High Treason and Low Comedy. Robert T. O’Keeffe
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In the English-speaking world Kisch has more or less fallen into oblivion since his death in 1948 (excepting Australia, for reasons explained below). Several of his pieces appeared in American magazines during the late 1920s and early 1930s,4 followed in the years 1935–1937 by English translations of three topical books that reported on his travels and direct observations. These were: Changing Asia (1935), Secret China (1935), and Australian Landfall (1937). Based on his 1931 travels through the peripheral Muslim lands of the USSR, Changing Asia conveyed a good deal of statistical (and bureaucratic) information and made the argument that ‘de–feudalization’ and vast improvements in the quality of life had been accomplished through Soviet economic programs; in addition to his political and social observations the book contains several colorful ‘adventure chapters’. The German title of the 1932 book, Asien gründlich verändert (Asia Fundamentally Changed) is more definitive of Kisch’s judgment that this modernization program had succeeded than the translated title used by his English publisher.
Secret China recorded Kisch’s illegal entry into the country and his travels between March and July, 1932, when he visited Shanghai, Peking, and Nanking. His trip took place at a time when a Japanese military incursion in Shanghai was in progress and when there was armed strife between Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist government, local warlords, and communist insurgents. In addition to his usual leftist-internationalist interpretation of these events (which led him to create an idealized picture of the Red Chinese enclave, based on the verbal reports of his contacts), Kisch wrote vivid chapters on Shanghai crime-lords and their corrupt police abettors and on his visit to an establishment housing retired Chinese Imperial harem officials, all of whom had been castrated. In comparison to the publisher’s translation, the German title of his 1933 China book captures the immediacy of his reporting on current affairs: Egon Erwin Kisch berichtet: China geheim (Egon Erwin Kisch Reports: Secret China).
This surge of translations of Kisch’s writing into English occurred toward the end of the period when his international renown peaked. His exploits in Australia in 1934–1935 also resulted in widespread publicity in the English-speaking world (and defamatory press coverage in Nazi Germany). Selected by Henri Barbusse, Kisch had gone there as the sole European delegate to a pacifist and anti-Fascist congress. Based on confidential intelligence reports from the UK, the Australian government had forbidden his entry. Attempting to bypass the ban, Kisch broke a leg when jumping from ship to dock in Melbourne. His legal case wound its way through the courts while he roamed the country on crutches, attending meetings and rallies as the government continued its efforts to deport him. Pro- and anti-government newspaper coverage of his case swelled into a floodtide of publicity.5 The trip yielded a book, Landung in Australien, published in Amsterdam in 1937. Its long opening chapter covered his political travails, with a good deal of facetious writing about the ineptitude of the government; it concluded with hortatory socialist rhetoric. Its second half comprised ten local color sketches about the history of the Australian labor movement and ‘exotic’ topics such as variants in the game of cricket and a famous horseracing murder case (of the horse, that is); it also included a rather misguided polemical chapter on “Lenin and Australia”. Noted above, its English translation, Australian Landfall, was published in London in the same year.
While both the original and the English translation of his book about his trip were banned in Australia between 1937 and 1969,6 Australians had a full report of his activities in their nation available in On the Pacific Front: The Adventures of Egon Kisch in Australia, a 1936 book written by one of their own, “Julian Smith”, the pen-name of a seasoned leftist journalist, Tom Fitzgerald.7 Smith recounted Kisch’s perambulations and painted a portrait of a witty, combative, risk-taking man whose character appealed to many Australians. His reportorial style was a direct tribute to Kisch’s, its author being an admirer and advocate of reportage as practiced by the master. Julie Wells has given readers an account and analysis of Kisch’s long-lasting influence on Australian journalism and liberal-leftist perspectives in the arts in general (e.g., he was a founding member of the Australian Writers’ League, which, though short-lived, had a significant local impact).8
Though the most widely publicized of Kisch’s long trips abroad, this was not his last. His on-the-scene reporting on the Spanish civil war was to follow, resulting in only one piece translated into English at the time, “The Three Cows”,9 while his other pieces about the war were published in German exile magazines and newsletters. Decades later they were gathered into a posthumous collection, Unter Spaniens Himmel (Under Spanish Skies), published in East Germany in 1961.10 His ten-month internment in New York in 1940 was followed by his 1940–1945 exile in Mexico, resulting in a book about historical matters and current life there, Entdeckungen in Mexiko (Mexican Discoveries). One of its reportages, “An Indian Village under the Star of David” has come over into English in two different translations, one as part of Tales from Seven Ghettos,11 the other in Segel’s Kisch Bio–Anthology.12 Both books are discussed in more detail below.
In late 1941 the English translation of his memoirs, Sensation Fair, came out ahead of the German version, Marktplatz der Sensationen, released in Mexico City in July, 1942.13 While the memoirs were critically praised in the US,14 they could only make a small impression, given the magnitude of recent events and the flood of reportorial and partisan writing about the unfolding of World War II. Their publication in New York coincided with the entry of the US into the Asian and European wars, the stalled German offensive on the outskirts of Moscow after six months of vast conquests in Russia, and a period of menacingly successful German U–boat activity in an attempted blockade of England. Sensation Fair recounts Kisch’s childhood and pre-World War I days as an enterprising reporter in Prague, with chapters that bring in events from his 1914–1918 life as a soldier and his 1920s research into the 1913 espionage case and major public scandal known as ‘the Redl affair’,15 which is the subject of one of the two plays presented below. Later additions to the memoirs during and after his lifetime are discussed in a Bibliographical Note that follows the main text of the present book. The memoirs present feuilletons, reportages, and articles that had appeared elsewhere in print as reminiscences, while also weaving essayistic connections between topics and between the different phases and perspectives of a long life as an adventurous and controversial professional journalist. Nowhere in Kisch’s memoirs does he mention that he had been a member of the Communist Party since 1919. His evasiveness on this point and what his Party membership meant for his writing will be discussed below.
The last of his books to come over into English was Tales from Seven Ghettos, a 1948 translation and augmentation of his 1934 book, Geschichten aus sieben Ghettos.16 The translator, Edith Bone, added chapters based on Kisch’s post-1934 writing about Jewish matters. Tales gives us the ruminations of Kisch, a thoroughly assimilated, non-practicing Jew, on Jewish lives and topics around the world in which he and they lived; it also includes essays about ‘exotic’ and legendary Jewish stories from across several centuries.
After Kisch’s death in 1948 there were no new translations of his work into English until 1997, when Harold Segel’s Egon Erwin Kisch, The Raging Reporter: A Bio-Anthology was published. Segel’s compact biography of Kisch also has translations of a wide variety of his reportages and essays, most of which had not been translated before. This yielded a virtual ‘sixth book’ of Kisch in English. Its concise bibliographical and critical discussions make it an ideal starting point for English-language readers to become acquainted with Kisch’s life and work, while its translations offer a wide sampling of his writing from over a period of four decades. Of relevance for the present book, Segel included a translation of Kisch’s small but influential 1924 book about the Redl espionage case.17 In the same year the most recent large-scale critical biography of Kisch in German was also published, Marcus Patka’s Egon Erwin Kisch: Stationen im Leben eines streitbaren Autors (Egon Erwin Kisch: Way-Stations in the Life of a Militant Writer). Patka’s exhaustive bibliography of writing by and about Kisch is the most comprehensive source of information for any and all research on the man, his works, and critical evaluation of his writing.18
Patka followed this in 1998 by compiling, editing, and contributing a summary critical essay to a profusely illustrated ‘Kisch biographical miscellany’, Der rasende Reporter Egon