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

and espionage could have been levied against him. In fact, the all-purpose ‘Trotskyite’ slur was aimed at him even after his death.70 Like his old friend Katz (André Simone) he might have gone to the gallows.71 He was fortunate to die when he did, spared a final disillusionment with the Communist Party, about whose crimes of commission and failures to establish a better society he had maintained a public silence, though he seemed to harbor many private doubts about the trend of events.

      The foregoing Introduction addresses the matter of ‘Kisch in English translation’ and, in abbreviated fashion, several aspects of his life and work: his long career as a journalist; his travels and adventures, which resulted in thematic books; his ventures into fiction, including writing for the stage; his reputation during the interwar years as ‘the master of reportage’; and the relationship between his writing and his political beliefs and commitments. With regard to the topic of Kisch in English, I note that my translation of the two cabaret plays is the first instance of any complete fictional work of Kisch—short stories, a novel, and plays —coming over into English; only a few small illustrative excerpts of these works have been translated to date.72 It is my hope that this will contribute to a re-evaluation of Kisch as a more well-rounded and gifted writer, rather than as just a master of politically-framed journalism (a characterization that ignores his gifts as a feuilleton-writer and essayist).

      The two plays selected were Kisch’s most successful works for the stage. As to the Redl story, a combination of materials from his 1924 book and his Redl play was adapted into a 1931 film that gave Kisch writing credits. In the previous year the story of ‘Toni Gallows’ that Kisch had presented in feuilletons and three versions for the stage was also made into a successful film. These adaptations indicated that producers and directors believed that both stories had popular appeal. Other stage, film, and literary adaptations of the Redl srory appeared in the 1920s, 1950s, 1960s and 1980s. Along with the later television-plays of the Toni Gallows tale, these constitute the ‘long afterlives’ of the stories that are discussed in detail in Chapters 9 and 10.

      To reiterate, the play about Colonel Redl is a historical melodrama with comedic interludes (Kisch called it a “Tragicomedy of the General Staff”). It derives its narrative materials from a successful book of investigative—and, at times speculative—reporting about the famous espionage affair. The shorter play about Toni Gallows, a pathetic yet defiant Prague prostitute who argues her way into heaven, is based on a feuilleton-style newspaper sketch that was framed as a posthumous fantasy. Though the character of Toni is a fictional embellishment of a woman allegedly known to Kisch from his days as a reporter in pre-1914 Prague, the social milieu she dwelled in was real enough. The plays bring to light fictional techniques that Kisch sometimes used in nonfictional reportages and essays and thus contribute to an understanding of his approach to writing in general. They also raise more general questions about how historical events are transformed into works of art, a topic that will be addressed in the final chapter.

Chapter 2.

      Notes on the Plays: Sources and Translation

      The texts of the two plays translated into English for the first time here were published in a wide-ranging 1926 collection of pieces Kisch had written during the early and mid-1920s, Hetzjagd durch die Zeit (Pursuit through Time, or, alternatively, Pursuit throughout the Ages).1 Kisch (or his publisher) selected the book’s title on the basis of the inclusion of his play about Colonel Alfred Redl, Die Hetzjagd. During the interwar era interest in the Redl case persisted in Germany, Austria, and Prague, where Kisch was a well-known reporter and Redl had been stationed at the time of his detection as a spy, though the day of his downfall occurred in Vienna. Kisch kept this interest alive and came back to the story several times between 1913, when he first reported on the case, and 1941–1942, when he devoted a chapter of his memoirs to the espionage affair and his role in bringing it to the public’s attention.

      The origins of the plays are quite different from each other. Die Hetzjagd relied for its basic material on Kisch’s post-World War I research into the famous espionage scandal, resulting in his 1924 book of investigative journalism about the case. He didn’t have to wait until his research was completed to work on the play —as discussed in Chapter 4 below, he could have easily used material from a more ‘telegraphic’ version of the Redl story written in 1921 but not published until 1936.2 This version would have sufficed for the play’s narrative outline. The story about the Prague prostitute nicknamed “Toni Gallows” first appeared as a newspaper feuilleton in Prager Tagblatt in early 1921.3 Kisch had encountered Toni (or had heard of her story) during his pre-war years as a reporter covering his native city’s demi-monde and criminal haunts. During the 1920s and 1930s Kisch returned to these two stories several times in prose articles of varying length, so the published and performed plays were bracketed in time by newspaper, magazine, and book-form treatments of their narratives. As with the Redl story, his last return to the tale of Toni the prostitute came in a chapter of his memoirs. The memoirs were among the first of the books he wrote after the Nazi ban of 1933 to be issued in Germany and Austria after World War II, thus bringing these two stories and the rest of the book’s contents to the attention of younger German readers for the first time.

      The word Hetzjagd carries the connotation of “harrying”, as in the chase and hunting of game. If considered either in its widest extension of meaning or metaphorically, it supplies an interpretive framework for several other pieces in the collection. However, it is possible that with “pursuit(s) throughout the ages” Kisch was alluding to the fact that he himself was ‘always on the hunt’ for both gripping stories, and, in many cases, for ‘the story behind the story’. The book came out at a time when he was writing prolifically and casting about for new publishing links and travel opportunities, having made up his mind that the kind of reportage that had succeeded so well in Der rasende Reporter (released in late 1924) laid out a promising path for future works. By the time Hetzjagd durch die Zeit appeared Kisch’s historical melodrama about Redl and his sharp-edged comedy about Toni Gallows had been presented in variant versions in several venues in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.

      These two cabaret plays (the Redl play was performed in small theaters as well) were Kisch’s most popular works for the stage. They appeared under a variety of names in two languages during the 1920s and early 1930s. The play about Colonel Alfred Redl’s last day on earth was performed as either Die Hetzjagd (The Pursuit) or Der Fall des Generalstabschefs Redl (The Case of General Staff Chief Redl, which was the title of Kisch’s 1924 book about the affair). In Czech the play was called Vyzvědacská aféra obstra Redla. The play about Toni Gallows appeared as Die Himmelfahrt der Tonka Šibenice and Die Himmelfahrt der Galgentoni (The Ascension of Toni Gallows to Heaven), alternatively using Czech and German nicknames for the protagonist. In English “Toni the Gallows Girl” would also be an appropriate sobriquet, as will be seen when the origin of her nickname is revealed in the play. The Czech version of the play was titled Tonka Šibenice na onom svété. Variations in the plays’ titles depended on their performance sites. Czech performances preceded German ones, for reasons discussed below in Chapter 7, which gives an overview of Kisch’s playwriting career, the performance histories of his plays on Czech and German stages, and critical responses to them.

      As to the published texts of the plays, variations depended on what Kisch thought would attract readers. For instance, in the 1926 German text for his play about Toni Gallows, the play is billed as “a real Prague legend”. This entailed using the Czech names from the 1921 feuilleton for the play’s characters and for the names of various dives, brothels, streets, and well-known neighborhood markers in Prague, familiar to readers there. Because his potential audience was larger in Germany, Kisch published two German-setting versions of the Toni Gallows play, in which local details of the story are altered accordingly. They are slightly less developed than the 1926 Prague version translated here. The earlier German version of the play was published in a 1922 issue of a Berlin weekly magazine, Das Tage-Buch, at a time when it was being performed in Berlin.4 In this version Toni’s life-story unfolds first in Hamburg and then in Berlin, and the language of the three deceased souls is in heavy regional dialect (a few Hamburg touches and a host of Berlin usages and pronunciations).

      Here