War, Revolution, and the Transformation of the German Humor Magazine, 1914–27

Abstract

In 1925 Kurt Tucholsky, Weimar Germany's leading satirical essayist, opened an article with the question: “Why can't one read Simplicissimus [Simplicissimus] any longer?”1 Tucholsky's question expressed an opinion, held by many Leftist intellectuals in the early 1920s, that Germany's most famous Witzblatt, or “humor magazine,” had abandoned its politically progressive satire of the prewar period and had become an organ of reactionary conservatism.