Deutschland, Deutschland Ueber Alles

Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1929. First German Edition. First Printing (cloth issue), with 1.-20. Tausend printed on title page. Octavo (24cm); yellow decorative cloth, with photomontage by John Heartfield applied to covers and titles stamped in black on spine; yellow topstain; 231pp, [5]; illus; text is in German. Contemporary (October 1929) owner's name penciled to front endpaper; slight forward lean, light overall dust-soil to cloth, with pictorial elements well-preserved and largely unrubbed; browning to endpapers, with mild wear to base of spine; a presentable copy, Very Good, lacking the rare dustjacket. A powerful piece of social criticism by Tucholsky, one of the most prominent German-Jewish authors and journalists of the Weimar Republic. Produced with graphic designer John Heartfield, Tucholsky managed to combine vicious attacks on everything he disliked about Germany with a declaration of love for his country. He warned of a government with anti-democratic tendencies and the impending threat of National Socialism - a plea, almost, to revolutionize a dormant country - though his fears were realized in 1933 when Hitler assumed the position of Chancellor of Germany. Axel Eggebrecht, one of Tucholsky's contemporaries, said of Deutschland: "If this book were to turn out to be quite a big success, it might be realized that the dream of awakening is still very vivid in Germany." Deutschland was listed on the Nazis list of censored books, and though it did go through a second printing, few enough survived destruction.

The present example is one of apparently two variant bindings for the first printing, with no extablished priority known to us. While the pictorial cloth binding is the variant we have seen and handled most often, we note another in yellow cloth, without the pictorial elements, and titles stamped in black on spine and front cover. A well-preserved example, and a high-point of Heartfield's graphic design and layout work. Pachnicke & Honnef 60a-69 (p.148-161).