High Treason and Low Comedy. Robert T. O’Keeffe
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Martina Seidel of the German Radio Archive (dRA). For a long-term conversation about Kisch’s adventures in Australia that made him a “hot news item” in the English-speaking world during 1934-35, I owe thanks to Dr. Carolyn Rasmussen of Melbourne University, who also steered me to Australian authors who wrote about his impact on that nation’s culture. And, of course, I express my gratitude to those at the ibidem-Verlag who assisted me administratively and editorially, especially Valerie Lange and Jessica Haunschild. Back in the US, I owe thanks to Stuart Moss of the Nathan Kline Institute for bibliographical help and to Jan Hrabě for translating the dialogue of a Czech television play for me. I hope I haven’t left anyone out, but it’s possible that I have. I close this with a salute to the memory of Harold B. Segel, a distinguished professor whose knowledge of Central European writing and culture was broad and deep and who was an enthusiastic partisan of E. E. Kisch’s writing.
Some notes on the text are advisable here. Unless otherwise indicated in the text or footnotes, translations are mine. Square brackets indicate my clarifying notes within quotes or translated passages. Footnotes are grouped by the chapter as book end-notes; some contain important supplementary information about historical matters. Citations are in ‘short form’, while full publication information on each work cited or discussed is in the Bibliography. A Bibliographical Note supplies detailed information about the main contemporary repository of Kisch’s writing, the Kisch Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works). In the main text, footnotes, and bibliography my citations and other references to the Collected Works use the later edition, referred to as GW (1992) or GW (1993). The first appearance of the German title of a book, article, play or film has its English translation in parentheses. Where the English translation of a title is not italicized, this indicates that the book was never published in translation, e.g., Wagnisse in aller Welt (Worldwide Exploits). Truncated German and English titles are used in passages with multiple references to a work under discussion (e.g., Die Abenteuer in Prag becomes Abenteuer, while A Patriot for Me becomes Patriot).
Chapter 1.
Introducing Egon Erwin Kisch,
the Raging Reporter
Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948) became a professional journalist in 1906. During his first two decades as a writer he was well-known in Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia. As his reputation spread throughout and beyond Europe during the interwar years, he acquired the sobriquet ‘the raging reporter’.1 The nickname stems from the critical success and large sales of his 1925 book, Der rasende Reporter, a collection of his reportage and other short pieces published in Berlin. In terms of ‘identity’ (using categorizations common to his own period) he was Jewish (by family religious affiliation, not ‘nationality’), a citizen of the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, a ‘real Praguer’, and a man who thought and wrote in German but had a good command of Czech. After World War I he was a citizen of the new Czechoslovakian First Republic. From 1921 on he lived in Berlin until his exile in 1933, moving first to Paris, then to Mexico City during World War II. He returned from exile to Prague in 1946, old, tired, and somewhat disillusioned, yet managed to revise earlier works and write new pieces up until the time of his death.
Kisch undertook long journeys abroad during the 1920s and 1930s to observe and investigate contemporary political events and their historical and cultural milieus, which he reported on in a series of thematic books.2 These travels included trips to France, England, Spain, Russia, the USA, North Africa, China, Japan, Ceylon, and Australia. As a man he was gregarious, ebullient, and broadly curious about the world he lived in. As a journalist he was an inventive stylist. He was also active in left-wing political movements after 1918 (his communist affiliations will be discussed below). Most importantly, he was a prolific writer of both short and long nonfiction works, most of which are deemed to be ‘reportage’ by later critics and students of his oeuvre (the pigeon-holing of his writing into this elastic genre is somewhat misleading). At the age of 29 he wrote a novel that was well-received, and during the first half of the 1920s he developed an ancillary career as a playwright, a phase of his life and work that will be examined in detail for the first time in English in the present book.
Translations of Kisch’s two most successful works for the stage are in Chapters 3 and 5 below. The first of the plays is a historical melodrama that deals with the last day on earth of an infamous, high-ranking Austro-Hungarian traitor, Colonel Alfred Redl, whose story played an important role in Kisch’s career as a journalist. The second play is entirely different in origins and atmosphere. It is the story of ‘Toni Gallows’, a rowdy Prague prostitute whose earthly travails unfold in slang as she tries to argue her way into heaven; here Kisch turned a short feuilleton into a cabaret fantasy-comedy with a strong streak of pathos. These two plays are treated in the present book as portals into a wider world. Inclusion of the translated plays is a necessary basis for discussions placing them in several overlapping contexts: biographical, historical, and cultural. Each of these plays enjoyed a long afterlife in several different media. Chapters 9 and 10 examine these various adaptations in the context of what happens when artists (including Kisch himself) transform history into art. Treating them in both intensive and expansive fashion allows discussion of the plays to ramify out in space and time, and takes the reader down informative and eventful pathways through history. But before reading the plays and the commentaries on them, the reader should learn more about their author and his career.
The English-language reader has three available sources of information about Kisch and his writing. First there is a fair sampling of his work in English translation: five of his books and a smattering of his magazine articles were translated into English during his lifetime. This sample is not fully representative of his interests or his approach to writing. Second is a 1997 “Bio–Anthology” written and edited by Harold Segel, an American scholar whose concise critical biography of Kisch is followed by his translations of 26 of Kisch’s outstanding pieces. (In German there are at least three major biographies of Kisch, several minor ones, and two ‘illustrated miscellanies’.) And, third, there are reviews of Kisch’s translated books and articles that critically analyze his work. This last body of writing in English is small, a mere trickle in comparison to the large number of such pieces about Kisch in German. In terms of significance, however, an exception to this is Scott Spector’s book (Prague Territories) about the unique ‘identity problems’ of German-Jewish writers in Prague during the years between ca. 1890 and 1920. Spector presents an in-depth analysis of Kisch’s chosen path (journalism and the evolution of his politics from typical German liberalism to secular-socialist activism) as exemplary of one of a complex of ideological and practical choices open to him and his Jewish peers in the ‘Prague circle’ in their attempts to reconcile the differences between Czechs and Germans.3 This will be discussed in more detail when dealing with Kisch’s ‘readership problems’ in Chapter 7 below.
During his lifetime Kisch had a presence in the English-speaking world that depended originally on newspaper and magazine publicity about his activities. In Europe his reputation as a journalist with a distinct voice and leftist perspective depended on his prolific writing of vivid newspaper and magazine articles and essays, often republished in book form as collections of reportage, and six or seven topical books based on his far-ranging travels. Between 1912 and 1948 twenty-four books by Kisch were published in German; this count does not include his juvenilia, co-written or co-edited works, pamphlet-sized publications, or several of his short plays. Many of his books were reissued during his lifetime, and equally many were translated into a variety of European languages (Czech, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, English, Swedish, and Italian).
Kisch is often credited with being the founder, foremost advocate, and best-known interwar practitioner of reportage, a form of journalism and essay-writing that will be discussed in more detail below. Posthumously his name and reputation have diminished outside the German-speaking lands, with the exception of the Czech Republic (and former Czechoslovakia), where he is one of the few ‘Prague Germans’ honored as ‘native sons and daughters’ of the city. In contrast to the normal fate of fading interest in all but the most famous men and women of any particular era, his name and writing are kept alive in recent German editions. In Germany (and, to a lesser extent, Austria) his status as the ‘master of reportage’ remains a subject