Egon Erwin Kisch, the Raging Reporter: A Bio-Anthology

On Pubs and their Guests

OnPub~ and Their 6ue~t~: Dramaturgy ofthe fleaTheater In cheap nightclubs you often come across people who do not earn "honorable" , bourgeois livelihoods but nevertheless do not earn their money in some dishonest way. People born with some talent who aren't suited for thetrack of ordinary life. So they derail themselves, and the course of their lives runs along side roads. But just imagine that in some peaceful streetyou suddenly encounter a railway. You'd shake your head angrily; at the very least you'd stare in wonder at it. That's what the derailed people understand. And because they have no desire to be the cause of any angry head-shaking or astonished stares,these bashful originals go among people aslittle as possible during the day and venture out into the light of day, so to say, only at night. At night the philistinism ofhumanity is not so assertive; people tend to show those ofodd professions an inquisitive understanding. Often you can find a whole assembly's worth of colleagues of such rare talents together-silhouette cutters, market hawkers, chantantdirectors, fair acrobats, instantportrait artists, conjurers, weather forecasters, couplet singers, mind readers, harmonica virtuosos, eccentric dancers, and similar artists. By·all means the most·interesting ofthese Prague figures isFerda Mestek de Podskal, since he has not sustained his adventurous life just by one of these curious ways of earning a living but rather has pursued all imaginable professions . "You've already been everything, Ferda," his friends sometimes remark after he's recounted some episode from his life in his usual jovial way.-At which he protests quite matter-of-factly: "No, no! I haven't been a midwife yet." 11] Egon Erwin KiIChI the Raging Reporter Since no genealogical handbook gives the birthdate of this whimsical aristocrat, here you have his curriculum vitae short and to-the-point: Ferdinand Mestek, whom the Prague Flaming Guild later honored with tax-free hereditary nobility and the title "de Podskal" for his contributions to art and learning, was born on-or, better said-in water. He came into the world as the son of the Prague master tailor of the same name on 17 March 1853 during the.great flood when the tides of the Moldau River had overflowed the Podskal workshop and residence·of Mestek the tailor. Fortunately, soldiers of the corps ofengineers, using a pontoon, succeeded in rescuing the tailor, his wife, his five daughters, and thehereditary prince, whose birth had been announced by cannon . shots from the XIX Bastion. (The assertion that the occasion for these shots was the flood is a perfidious slander.) Fromthis the first day of his life, little Mestek began to hate water, which had sought to destroy his still-innocent existence, and to this very day still can't comprehend that many people regard this uncongenial fluidness as something to be enjoyed. After the flood, Mestek senior hastily rented a new apartment at the comer ofFerdinandstrasse and Charvatgasse and began hemming seamlessly. His one and only son was also supposed to take up tailoring, but Ferda aimed higher. He wanted to become a scholar and at an early age grew intere~ted in zoology. He crawled into the garden ofthe convent ofOur Lady ofthe Snows, roamed all around the grounds on the Vysehrad, ·and examined the entire Scharka for all manner of animal life-mice, hedgehogs, salamanders, caterpillars, slowworms, and beetles-with whose help he turned his father's apartment into a menagerie. At night he shut the animals up in a wooden box; during the day he allowed them as much freedom of movement as possible (please note his presentiment of the Hagenbeckl system). Only once did he forget to put away a hedgehog in its night quarters. It crawled into the bed of one of Ferda's aunts and onto auntie herself. A terrible outcry, a sound thrashing, the closing down of the little zoo, and stem warnings were the consequences of the unfortunate omission. Since Ferda nonetheless did not respect the ban and kept on dragging various mammals and reptiles back home with him, he was given a sound thrashing by his father every morning. This punishment became a daily exercise. "Why are you beating me; I didn't do anything," he howled once during the bastinado. However he got this answer: "That doesn't matter; you'll be up to more pranks even before the 128 Dramaturgy ofthe...