contemporary form, in the pages devoted to the Zeitenwende and to Germany’s rearmament today.