Status
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Description
"Castle Gripsholm, the best and most beloved work by Kurt Tucholsky, is a short novel about an enchanted summer holiday. It begins with an assignment: Tucholsky's publisher wants him to write something light and funny, otherwise about whatever Tucholsky wants. A deal is struck and the story is off: about Peter, a writer; his girlfriend, known as the Princess; and a summer vacation far from the hurly-burly of Berlin. Peter and the Princess have rented a small house attached to a historic castle in Sweden, and they have five weeks of long days and white nights at their disposal; five weeks for swimming and walking and sex and talking and visits with Peter's buddy Karlchen and with Billy, the Princess's best friend. It is perfect, until they meet a weeping girl fleeing the cruel headmistress of a home for children. The vacationers decide they must free the girl and send her back to her mother in Switzerland, which brings about an encounter with authority that casts a worrying shadow over their radiant summer idyll. Soon they must return to Germany. What kind of fairy tale are they living in?"--… (more)
User reviews
Tucholsky plays on this contradiction himself, introducing the story with a (presumably fictitious) correspondence between the author and his publisher, Ernst Rowohlt, who points to the difficulty of selling politics books in these troubled times and asks Tucholsky for something light and ironic between coloured boards, preferably a love story. Tucholsky responds by saying he doesn't do love stories, but he is just about to go on holiday, so he'll see what he can come up with. But he doesn't see how he can do anything at all if Rowohlt insists on keeping up that ridiculous 15% allowance for free copies that appears in paragraph 9 of his standard contract...
The story itself is a rambling, cheerful account of the narrator's holiday trip to Sweden with his girlfriend Lydia, during which they stay for some weeks in an apartment in a side-wing of Gripsholm Castle (inspired by a real holiday Tucholsky and Lisa Matthias took in 1927). There's no plot to speak of: one of the narrator's friends turns up for a few days, one of Lydia's friends arrives a bit later, they hatch a half-baked plot to liberate a little German girl who is having a miserable time in a holiday home run by the tyrannical Frau Adriani. And that's about it, the rest is, after all, something like a jokey love story, describing the way two people who like each other but haven't quite got to the point of living together cope with the enforced intimacy of being alone together in a foreign country. It's clearly a success, but both seem to feel by the end of the book that it will be nice to return to something less intensive when they get back to Berlin.