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Rheinsberg: A Storybook for Lovers

Rheinsberg: A Storybook for Lovers

Rheinsberg: A Storybook for Lovers

By Kurt Tucholsky
Translated by Cindy Opitz

"Rheinsberg is at once a delightful and a deeply disquieting story."—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Hester Among the Ruins and The Scenic Route

"A wonderful and charming love story, finally rediscovered and brought to America"—Claudia Dreifus, Columbia University, New York

One summer before World War I, a young couple escapes on a romantic weekend getaway to the small German town of Rheinsberg, north of Berlin, in the midst of a rural landscape filled with country houses and castles, cobble-stone streets, lush forests, and dreamy lakes. The story of Wolfie and Claire, told with a fresh, new style of ironic humor, became Kurt Tucholsky’s first literary success and the blueprint for love for an entire generation. Kurt Tucholsky 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. Rheinsberg is at once a delightful and a deeply disquieting story. The lovers, Claire and Wolfie—a silly but harmless pair—escape the confines of Berlin for a romantic romp in the countryside. As their brief interlude nears its end, already consigned to memory, there comes with it an end to innocence, to frivolity. It was 1912; Kurt Tucholsky’s prescience was uncanny: the holiday is over and soon we will go to war.

Hardcover
98 pages
Berlinica Press, 2014
Originally Published in 1912
5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
ISBN 9781935902256
Romantic Fiction, Poetry

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