dehumour1-4, Exercise 2: "What may satire do? Everything."

Model answer (check the wording and date):

1. Who says it? Kurt Tucholsky, a journalist and satirist, in an article of 1919 in the Berliner Tageblatt. He was an interested party, a satirist defending his craft.
2. Record? The article exists and the sentence is cited in histories of German satire. Check the exact text and its context, because the quotation is often given without its surrounding argument.
3. When? 1919, soon after the end of the monarchy and the war, at a moment of new press freedom.
4. Definition? "Satire" here means mockery of public life and abuses. "Everything" is a claim of principle, not a description of the law.
5. Who gains? Satirists, and later writers and broadcasters who cite it to defend satirical freedom.
6. What would change my mind? Evidence that the sentence was a slogan used in a different sense, or that the legal limits at the time were absent.

What it shows: a strong statement of the principle of satirical freedom, made in a country where the law still punished some satire (see the 1931 Weltbühne case).

What it does not show: that satire was free in practice, or that Germans in general held this view.