"Wir haben die Firma gewechselt, aber der Laden ist der alte geblieben": Kurt Tucholsky and the medialized public sphere of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933)

This dissertation investigates Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935) as a public intellectual who used resources of language within the growing media landscape of the Weimar Republic productively. It focuses in particular on his attempt to develop an alternative to politically polarized public discourses around notions of German-ness. This study argues that Tucholsky’s work signaled the crisis of meaning and representation in interwar Germany, when a fundamental transformation of the way the world was perceived took place. Tucholsky’s work responded to this shift in that it demanded that its audience unveil the workings of a discourse of ambiguity and deception. By means of humor, satire, word play, and language parody, his texts undermined the authority of the word, the authority of the press, and they thus promoted public mass communication as a subversive power. To contribute to a better understanding of Tucholsky in this context this dissertation draws on different methodological paradigms of literary, cultural, and communications studies. Thus this dissertation not only acknowledges the aesthetic dimension of Tucholsky’s work, but also contextualizes it within the construction of what it meant to be German during the Weimar Republic. The inherent paradoxes of nationalism and the mass press, particularly the mechanisms of how national identities are mass communicated, how unifying ideologies exist in diverse public spheres, are at the core of this dissertation’s investigation of Tucholsky’s work. Tucholsky’s satirizing of traditional ways of conceptualization is a central part of this study’s discussion of his analysis of the public negotiation of national identity. Each chapter of this dissertation analyzes a cluster of Tucholsky's journalistic texts with respect to how they emerge from and operate within different contexts: the contexts of the press landscape at a particular period of Tucholsky’s work, of Tucholsky’s political activism besides writing, his publishing strategies, and his discussions of language and identity formation in each historical phase of the Weimar Republic. During the Republic’s politically and culturally polarized times, Tucholsky’s innovative use of language, particularly his use of satire, negotiated between social classes and political camps through his conscious selection of public channels.