High Treason and Low Comedy. Robert T. O’Keeffe
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works, including letters, the book contains reminiscences of friends, reviews of and commentary on Kisch’s writing by other writers and colleagues, and amusing anecdotes about the colorful, energetic, and congenial man himself. Illustrations are in the form of photographs (often of ‘Kisch among the famous’ of his era) and reproductions of sketches, finished drawings, paintings, postcards and posters that show Kisch in a variety of settings: his domiciles and favorite haunts in Prague, Berlin, Paris and elsewhere; meetings with colleagues and friends on political and informal occasions; and, important documents that chronicle aspects of his life. Patka’s essay, “Facetten rasender Zeit: Der Schriftsteller Egon Erwin Kisch hinter der Maske des Reporters”,19 was, in slightly edited form, translated as “The Writer behind the Reporter’s Mask” by Heidi Zogbaum. This is the Afterword to her informative 2004 book, Kisch in Australia: The Untold Story.20 Here Patka makes his case for Kisch as a “poet of everyday life”, also arguing that the Manichean polarities of Cold War-era opinion resulted in Kisch being arbitrarily and incorrectly dismissed as a merely “communist reporter” (or even a propagandist) in the West, including England and the US. The exception to this dismissal was continued and more nuanced interest in Kisch in both halves of the divided Germany. The present author believes that the available translations of Kisch in English support Patka’s contentions in this respect and give the reader an idea of his wide range of interests and his literary strengths (and occasional weaknesses as well).
Two more English translations of Kisch pieces came out in 2003 and 2015, respectively. The first was a chapter about “Fordism in Detroit” from Kisch’s 1929 book, Paradies Amerika (American Paradise), followed by Sheila Skaff’s analysis of Kisch’s rhetorical techniques, which show his literary gifts and convey his leftist political outlook on life.21 The full title of Kisch’s American travelogue is Egon Erwin Kisch Beehrt Sich Darzubieten: Paradies Amerika (Egon Erwin Kisch Has the Honor to Present You: American Paradise), showing his ironical attitude toward the ‘paradisical’ aspects of the USA. The second piece is “Elliptical Treadmill”, a vivid snapshot of the crowd at Berlin’s immensely popular six-day bicycle races, taken from 1925’s Der rasende Reporter.22 Graham Davis’s translation captures the excitement of Kisch’s sketch of the fervid atmosphere of a form of urban entertainment patronized by people from all walks of life, from prostitutes and gamblers to families with children, workingmen, and wealthy men-about-town, all in search of diversion through intoxication, sexual opportunities, and the thrill of thousands cheering on their favorites. Kisch’s gifts as a feuilletonist portraying a popular social phenomenon (with sociological implications) can be compared here with those of Joseph Roth, who covered the same event in his piece, “The Twelfth Berlin Six-Day Races”, available in a translation by Michael Hofmann.23
The preceding summary account of ‘Kisch in English’ takes the reader through representative Kisch pieces from the pre-World War I era (as recounted in his memoirs and stories in Tales from Seven Ghettos) up until the mid-1940s. Though amounting to about seven volumes of prose, it is small and somewhat selective in comparison to Kisch’s total output, at least half which deals with matters in Central Europe (if we extend that appellation to interwar Germany as well as to the successor states of the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire). The English-language reader with some command of German has to go to linked compare-and-contrast books, like Paradies Amerika and Zaren, Popen, Bolschewiken (Czars, Priests, Bolsheviks) in order to get the full flavor of Kisch’s writing about contemporary social and political phenomena of intrinsic interest to Kisch’s wide readership during his heyday; or to books like Der rasende Reporter, with its 53 short, graphic pieces, to see why Germans and Austrians considered Kisch to be a master of Kleinkunst (“the small art form”)24 with a specifically modern cast.
As with all authors, it is necessary to take the facts of Kisch’s life into account when evaluating his writing―he lived in several cultural milieus that changed over time and had an impact on his responses to the world around him. Therefore a biographical sketch is given here.
Born in 1885 in Prague, Egon was the third of Hermann and Ernestine Kisch’s five sons. His family was middle-class and Jewish. His father owned a draper’s-clothier’s fabric shop, and many of his uncles and cousins were also small businessmen or professional men in Prague. Kisches, originally from the Eger (Pilsen) area of Bohemia, had lived in Prague for many generations and branched out into a variety of trades and professions, including medicine and law. Like the vast majority of Prague’s Jews, the family’s primary language and cultural affiliation was German, though Kisch himself was fluent in Czech and, in general, supported the aspirations of Czechs for more political autonomy within the Dual Monarchy. Eventually this turned into support for the new Czechoslovakian First Republic established as the Habsburg dynasty collapsed at the end of World War I and its holdings became reborn, new, or expanded nations.
Kisch attended the same Catholic elementary school (staffed by Piarists) where Franz Kafka, two years older, had been a student, followed by completion of the Staatsrealschule course of studies. Upon graduation he went to a technical school for journalism but did not complete the program. In 1904 he went through the one-year voluntary military program designed to advance its trainees to Second Lieutenant rank within the Austro-Hungarian reserve army. Having problems with discipline, he spent much of his time on guardhouse duty and finished the program as a corporal in the reserves, a status that would have an impact on his fate when World War I broke out. He was shifting about and dabbling with literature, having a volume of verse published in 1905; his always-supportive mother subsidized the publisher’s small edition. In the following year he had a collection of short stories published, Der freche Franz und andere Geschichten (Cheeky Frank and Other Stories). He later dismissed his poetry as sentimental juvenilia, while avoiding judgmental remarks on the quality of his stories.
In 1906 Kisch also began his career as a journalist, first interning for Prager Tagblatt, where his assignment was to attend the large number of public lectures on politics, science, and cultural topics given in Prague and then submit short, summary reports on them. After six weeks of this unsatisfying (and unpaid) employment he obtained a starting position with another Prague German-language newspaper, Bohemia, where he began as a daily-beat reporter covering fires, accidents, other mishaps, and any aspect of street-life that had ‘local-color’ value to the paper’s readers. He soon became a ‘specialist in crime’, reporting on Prague’s criminal underworld, police courts, associated seedy venues, and its demi-monde of prostitutes, pimps, and assorted low-level thugs who lived in the legal twilight zones common to all large cities. As he continued as a reporter he acquired editorial duties and wrote a Sunday feuilleton column, “Roaming through Prague”―he used the opportunity to live briefly with the homeless and to take a variety of proletarian jobs in order report on the abysmal living and working conditions of Prague’s large ‘underclass’, which had few tribunes speaking publicly on their behalf.25 Edited and rewritten material from his newspaper reports came out in book form as well, beginning with 1912’s Aus Prager Gassen und Nächten (From Prague’s Alleyways and Nights) and 1913’s Prager Kinder (Children of Prague—with “children” meaning the city’s native sons and daughters).
In his last two weeks at Bohemia Kisch was involved in breaking the story behind the suicide of Colonel Alfred Redl during the early morning hours of May 25th, 1913. Within two days of the event, Kisch, based on his journalistic experience and intuition, had acquired enough information from unnamed ‘inside sources’ to contradict the benign story put out by the General Staff of the Austro-Hungarian army that Redl had taken his own life because he was suffering from “insomnia and nervous exhaustion” related to his diligence in the performance of his military duties as the General Staff Chief of Prague’s VIIIth Army Corps. Redl, well known to the Viennese public, had spent most of the previous decade as the leading military intelligence expert within the General Staff’s Evidenzbüro, which managed both espionage and counterespionage matters. He proved to be the highest-ranking traitor within the army, having sold large amounts of sensitive military information to Russia and Italy for a decade or more. Kisch’s unsigned reports on the scandal led to a press, parliamentary, and dynastic furor directed at the General Staff and its Chief, Lieutenant Field Marshall Baron F. X. Conrad von Hötzendorf (usually referred to by historians as “Conrad”).