By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel –The years 1918 and 1919 were post-war times in Europe. Empires collapsed, republics were formed, revolutions and civil wars raged. A prosperous Europe was dragged into chaos, famine and devastation. In the book Yesterday’s World: Memoirs of a European, Stefan Zweig in 1941 reflected on what did not happen in the newly formed Austria:
“I would find it difficult to explain how survived then looted, poor, miserable Austria. On the right, the Republic of Soviets was formed in Bavaria; on the left, Hungary, led by Béla Kun, became Bolshevik; even today it remains incomprehensible to me why the revolution did not spread to Austria. There was indeed no shortage of explosives. The soldiers who had returned home, half-starved and half-dressed, roamed the streets, looking with anger at the defiant luxury of those who had profited from war and inflation; a battalion of Red Guards was already in the barracks, and there was no one to counteract it. Two hundred determined men could at that time have taken power in Vienna and in all Austria. But nothing serious happened. Once or twice a group of anarchists attempted a coup, which was easily suppressed by four or five dozen armed policemen.”
A socialist revolution did not take place in Austria despite the efforts of the commander of the Red Guard in Vienna, the Prague Jew Egon Erwin Kisch (1885 -1948). He was stopped by his brother, the conservative-minded Dr. Paul Kisch, a classmate of Franz Kafka. Claude David, Franz Kafka’s biographer, writes: “Another fellow student with whom Kafka had a long relationship was Paul Kisch. […] While his brother Egon Erwin Kisch would earn a reputation as an extreme left-wing political writer, Paul Kisch, the only one Kafka visited, joined […] one of the conservative student groups. A little later he would be invited to the Neue Freie Presse (New Free Press), a very officious Viennese newspaper.”
The Hungarian writer Béla Illesz, a doctor of law, a communist, and a member of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic government, recalled, “We reconvened in my Moscow apartment. […] The conversation brought up […] episodes of the First World War and memories related to its end as well as to the beginning of the revolutionary events. Egon Erwin Kisch was in Vienna in 1918, when […] the Habsburg monarchy collapsed, and was a commander of a Red Guard unit. – What did you do in that capacity?
– Not much. The monarchy collapsed of its own accord.
– But there were some armed actions?
– Um… I suppose I could call one of them.
– I was assigned to take over the editorial office of the biggest bourgeois newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse. With a platoon of Red Guards I broke into the building of the newspaper, where the editor-in-chief, my own brother, came out to us.
– In the name of the revolution, I confiscate the editorial office and the printing press! – I declared.
– Just try it! – replied the editor-in-chief.
– If you don’t hand them over voluntarily, I shall be forced to do it by force of arms! – I raised my voice.
– I’ll have to submit to force, the editor immediately lowered his tone. – But… but… he wagged his finger at me, I warn you, Egon, I’ll complain to our mother.”
In 2008, a Czech-born Yale University literature professor, Peter Demec, published his father’s account of the Kisch brothers’ relationship. According to the narrator’s father, Paul, a German nationalist – who but Jews are German nationalists – was in strong ideological conflict with his Communist brother. On October 12, 1944, “German nationalist” Paul Kisch died in Auschwitz.
Egon Kisch was a cosmopolitan with a Prague “bent.” Bela Illesz writes: “Egon Erwin Kisch was born in Prague. For the rest of his life, wherever he was, wherever he worked, he remained a Prague citizen. It seems to me that even when asked about his nationality, he always answered in one word: a Prague citizen. Few people in the world knew Prague and its history as well as he did, few people knew all its sights as well as he did, literally every house, every stone, every tree, even every bush. But, remaining a Prague resident in spirit, in character, he felt at home, equally at home in Vienna and Berlin, Paris and Moscow, and in many other capitals of the world.”
Egon Kisch was a great adventurer. I do not agree with my father, who researched Kisch’s work and saw him as a freedom fighter. Kisch advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat, which did not mix well with freedom. He was a Czech German-speaking writer, journalist, a junior officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, a Red Guardsman, a participant in the Spanish Civil War, and a member of the Communist parties in Austria and Germany. He traveled the bright path of an adventurer in Australia, Czechoslovakia, USA, Germany, USSR, Tunisia, Algeria, Spain, China, Ceylon, Belgium, Holland, Austria, France, Saudi Arabia, Denmark and Mexico, i.e. on five (!) continents.
Egon Erwin Kisch was born in 1885 in Prague, the son of a cloth merchant of Sephardic Jewish descent. In 1902, he graduated from Prague’s Nikolander Real School, and two years later became an employee of the Prague Daily Gazette and Bohemia. At a survey at the school, Kisch announced his intention to pursue journalism. This profession was considered a lowly occupation in Austria-Hungary. Bohemia was then the most popular German-language publication in Prague. Kisch took a job as a crime reporter, considered a demeaning position in the editorial office. He was in charge of police news and quickly rose to prominence thanks to his rare reporting talent. His notes began to be reprinted by Viennese newspapers.
Local crime scoops became less interesting on the eve of World War I. Notes about Kaiser Wilhelm’s militaristic plans began to appear in Bohemia. In 1913, Kisch, cleverly bypassing the censorship, published the news that shocked contemporaries about the betrayal of the head of Austro-Hungarian counterintelligence, Colonel Alfred Rödl, who turned out to be a Russian spy. Kisch made a journalistic investigation of Rödl’s espionage.
Emperor Franz Joseph and the heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand learned of Rödl’s treachery from a newspaper article by Kisch. His article was reprinted by Parisian newspapers, which praised the young “miracle journalist.” The Rödl exposé earned Kisch enormous fame. German writer, journalist and publisher Florian Illies in his book 1913. Summer of a Century (2013) writes: “Egon Erwin Kisch, the whistleblower (Rödl. – A. G.), this scam turned from a reporter into a legend.”
In 1913, Kisch moved to Berlin, where he began working at the newspaper Berlin Daily Newspaper, but was soon mobilized for army service. He participated in World War I as a junior officer in the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1917, as a military censor in Vienna, he became acquainted with banned left-wing radical literature. In 1918 he became one of the leaders of illegal soldier committees and an organizer and commander of the Red Guard. In 1919, Kisch joined the Communist Party of Austria. In those days he was one of the most popular figures in the Austrian capital. The following year, as reaction set in, Kisch was sentenced to three months in prison for illegal activities and “incitement.” The Austrian authorities expelled him to Czechoslovakia, of which he became a citizen.
In 1920, Kisch published a war diary in Prague under the title Soldier in the Prague Corps. In the fall of 1921, Kisch moved to Berlin for the second time. In 1924, his book The Raged Reporter was published. In 1925, he joined the German Communist Party. He then continued his “raged reporting” in travel diaries of his travels in Russia (From 1925 to 1931 he traveled to the Soviet Union several times), Central Asia, Africa, and the United States. He published the book The Raged Reporter in Russia: – Czars. Popes. Bolsheviks (1927). In 1928-1929, the communist Kisch traveled to the United States under an assumed name and wrote the book American Paradise (1930). At the beginning of his literary activity, Kisch belonged to a circle to which the German-speaking Jewish writers Franz Kafka and Max Brod belonged.
A few hours after setting fire to the Reichstag, Kisch was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Spandau Prison. Kisch’s worldwide fame and his Czechoslovak citizenship saved him from death. He was exiled to Prague and from there moved to Paris. In 1934, at the invitation of Henri Barbusse, he traveled to an anti-fascist congress in Melbourne. Australian authorities banned Kisch from entering the country as a communist extremist. He jumped 18 feet off the side of a steamship and sailed to Melbourne with a broken leg. He was arrested by the police, but under pressure from the “progressive community” he spoke at a rally. He was then sentenced to six months in prison and expelled from the country. After Australia he went to Spain and took part in the 1937-1938 Civil War as a fighter in the International Brigades.
Kisch began his journalistic work with small pieces, then organized into collections of “reports”. Some “reports” could be defined as feuilletons, reviews, historical studies. Kisch gave the previously minor genre of newspaper reportage the character of artistic journalism, creating a new type of essay-essay. In articles and in the book The Raged Reporter and in the autobiographical book Sensation Fair (1942), Kisch outlined his thoughts on the aesthetic and moral responsibility of the journalist and on reportage “as a form of art and struggle.” In his work, Kisch combined the presentation of fact with its presentation by means of “logical fantasy.” By conjuring up the unknown with the help of “logical fantasy,” the reporter, according to Kisch, should “reconstruct the course of the event and the transitions from cause to effect, making sure that the line of his narrative does not deviate one hair’s breadth from the facts known to him.” During the first decades of the twentieth century, Kisch’s style evolved from the old-fashioned neo-romanticism characteristic of the period to his distinctive style of reportage.
In 1897, Kafka witnessed an anti-Jewish pogrom in Prague that began as an anti-German protest. Mark Twain, reporting from Vienna on the parliamentary struggle, described that situation as follows: “There were three or four days of ferocious riots, […] Jews and Germans were ravaged and plundered, their dwellings destroyed; riots broke out in other Bohemian towns – in some cases the instigators were Germans, in others Czechs, but in all cases it was the Jew who went to the stake, whichever side he took.” In Prague, mobs looted Jewish businesses, smashed shop windows, smashed synagogues and beat Jews in the streets. Kisch was two years younger than Kafka and witnessed these anti-Jewish riots. In 1920, anti-Jewish pogroms broke out again in Prague. “I spent the whole day in the streets bathed in anti-Jewish hatred,” Kafka reported in a letter, contemplating the need to flee the city. ‘Bad blood’ is what they called the Jews in my presence.” Anti-German and anti-Jewish sentiment was widespread among Czechs. But it was not uncommon for both Czechs and Germans to be anti-Jewish. He no longer repeats that “my homeland is working class.” He is nostalgic for Prague. In the essay An Indian Village Under the Star of David (Discoveries in Mexico), he described a group of Indian Jews he found who believed they were descendants of the Marranos, forcibly baptized Jews. His membership in the Communist Party ensured his return to postwar communist Czechoslovakia. He continued there as an essayist and again became a favorite author in Prague.
Egon Erwin Kisch was a very jovial man and an incredibly efficient publicist, referred to as a “raged reporter.” He was a pioneer of world journalism and the founder of artistic and analytical reporting.
In communist Prague, Kisch became even more popular than he had been during the Austro-Hungarian period. His return to Czechoslovakia proved to be a return to Jewishness as well. Although Kisch was not a religious man, he devoted much time and effort to finding traces of the Golem, the legendary protector of the Jewish people, made by the Prague rabbi Yehuda ben Bezalel – Löw (Maharal of Prague; Maharal is an acronym for “our great teacher” in Hebrew).
The outbreak of World War II caught Kisch in France. In October 1940, he moved via New York to Mexico, where he lived for five and a half years. There he was a contributor to the magazine Free Germany. His book Discoveries in Mexico (1945) shows Kisch, not a “raged reporter,” but a man reflecting on the loss of his homeland. Kisch declared that he was a descendant of the Maharal. In 1946 he was elected honorary chairman of the Jewish community of Prague; it was the last position of an atheist communist. He died of a heart attack on March 31, 1948.
Austrians, Czechs, Germans, and Jews consider Kisch a compatriot. He considered himself among the “citizens of the universe” who were labeled “rootless cosmopolitans” in the USSR and repressed in 1949. Kisch was an excellent candidate for the title of “rootless cosmopolite” or “Jewish bourgeois nationalist,” but he was not “exposed” in the “socialist camp” in time for the writer’s “timely” death in 1948.
Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.