Rheinsberg: A Storybook for Lovers (Kurt Tucholsky in Translation)

One summer before World War I, a young couple escapes on a romantic weekend getaway to the small German town of Rheinsberg, north of Berlin, in the midst of a rural landscape filled with country houses and castles, cobble-stone streets, lush forests, and dreamy lakes. The story of Wolfie and Claire, told with a fresh, new style of ironic humor, became Kurt Tucholsky€s first literary success and the blueprint for love for an entire generation.

Kurt Tucholsky was a was a brilliant satirist, poet, storyteller, lyricist, pacifist, and Democrat; a fighter, lady€s man, one of the most famous journalists in Weimar Germany, and an early warner against the Nazis. Erich Kaestner called him a "small, fat Berliner," who "wanted to stop a catastrophe with his typewriter". When Tucholsky began to write, he had five voices€"in the end, he had none. His books were burned and banned by the Nazis, who drove him out of his country. But he is not forgotten.

Rheinsberg is at once a delightful and a deeply disquieting story. The lovers, Claire and Wolfie€"a silly but harmless pair€"escape the confines of Berlin for a romantic romp in the countryside. As their brief interlude nears its end, already consigned to memory, there comes with it an end to innocence, to frivolity. It was 1912; Kurt Tucholsky€s prescience was uncanny: the holiday is over and soon we will go to war. --Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Hester Among the Ruins and The Scenic Route

Once known as Weimar Germany€s greatest political satirist and one of that fabled era€s most celebrated literary figures, Kurt Tucholsky is today virtually unknown in America. Now, readers have the chance to discover one of his early pieces of fiction that exhibits the intense wit, charm, and rhetorical verve for which he earned his reputation.€ €"Noah Isenberg, author of Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism

In Rheinsberg, Tucholsky delivers the newness and intensity of young love, sweet, sometimes strident, with repartee juxtaposed against the sylvan landscape of rural Germany. Poignant, biting, tender: a reminder of what love promises€¦and can be. €"Victoria Zackheim, playwright, novelist, and anthologist

A wonderful and charming love story, finally rediscovered and brought to America €"Claudia Dreifus, Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, New York

Teachers and students of history and literature will welcome this collection of texts by Kurt Tucholsky, an early 20th century master of literary and political criticism, whose incisive and elegant voice will now be more widely available in English. €"Atina Grossmann, Professor of History at Cooper Union and author of Jews, Germans and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany

Rheinsberg€"a short story of two unconventional lovers in the last carefree days of Germany before 1914. The first major work by the anti-Nazi journalist and poet Kurt Tucholsky finally appears in a new translation for English speakers. €"Ian King, Professor of German, Chair of the Kurt Tucholsky Society