Kurt Tucholsky Museum Tour

The writing desk and the chair you can see here are the most striking exhibits in our museum, both belonged to Kurt Tucholsky and stood in his villa “Nedsjölund” in Hindås, Sweden. In the 1980’s they were transferred to Berlin. The Academy of the Arts provided these as permanent loans to our museum.

The most important and most intimate piece of furniture for an author is probably his writing desk. It stands in for Tucholsky’s works: 10 books and more than 3000 texts.

Tucholsky’s creative period counted only 20 years from 1912 to 1932. Already half a year before the Nazi take-over he put aside his beloved pointed pencil as the political situation reduced him to despair. After that he didn’t even publish a single line.

The letters he wrote at this desk remained his sole means of expression. They are “letters out of the silence”, letters from his Swedish exile, which he sent to his Swiss friend Nuuna and signed them with:

“an ex-German” and “an ex-poet”

Another symbol for his work as well as his life we find on the last pages of Tucholsky’s “Sudelbuch”, a notebook for occasional ideas and quotations. It is a sketch of a stair. Its highest step is “silence”, preceded by “speaking” and “writing”.