High Treason and Low Comedy. Robert T. O’Keeffe

in accepting at face value an idealized form of reportage as presented by its practitioners and advocates, Peter Steiner undertook a critique of the most famous post-World War II piece of reportage, Julius Fučik’s Reportage: Notes from the Gallows, first published in Czech five years after Fučik was guillotined in 1943.55 Steiner’s analysis makes plain the book’s religious-mythical (‘Christological’) framing of the story of Fučik’s captivity and execution by the Nazis and how it became a propaganda tool of the Czech communist leadership during the post-war years (as it was caustically depicted in Milan Kundera’s novel, The Joke). In such a case of hortatory, partisan political writing it is difficult for an author to escape using the devices of fiction, sometimes drifting into poetic and rhetorically driven representation of crass realities, as Fučik often did.

      In its glory years, when the claims of reportage were being advanced as an alternative to conventional journalism (‘just the facts’ articles and the printing of officially released information without challenge or comment), Kisch and others also argued for reportage’s superiority over fiction as a mirror of the world. They presumed it was the wave of the future, with literary fiction itself on the verge of death due to trends in current political and literary life; obviously this was a mistaken judgment. Reportage did not disappear with Kisch’s death in 1948. In the West the term denominates social and political reporting that exhibits the author’s literary skills and analyzes current events in terms of deeper, yet explicable causes that may not be immediately apparent to the reader; it often has an implicit political message. Large anthologies of reportage have been published in the US and Great Britain between the 1950s and the present, yet none of them includes articles by Kisch or even mentions him as a major, influential interwar practitioner of the form.56 As Patka surmised, this reluctance in the West to deal with Kisch as a master of reportage is an artifact of the fixed attitudes that accompanied Cold-War polarization of opinion. Kisch’s reputation in Germany and Austria, built almost entirely upon an assessment of him as the founder and cynosure of modern reportage, remains strong. However, in the US and the UK (but not Australia) he has gone missing from the genealogy of reportage in the minds of contemporary editors and compilers of anthologies.

      While continuing to practice journalism in this mode, Kisch encountered major impediments in reaching his German-speaking readership after the Nazis ascended to power in early 1933. After the Reichstag fire he was rounded up as a target for internment by the new authorities; his account of his captivity has been translated by Harold Segel.57 The possession of a Czech passport facilitated his release from jail, but from March, 1933, until the end of the Second World War his books were banned (and burned) in Germany. Kisch made Paris his next home base, soon moving to the town of Versailles, where, in 1938, he married his secretary of many years, Gisela Lyner (he had a reputation as a ‘charmer’ and womanizer in his earlier years). During his exile from Germany his new volumes of reportage, numerous newspaper articles, and reports of his anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist activities could only reach a vastly reduced audience of German readers, i.e., fellow-exiles and emigrants from Germany predisposed to sharing his ideas and ideals.

      Kisch’s travels continued—England, Australia, Spain during its civil war—as did translations of his work, but the growing tide of partisan journalism associated with political turbulence and the likelihood of a major war tended to drown out his voice. This was especially true in the English-speaking lands, which had their own prominent overseas journalists, for instance Hemingway, Orwell, and John Gunther; the first two of these were ‘literary journalists’, while Gunther’s practice of writing countrywide socio-political surveys was similar to Kisch’s approach to international reportage. He stayed one step ahead of the Nazis, leaving France in 1939. Quarantined in New York for ten months, he was denied entry into the US on political grounds (as a known leftist and ‘trouble–maker’), resulting in his spending the World War II years in Mexico, where he completed two books discussed above.

      It was in Mexico that the allegation that Kisch was a communist propagandist (or ‘Party hack’) received some ammunition. Kisch wrote a slanderous diatribe against Gustav Regler, an old colleague who had left the Party and denounced the sins and crimes of Stalin and his abettors. Regler, to use the stilted jargon of the era, was now accused by pro-Russian intellectuals and writers of being ‘objectively Fascist’, because he did not give the USSR carte-blanche in its internal political life or manipulative machinations abroad (he was also accused of collaboration with the Vichy authorities). Kisch praised Stalin’s 1937–1938 lethal purge of military men on trumped-up charges as necessary and useful in bolstering the USSR’s military capacity—a nonsensical and factually false interpretation of events that also ignored the inconvenient fact that the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 had facilitated Nazi aggression. The offending article was published in the New Masses in March, 1942 and became the focus of an ongoing war of words between Party hard-liners and the non-communist, anti-Stalinist left in the US.58 This unseemly controversy and the political and personal reasons behind Kisch’s behavior in the case have been analyzed and interpreted by Patka,59 Heidi Zogbaum,60 and Jonathan Miles, Otto Katz’s biographer.61 Zogbaum remarked that Kisch’s writing about Regler may have been motivated by his desire to protect Katz (a well-known organizer who used the alias André Simone) from expulsion from Mexico, while his collapse into mendacity and implausible reverence for Stalin was probably motivated by uncertainty over his own prospective post-war status and livelihood. Separation from the Party at this point in his life would have meant social isolation and anxiety about what would happen to him and his wife in the near future. His role in the affair did, in fact, isolate him from a variety of American liberals and leftists who had previously admired him.

      In April 1945, during the final weeks of the war in Europe, Kisch celebrated his 60th birthday in Mexico City. The festivities put together by the exile community went on for a week, and there were gifts and tributes to him from abroad as well.62 Of relevance to the present work it is notable that his friends put on a revival of his play about Colonel Redl as part of the celebrations.63 Rather than nostalgia or recognition of how the case had contributed to the demise of the Old Regime, perhaps what they were marking with this choice was the fact that Kisch’s reporting on the case had spread his reputation as a tenacious investigative reporter. The specific controversies of the late Habsburg world were now, or seemed to be, in the distant past, given the events of 1933–1945.64 This distancing was the product of an optical illusion, although it was not clear at the time. These old (pre-1914) controversies have not yet totally subsided, as can be seen in the rampant chauvinism, irredentism, and anti-Semitism within Central and Eastern Europe in the present day. Four decades of Moscow-enforced ‘fraternal socialism’ in the Soviet bloc of satellite states collapsed into civil wars and ethnic-supremacy campaigns after the dissolution of the bloc in 1989–1992.65 Once again nationalist autocrats (‘strongmen’) of the 1930s ilk66 accrued power in the region.67 The interwar strongmen were an outgrowth of widespread economic problems and nationalistic dissatisfaction with the peace treaties of 1918–1920. Today’s strongmen also reflect economic and ethnic dissatisfactions brought into the open by the collapse of communism, the social inequities and environmental damage caused by a form of global capitalism that seems beyond local political control, and perceived impingements on national sovereignty (and ‘national culture’) by the European Union.

      In 1946 Kisch returned to Prague, where he was one of the few ‘Prague Germans’ allowed to resettle in Czechoslovakia (in 1945–1946 a thorough and often violent expulsion of approximately three million Germans from the reconstituted Czechoslovakia took place). His health was not good, putting an end to his days a roving reporter, though he wrote fresh pieces and revised older works. Kisch returned to a city that no longer had a vibrant, multicultural life, and he felt isolated and depressed on account of the death of family members and friends in the Holocaust. As Erhard Schütz wrote in an essay in the literary journal Text + Kritik, Kisch’s misgivings about how communism had developed in the USSR, his distress about the systematic anti-Germanism of the Czechoslovakian state, and a growing emotional bond with his fellow Jews characterized his postwar years in Prague.68 A series of strokes culminated in his death in March 1948, soon after the take-over of Czechoslovakia by a communist coup that had a high level of popular support. As some of his biographers and commentators point out, had Kisch survived until the time of the hysterical, anti-Semitic Slánský show-trial in 1952, it is probable that he would have