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

The Raging Reporter Introduced

The Raging Reporter Introduced His friends and wife. called him "Egonek," a combination of his first name and the Czech diminutive suffix "-ek"; the rest of the world came to know him as "the raging reporter." He was Egon Erwin Kisch, born in 1885 in . Prague, when that city of Czech and German cultures was one of the adornments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; he died in 1948, in his native city, then the capital ofthe independent Czechoslovakia that had been created out of the ruins of the Habsburg Empire following World War I. In a sense Kisch traded one empire for another, the Austro-Hungarian that was destined to crumble notwithstanding Kisch's.efforts to hasten the process to the best of his ability; and the post-World War II Soviet empire of whichCzechoslovakia was firmly a part and which had now become Kisch's only true homeland. Kisch's early work as areporter was intimately bound up with his native city; but by the time he retlirned to Prague in 1946, a year after the end of World War II, he had traveled the world over.in along and remarkable pursuit of experiences from which he crafted an extraordinary number of sketches collectivelyrepresenting one of the great achievements of modem reportage. A workaday journalist in the conventional sense only when he covered the back streets of Prague as a local reporter for the German-language Bohemia in the early years ofthe century, Kisch's subsequent career was devoted wholly to the elevation of reportage to the level of literary art. So admirably did he Egon Erwin Kisch; the Raging Reporter succeed in that goal that he is now acknowledged asthe central figure in that development in the German-speaking world in the twentieth century. Kisch's flirtation with the writing of poetry, fiction, and drama came at afairly early age, but was rapidly overtaken by his commitment to reportage. Once set on that path, he never wavered or retreated. Unlike -other writers who began as journalists and moved on to the more respected, and usually more lucrative, cultivation·of fiction, Kisch determined by his own example to change attitudes toward reportorial writing, to transform reporting into reportage, aliterary art form indebted to fact but shaped by the creative genius of the writer. The determinants of Kisch's success were many. A restless, energetic, immensely curious individual with a flair for adventure, the world, literally, became his beat. His early Prague newspaper sketches, subsequently collected in three books, laid the cornerstone of his career. Admired for their vividness and color, their keen eye for detail, their offbeat characters and settings, they also evidenced a social consciousness barely concealed beneath the apparent objectivity and lightheartedness. Kisch's sense of fair play and justice, his sympathy for the socially overlooked and marginalized, carried over into his WorldWar I war diary, often composed under fire, in whichhis concern above all is with'the ordinary soldier. The publisheddiary was a,considerable success and confirmed Kisch's positionas one ofthe leading reportorial writers ofhis day. When he uncovered and leaked the sordid truth behind the suicide in 1913 of Colonel Redl" a high-ranking officer in military intelligence, he was well on his way to celebrity. His later detaiied account of the Redl treason, Der Fall des Generalstabschefs Redl (The Case of the Chief ofthe General Staff Redl, 1924), was one of his most acclaimed publications. The sobriquet "the raging reporter" derives from the title of Kisch's first real collection of reportage after the ~arly Prague newspaper sketches, his war diary, and the Redl expose. The collection was first published in 1924 and has been republished many times since. Widely divergent in its topics, from a piece about a shelterfor the homeless in London to impressions of the ravaged Albanian city of Scutari in the Balkan War of 1913, Der rasende Reporter could not have come at a better time, in the literary sense. The devastation ofWorld War I understandably diminished the appeal of literary make-believe. How could the workofimagination vie with reality when reality 1 Introduction was more powerful,· more terrifying than anything the human mind could. devise? Interest now arose in aliterature offact, ofreality, aliterature dealing with the concrete issues of the here and now. This·enthusiasm for the "factographic " coincided with the "New Objectivity" ("Neue Sachlichkeit") of postwar Weimar Germany. Half a world away, in postr~volutionary...