Kurt Tucholsky Museum Tour

“Our lives, trapped and captured
Have walked through you
Guillotine!
Our pleasures, our sorrows
Yesterday, today, for ever
O machine!
Lever spinning, shuttle creaking,
And the keys are beating time.”

This is Theobald Tiger’s prose-poem „Hands at the Typewriter“. It appeared in May 1928 in the modern entertainment magazine “UHU”. Tucholsky worked in the Ullstein publishing house and contributed to UHU’s conceptual design.

At his typewriter. a Stoewer-Elite, sat not only Tucholsky, but four other renowned publicists.

“Wrobel, an acetatic, bespectacled, blue shaven fellow, nearing a hunchback and red hair; Panter, an agile, globated, little man; Tiger only sang verses, if there weren’t any, he slept – and after the war Kaspar Hauser opened his eyes, looked into the world and did not understand it. […] And these five have lived in the “Weltbühne” and elsewhere over the course of the years.”

In the foreword to the anthology “Mit 5 PS” from 1927 Tucholsky explained how the famous pseudonyms came into being. He also includes his own name:

“We are five fingers of one hand. One on the title page and than: Ignaz Wrobel. Peter Panter. Theobald Tiger. Kasper Hauser.

These Pseudonyms emerged from the dark, intended as a game, invented as a game – that was than, when my first works appeared in the “Weltbühne”. A little weekly does not like to have the same man four times in the same edition. […] And what started as a game ended as happy schizophrenia. I like us allot.