He also wrote under the pseudonyms Kaspar Hauser (after the historical figure), Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger and Ignaz Wrobel.

He saw himself as a left-wing democrat and pacifist and warned against anti-democratic tendencies — above all in politics and the military — and the threat of Nazism.

[6] Alex Tucholsky left a considerable fortune to his wife and children, which enabled his eldest son to go to university without any financial worries.

[7] After taking his Abitur examinations in 1909, he began studying law in Berlin in October of the same year, then spent his second semester in Geneva at the start of 1910.

Thus he travelled to Prague in September 1911 with his friend Kurt Szafranski to surprise his favorite author, Max Brod, with a visit and a model landscape that he had made himself.

From the controlled and powerful swing of his walking stick which gives a youthful lift to his shoulders to the deliberate delight in and contempt for his own literary works.

In 1907 the weekly satirical magazine Ulk ("Prank") published the short text Märchen ("Fairy Tale"), in which the 17-year-old Tucholsky made fun of Kaiser Wilhelm II's cultural tastes.

[8][11] The owner of the magazine, the publicist Siegfried Jacobsohn, became Tucholsky's friend and mentor, offering him both encouragement and criticism, sometimes co-writing articles with him, and gradually inviting him to assume some editorial responsibility for Die Schaubühne; under Tucholsky's influence the focus of the journal shifted toward political concerns, and in 1918 it was renamed Die Weltbühne: Zeitschrift für Politik/Kunst/Wirtschaft ("The World Stage: Magazine for Politics/Art/Economics).

Looking back he wrote: For three and a half years I dodged the war as much as I could – and I regret not having had the courage shown by the great Karl Liebknecht to say No and refuse to serve in the military.

[14]These means, in part, did not lack a certain comic effect as emerges in a letter to Mary Gerold: One day for the march I received this heavy old gun.

[15]His encounter with the jurist Erich Danehl eventually led to his being transferred to Romania in 1918 as a deputy sergeant and field police inspector.

In a 1931 text, he wrote Soldaten sind Mörder ("soldiers are murderers"), which subsequently led to numerous judicial proceedings in Germany.

The author, who wrote under his own name as well as under four pseudonyms (Theobald Tiger, Peter Panter, Kaspar Hauser, and Ignaz Wrobel) became one of the most famous and influential voices of the Weimar Republic, an outspoken satirist, and an opponent of German militarism, the right-wing judiciary system and an early warner about the rising National Socialist movement.

Recently, Tucholsky's biographer Michael Hepp has called into doubt the verdict of suicide, saying that he considers it possible that the death was accidental.

An inscription on his grave reads: Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, a quote from Goethe.