Egon Erwin Kisch ( Prague, April 29, 1885 - March 31, 1948) - Czechoslovakian writer and journalist, who wrote in German. He was noted for his development of literary reportage .
Biography
Prague
Kisch was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and began his journalistic career as a reporter for a local German language newspaper in 1906. His early work is characterised by an interest in crime and the lives of the poor of Prague, taking Jan Neruda, Emile Zola and Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz as his models. His most notable story of this period was his uncovering of the spy scandal involving Alfred Redl.
At the outbreak of World War 1, Kisch was called up for military service in the Austrian army. He fought on the front-line in Serbia and the Carpathians and his war-time experiences were later recorded in Schreib das auf, Kisch! (1929). He was briefly imprisoned in 1916 for publishing reports from the front that criticised the Austrian military's conduct of the war, but nonetheless later served in the army's press quarters along with fellow writers Franz Werfel and Robert Musil.
The war radicalised Kisch. He deserted in October 1918 as the war came to an end and played a leading role in the abortive left-wing revolution in Vienna in November of that year. Werfel's novel Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit (1929) portrays the events of this period and Kisch was the inspiration for one of the novel's characters. Although the revolution failed, in 1919, Kisch joined the Communist party, a political allegiance he maintained for the rest of his life.
Berlin
Between 1921 and 1930 Kisch, though a citizen of Czechoslovakia, lived primarily in Berlin, where his work found a new and appreciative audience. In books of collected journalism such as Der rasende Reporter (1924), he cultivated the image of a witty, gritty, daring reporter always on the move, a cigarette clamped doggedly between his lips. His work and his public persona found an echo in the artistic movement of Neue Sachlichkeit, a major strand in the culture of the Weimar Republic.
Through the late twenties and early thirties, Kisch wrote a series of books chronicling his journeys to Soviet Russia, the U.S.A., Soviet Central Asia and China. These later works are more strongly informed by Kisch's communist politics. Whereas in his earlier collections of reportage he had explicitly stated that a reporter should remain impartial, Kisch came to feel that it was necessary for a writer to engage politically with what he was reporting on.
Exile
On February 28 1933, the day after the Reichstag Fire, Kisch was one of many prominent opponents of Nazism to be arrested. He was briefly imprisoned in Spandau, but as a Czechoslovakian citizen, was expelled from Germany. His works were banned and burnt in Germany, but he continued to write for the Czech and émigré German press, bearing witness to the horrors of the Nazi takeover.
In the years between the Machtergreifung and the outbreak of World War II, Kisch continued to travel widely to report and to speak publically in the anti-fascist cause. He combined both in his visit to Australia as a delegate to an anti-fascist conference in 1934 which he later chronicled in Australian Landfall (1937). The right-wing Australian government repeatedly refused Kisch entry so he took matters into his own hands. He jumped five meters from the deck of his ship onto the quayside at Melbourne, breaking his leg in the process. This dramatic action mobilised the Australian left in support of Kisch and after a series of court cases, the government in the form of then Attorney-General Robert Menzies was soundly defeated.
In 1937 and 1938, Kisch was in Spain, where left-wingers from across Europe had been drawn by the Spanish civil war. He travelled across the country speaking in the Republican cause and his reports from the front line were widely published.
Following the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the subsequent Nazi occupation of Bohemia six months later, Kisch was unable to return to the country of his birth. Once war broke out, Paris, which he had made his main home since 1933, also became too dangerous for an outspoken Jewish communist whose native land no longer existed. In late 1939, Kisch and his wife Gisela, sailed for New York where, once again, he was initially denied entry. He eventually landed at Ellis Island on December 28, but as he only had a transit visa moved onto Mexico in 1940.
He remained in Mexico for the next five years, one of a circle of European communist refugees, notable among them Anna Seghers and Ludwig Renn . He continued to write, producing a book on Mexico and an autobiography Sensation Fair (1941). In this period of exile, Kisch's work regularly returned to the themes of his Prague home and his Jewish roots and in March 1946 he was able to return to his birthplace.
Legacy
Kisch died two years after his return to Prague, shortly after the Communist party seized complete power. There are contradictory reports of his attitude - as a German-speaking Jew - to the party in this period as it began to develop the anti-semitism which culminated in the Prague Trials of 1952 and supported the expulsion of most of Czechoslovakia's ethnic Germans.
After his death, Kisch's life and work were held up as exemplary in the GDR. The attitude to both in West Germany was more complicated due to his communism. Nonetheless, when Stern magazine founded a prestigious award for German journalism in 1977, it was named the Ego Erwin Kisch Prize in his honour.
Kisch has appeared as a character in two novels by Australian authors. He is a minor character in Frank Hardy's Power without Glory (1950), which was filmed for television in (1976), and plays a central, if fictionalised, role in Nicholas Hasluck 's Our Man K (1999).
Selected Bibliography
English titles are given where the work has been translated into English. All dates refer to earliest publication
- Aus Prager Gassen und Nächten (1912) - An early collection of reports from Prague's underworld
- Der Mädchenhirt (1914) - Kisch's only novel, again set in the Prague underworld
- Der Fall des Generalstabschefs Redl (1924)
- Der rasende Reporter (1924)
- Zaren, Popen, Bolschewiken (1926) - On the Soviet Union
- Schreib das auf, Kisch! (1929)
- Paradies Amerika (1929) - On the United States
- Changing Asia (1932) - On Soviet Central Asia
- China Geheim (1933) - On China
- Stories from Seven Ghettos (1934) - A collection with a Jewish theme
- Australian Landfall (1937)
- Soldaten am Meeresstrand (1938) - Reports from the Spanish Civil War
- Sensation Fair (1941)
- Entdeckungen in Mexiko (1945)
External Links
Last updated: 08-31-2005 17:57:46
