High Treason and Low Comedy. Robert T. O’Keeffe
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using fragments of reality in the manner of photographic montage. It is partial to a ‘you-are-there’ recounting of events, emphasizing the reporter’s direct observation and the human factor, i.e., how events affect the common man and woman as they perceive them. In the right hands (e.g., Kisch’s) it can be used to address historical topics as well as current events.
As to its political component, reportage is adversarial toward the conservative forces of society and those in power. It advances the causes of progressivism and improvements in the lives of workers and anyone else excluded from social and political influence. And, through militancy and exhortations, it aims to change society as well as to observe and describe it. Thus, Kisch’s 1935 piece, “Reportage als Kunstform und Kampfform” (“Reportage as Art-Form and Combat Style”) highlights militant advocacy as a basic component of reportage.41 In an analysis of Der rasende Reporter, Keith Williams noted that although the book’s Foreword hewed to the principle that the ideal journalist should be neutral, the actual writing implied just the opposite, i.e., there are no simple ’facts’ in economic and social life―the reader needs information about prevailing political structures and ideologies that underlie the facts in order to understand how and why they exist as they do. Williams calls the interlocked set of techniques Kisch used to indicate these underlying structures “defamiliarizing the familiar”. For Kisch this meant, as Williams puts it, “demystifying the alienated appearances sponsored by capitalism.”42
None of the foregoing constitutes a theory of reportage, but is rather a set of journalistic guidelines or standards. During the Weimar Republic years, when Kisch advocated this kind of writing, he was not alone in his turn away from the recent achievements and stylistic approaches of other forms of modernism (e.g., Symbolism, Expressionism, ‘stream of consciousness’ writing). In Weimar-era Germany the term die neue Sachlichkeit (“new objectivity” or “new matter-of-factness”) described the period’s turn toward more ‘factually engaged’ works in the realms of literature, painting, architecture, film, theater, and music. The extent of this stance can be seen in the subtitle of John Willett’s survey of Weimar-era art and politics, The New Sobriety 1917–1933, wherein “sobriety” is an alternate interpretation of Sachlichkeit. Willett writes that Kisch’s contemporaries saw him as an able representative of the era and its concerns, to the point that in their minds his name was synonymous with reportage, a form of writing they perceived as parallel to experimental ventures in film, drama, and the visual arts.43
The foregoing account of reportage’s ideal constituent elements can be challenged when considering any particular piece that claims to adhere to its standards. Political tendentiousness might undermine accuracy, and imputed motives and causes might be incorrect. Contextualizing one’s gathering of facts (‘raw data’) within a political-philosophical ideology, Marxism-Leninism, already points to ways in which the meaning of facts might be distorted, while inconvenient facts might be ignored. Needless to say, this applies to all ideological frameworks through which facts are selected and interpreted (e.g., reporting that assumes the ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ status of capitalism, as in our own time). In addition to these commonplace provisos about the nature of journalistic objectivity, Kisch’s desire to make his reporting interesting and entertaining points to other ways in which fictional devices (story arcs, clear contrasts between villains and heroes, the invented persona of an ‘objective narrator’, reconstructed dialogues, etc.) penetrate literary nonfiction. There are no firm criteria for deciding when the already vague boundary between objectivity and the reporter’s subjectivity drifts too far to the subjective or interpretive side. Another way to put this is that the boundary between fiction and nonfiction is often not clear. Whether Kisch pondered such matters in any depth is unknown.
In English-language writing the problem has reared its head several times in the recent past. Debates about the relative merits of tabloid journalism versus writing published by august newspapers with stricter fact-checking criteria have been running for more than a century. The American ‘New Journalism’ of the 1960s–1980s yielded extended interpretive reportages (by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Janet Malcolm, Norman Mailer and others) and even ‘nonfiction novels’ (e.g., by Truman Capote and Mailer); these blurred previous journalistic boundaries. The advent of round-the-clock cable television news programs, internet news blogs and tendentious websites, including those that dispense ‘fake-news’, has exacerbated competing standards of ‘what is fit to print’. Were he alive today, Kisch might relish some of these contentious battles while being mystified or horrified by others.
During his pre-1914 years as a Prague journalist Kisch made no specific pleas for parties on the left. He was vaguely aligned with the old liberal Bohemian-German values that had been adopted by many of Prague’s Jewish families. After the war, when his political beliefs took a definite shape, he used wry suggestiveness rather than blatant didacticism to convey his ideology to the reader; occasionally he shifted into outright propaganda. He was, in principle, a communist, but he did not allow his topical interests or his writing style to be dictated by the rigid Party line. It seems that the cultural bureaucrats of the Party never attempted to force Kisch into this mold; perhaps, with his celebrity and his broad network of moderate, liberal, and non-communist leftist contacts, he was too valuable an asset to be bullied or tampered with. In the terminology of Russian and Comintern intelligence and Western counterintelligence he was an ‘agent of influence’, putting him on a plane with non-communist ‘fellow travelers’, though he was far better informed and more purposeful than they were. Whatever influence his communist affiliations had on his writing, Kisch wandered away from reportage with political implications whenever opportunities to do so occurred, indicating his broad, eclectic curiosity about human life. However, during the post-World War II years, Kisch’s East German biographers emphasized his credentials as a communist writer who often advanced the Party’s goals—at times this is a fair evaluation, but Kisch was much more (and perceived to be much more) than a writer who stuck to the Party line or had his writing pre-approved by Party officials.
An interesting light on Kisch’s status as an iconic socialist (or communist) journalist in post-1948 East Germany is shed by passages in Maxim Leo’s ‘family biography’, Red Love, published in translation in 2013 and critically discussed by the present author elsewhere.44 Leo remarked that his mother and her father (a well-known foreign-affairs journalist who served the DDR’s press agency, with intelligence duties as well) were admirers of Kisch. But they lamented the fact that they would never be allowed to write like Kisch, i.e., they could not apply their powers of observation and literary skills to an examination of the underlying power politics of the Soviet bloc and the grim realities of social and cultural life in the DDR. Like Kisch, they were uneasy about the trend of socialism in the Soviet world, but maintained a public silence. Here Kisch assumes the typical lineaments of an official icon honored in word, but not deed.
A glimpse into Kisch’s attitude toward the new communist state in the Soviet Union can be had by considering his trip there in 1925–1926. Michael Horowitz quoted a brief, starry–eyed letter that Kisch wrote to his mother soon after his arrival:
Dearest Mom―So I’ve been in Moscow and have been really lucky, for this city, both in appearance and in its inner essence, is the most beautiful in all the world. A thousand good wishes and kisses from yours, Egonek.45
Following up on this, Horowitz wrote that in his letters Kisch also noted the lack of housing, overcrowding in all public institutions, large numbers of homeless children living on the streets, decrepit public transport, and every other person appearing to be a newly minted bureaucrat. Here the reader sees enthusiasm, even awe, tempered by objectivity about persistent social and economic problems in the USSR. This objectivity was probably why Kisch’s book Zaren, Popen, Bolschewiken, the fruit of his observations during his first trip to Russia, was not translated into Russian, though earlier and later collections of his reportage were.
Both concise and more expansive definitions and discussions of reportage can be found in Kisch’s works,46 in the analyses by Kisch’s major East German biographers, Dieter Schlenstedt47 and Fritz Hofmann,48 in the 1997 biographies by Segel49 and Patka,50 in Spector’s parsing of Kisch’s reportage as a “cultural re-mapping of Prague”,51 in Peter Monteath’s article on Kisch’s Australian adventures52