Berlin! Berlin!

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. Cindy Opitz earned a BA in German Language & Literature and Soviet Studies at Brown University, and spent two academic years in the former German Democratic Republic. She went on to earn an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa and currently lives in Iowa City (a UNESCO City of Literature), with her East-German husband, three children, and four cats. She also is the collections manager at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History and was once described by an Austrian author as a "curator of words." Ian King, BioIan King was awarded a doctorate in 1977 by his home university, Glasgow in Scotland, for his thesis on Kurt Tucholsky's political development, which was also published in Germany. He has written on Tucholsky for British academic journals, an American literary encyclopaedia and recently for the German Dictionary of National Biographies. He was also co-editor of Volume 3 of Tucholsky's Complete Works and has lectured on the subject in the UK, Germany, Israel and Norway. He co-edits the conference volumes of the Kurt Tucholsky Society, was its vice-chair from 2005 to 2009 and has been chair since then. He was a professor of German in Sheffield and London and now works as a translator. Anne Nelson is an author, lecturer and playwright who specializes in media and international affairs from a human rights perspective. Nelson's most recent book is "Red Orchestra: the Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted