Born in Mindszent, Kohut was born as one of thirteen children of the very poor, pious Talmud scholar Jacob Kohut. He studied from 1866 to 1868 at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau as well as his older brother Alexander. Then he studied two semesters new philology and art history at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Breslau and afterwards at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin. In Vienna he lectured for three years at the University of Vienna and received his PhD from the University of Jena in 1878. In 1872 he was called by Karl von Holtei to the editorial office of the Breslauer Nachrichten. In 1873 he was editor of the Düsseldorfer Zeitung. Leopold Ullstein hired him in 1878 at the Tribüne in Berlin and later at the Berliner Zeitung. Afterwards he edited the magazine Deutsches Heim. "Illustrated entertainment sheet for all estates". Like many other journalists Kohut was also persecuted in different trials according to the. In one case the prosecutor demanded for him six weeks imprisonment because of offence against of the "Gesetz über die Presse". On September 13, 1884, he was expelled from Prussia as an "unpopular foreigner," after he allegedly attacked Bismarck in an article. In reality, he had been expelled from Berlin at the instigation of the anti-Semite Adolf Stöcker, who had worked for it with the minister Robert von Puttkamer. For the next five years he lived in Dresden. By a letter of 21 December 1889 from the Prussian Legation Council in Saxony of Count August von Dönhoff Kohut was allowed to return to Berlin. In April 1890 he arrived there. Bismarck himself had, as Kohut wrote, never spoken up for his expulsion. Already sick since 1915, Kohut died in the night of 21 to 22 November 1917 in his Berlin apartment Courbiérestraße 7 at age 69. There was no obituary in the and also the Gemeindebote did not mention him on the occasion of his death. Kohut did not only have conservative, liberal or anti-Semitic German contemporaries, but also, who worked for several years on European stages and last worked as a singing teacher in Berlin. Oswald Kohut was the son of this marriage. A grandson of him was.
