Who does not know that: you want to realize your own idea in the job, but you are stopped by the headquarters because the bosses have concerns. Or also: you rack up, you could use help – but instead there are only several superiors who give well -to -do advice. This was exactly what the journalist and writer Kurt Tucholsky described 100 years ago.
On March 31, 1925, the satirical text “The Center” appeared under his pseudonym Peter Panter in the magazine “Die Weltbühne”.
From the newspaper to the toddler retention institution
The first sentence already shows in which direction it goes: “The headquarters know everything better.” Tucholsky leaves open which headquarters here, because it doesn’t matter – it is about the principle. And that is immediately recognizable today, regardless of whether you work for a company, an authority, government, union, environmental organization or whatever.
In Tucholsky’s words: “For toddlers, foreign ministries, newspapers, health insurance companies, forestry administrations and banking secretariats”.
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The headquarters, according to Tucholsky, have the main interest in staying the central interest. “Grace God the subordinate organ, daring to do something independently! (…) First the headquarters have to be asked.” The people from the headquarters “Tap your shoulder and say:” Dear friend, you cannot judge it from your individual post! “
The headquarters, Tucholsky continues, “is a little thing inalistic than the Pope, but does not look so good for a long time.” The best known sentence of the only six paragraphs long, which is cited individually from time to time, reads: “One chopped wood, and thirty -three are standing around – they form the headquarters.” A beautiful picture for the waterminity inflated headquarters.
“I am always surprised at how fresh and up-to-date Tucholsky’s texts have stayed,” says the actor Bert Oberdorfer, who lives in Cologne, who regularly appears with a Tucholsky Revue under the title “Learn Laugh without crying”. “Unfortunately,” he adds. “Because he often denounces grievances such as democracy.”
For a short time, Tucholsky was sometimes the headquarters
Did Tucholsky suffer from central? “Yes, that also has biographical roots because he has already experienced something similar in war,” says Frank-Burkhard Habel, chairman of the Kurt-Tucholsky Society. “There is an article that he wrote in 1920 under the title” Die Men Verlower “, and he has already dealt with the fact that the military has a hierarchy that deals with many non -commissioned officers and the like without really doing anything.”
Tucholsky was moved in in 1915 in the First World War and sent to the Eastern Front as a soldier. Most of the time he was used behind the front, “in the stage”, as it was said. “I pressed for three and a half years in war,” he wrote later.
The journalist Friedhelm Greis, author of the Tucholsky blog “Sudelblog.de”, is also convinced that the experience with the military bureaucracy in the First World War has strongly shaped Tucholsky.
After the war, Tucholsky worked for around a year as a lawyer for a bank. “He also experienced these hierarchies and made fun of it again and again,” said Habel. The small editorial team of the “Weltbühne” with his fatherly friend and mentor Siegfried Jacobsohn at the top, on the other hand, was more of a home and a positive counterplay. “He saw that it is possible that everyone can have their own area of responsibility, which they work on independently and fill out, so there is another way.”
When Jacobsohn died unexpectedly at a young age, Tucholsky was forced to take over the editor -in -chief of the “Weltbühne” for a few months, so it was now, so to speak, the headquarters – the “executive line editor”, as he self -deprived.
He didn’t like this management function at all. A friend who visited him a few months later experienced him completely – without drive, tired, depressed and constantly painting males on a block.
The editorial management was horrible, he complained, “everything smashed under your fingers”. Therefore, he was only too happy to be able to hand over the chief position to Carl von Ossietzky after five months. In this respect: you can digestly reay through the central – but to do it yourself is not a solution.