The Kurtzahn Tarot
Germany's first tarot, 1920: a wartime engineer's spare pen-line deck, each card keyed to a Hebrew letter, with room left blank for the reader's own notes.
Ernst Kurtzahn, who wrote as Daityanus; published by Talis Verlag, Leipzig · Leipzig; the first tarot deck designed and published in Germany · 1920
Tarot came late to Germany, and it arrived as an engineering manual. In 1920 Ernst Kurtzahn, a naval engineer who signed his esoteric work Daityanus, published Der Tarot with the Talis house in Leipzig: the first German tarot book and, bound into it, the first German tarot deck. His cards owe their skeleton to the French occult line, Justice at eight, Strength at eleven, the Fool a zero standing between Judgment and the World, and every card carries a cartouche assigning its Hebrew letter and Kabbalistic number, Aleph 1 for the Juggler through Thau 400 for the World.
The drawing is deliberate contour, no shading, no color: a deck built to be printed cheaply and read precisely. On the pips Kurtzahn left the lower half of each card blank, printed space for the reader's own system, which makes the deck feel oddly modern, half oracle, half worksheet. The book was dedicated to Gustav Meyrink, whose novel Der Golem had made Prague Kabbalah a bestseller, and it leaned on Etteilla's divinatory tradition as much as on Eliphas Levi's correspondences.
Kurtzahn's timing was poor; Weimar Germany got its occult from cheaper fortune packs like the Kipper Cards, and the deck was never a popular success. But it opened a door: every German tarot after it, and the German editions of the Wirth and Rider-Waite-Smith decks, walked into a market this deck created.
- The Tarot of Papusthe French occult tarot it answers
- The Oswald Wirth Tarotthe trumps it redraws
- The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarotthe deck that beat it to the market
- How to self publish a tarot deckthe first German deck, self-issued
- Free tarot card templates and sizesblank space left for the reader