IT WAS FAR FROM UNUSUAL in the interwar period for satirical or leftwing German authors to adopt a nom de plume. Indeed there is a long tradition of German literary Jewish writers changing their name to hide their family origins from prejudiced readers. Neither of the other two Jewish women writers from “the 1890s generation,” Claire Goll and Gertrud Kolmar, whom Dagmar Lorenz groups with Veza, published under their real names. The greatest satirist of the Weimar period, Kurt Tucholsky, invented a number of writing personae, alternately calling himself Peter Panther, Theobald Tiger, Ignaz Wrobel, and Kaspar Hauser, after the nineteenth-century foundling (that is also the theme of one of Veza's lost texts).

In a letter to Rudolf Hartung after the war, Veza recalls that Dr. König from the Arbeiter-Zeitung explained to her that “with the latent anti-Semitism one cannot publish so many stories and novels written by a Jewess, and yours are unfortunately among the best.” In such a climate, a change of name was a practical necessity. Pseudonyms could be even more useful to Jewish or oppositional authors after 1933. In order for his book to stand a chance of dissemination in Nazi Germany, Walter Benjamin rechristened himself Detlef Holz (which means wood) to publish an anthology of ostensibly nationalistic letters (German People) written by prominent Germans between 1783–1883, which he published in Switzerland.