When things fragment, we look for something solid to hold onto. The ticker-tape of daily disasters – a fire here, a shooting there, a pointless military adventure somewhere else – makes us fearful and afraid of the future. And so we look to the past for warnings missed, as well as wisdom hidden. If we are really anxious we may even start to read poetry.
Kurt Tucholsky, the Weimar-era poet and satirist born on January 9 in 1890, is the man to turn to in such times. Serving as a soldier in the First World War, he left his gun leaning against a hut and walked away a pacifist. In 1919 he announced his life’s work: “I want finally to pull out all the drawers of our German dresser to see what is to be found in them,” exactly the darker sides of Weimar captured in the series Babylon Berlin that returns in 2020 for a new season of flashing sequins, cabaret and murder.
Described by writer Erich Kästner as “a short fat Berliner who tried to stop a catastrophe with a typewriter”, Tucholsky also predicted the ominous rise of the Nazis and another war in Europe, writing that “New cannons will come.”
