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

Mungo Natscheradetz is Moritz Meseritzer; blondie Mirko is blondie Willy; and the repulsive murderer, Ferdinand Prokupek, is Hugo Klos. The third and last version of the play was published in Kisch’s 1927 reportage collection, Wagnisse in aller Welt (Worldwide Exploits).5 It is a slightly edited re-publication of the 1922 text,6 taking us back to Hamburg and Berlin again.

      In the 1922 and 1927 texts of the play, the slums and demi-monde of Prague have been transferred to Hamburg’s Reeperbahn district, notorious throughout Europe for its brothels, streetwalkers, and dives that served the city’s natives and foreign seamen who thronged the port. For the Berlin passages similar seedy neighborhoods and streets are named. Kisch had been in Hamburg several times, was fascinated by the city’s hustle and bustle, thought of it as a potential ‘red’ city, given its large working-class population, and knew about its vice district, but he certainly did not have the long and close familiarity with its nooks and crannies that he had with Prague’s neighborhoods, having resided there from his birth in 1885 until 1913. Presumably he became well-acquainted with Berlin’s vice districts during his 1913–1914 and 1921–1933 years there. The Hamburg-Berlin version would have been more suitable for performance in German cities, while the 1926 Prague version would have played better in Vienna, where much of the population was more familiar with the Prague accent and everyday Czech expressions than they were with the dialects of Hamburg or Berlin (and, it was a tale of the late Habsburg realms and years, which resonated in Austria). Linguistic and narrative variations in versions of both plays will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 4 and 6 below.

      In both fiction and nonfiction Kisch’s language is usually colloquial and idiomatic, especially when it comes to direct and indirect speech; it has passages in local dialects. This stems as much from his intellectual commitment to socialism (implying that art about everyday people should be written in the language such people use) as it does from the kind of neighborhoods he covered as a Prague journalist. It has slang peculiar to various parts of the vanished Dual Monarchy and Germany. It is often ‘breezy’ and informal, never flowery or over-ripe. His dialogues in the Redl play go back and forth among the dreary clichés of love affairs going sour, comical banter among policemen, the imbecilic patter of a worthless Habsburg dynast, and the formalities observed by officials engaged in their duties. For the most part his language in the 1926 version of the play is the ‘standard German’ of his day, with a few Austrian touches. He had used more of the local dialect in his 1924 nonfiction book about the Redl case. For instance, in creating a conversation between detectives on the spy’s trail and a porter at the hotel, he has the latter say:

      “Grad’ jetzt saan zwaa Herren im Auto ankommen, Kaufleute saans aus Bulgarien” – “Under vorher eine Herr allein?” – “Im Auto? Dös waass i net. Vor einer Viertelstund’ is der Herr Oberst Redl kommen. Im Zivil war er, dös waass i. Aber i waass net, ob er im Auto vorg’fahren is.”7

      To see how much this drifts from standard German: “Dös waass i net” is “Das weiss ich nicht” (“I don’t know about that”). Kisch used this conversation in the Redl play, but dropped his phonetic representation of the broad Viennese accent, though this might have amused play-goers in Berlin, Prague, or Brno. Actors playing some of the roles may have used Viennese accents on the stage without the need for instructions in the working scripts of the play. As mentioned above, the 1922 and 1927 versions of the play about Toni Gallows employ a Berlin accent and local slang. A typical line, in Kisch’s phonetic representation of this accent in Toni’s mouth, is:

      Ick habe lange jenug jewartet. Zweeundfuffzig Jahre wart ick uff den Klimbim. Ich will direkt in den Himmel, sonst misch ick hier auf.8

      In the play about Toni Gallows the language is inventively coarse and somewhat scatter-brained. The 1926 version includes Czech and German slang. Brief phatic phrases, adverbs, and interjections, often used as an ironic or questioning gloss on the ongoing conversation, can be translated in several ways. The Austrian “Na ja” is one such phrase—when in Prague, Tonka says, “No jo”, using a local accent. I do my best in these instances to turn such short phrases and verbal tags into their era-appropriate (American) English counterparts. In the 1926 text of the play Tonka refers to locations in or near Prague in Czech and German. The editors of the Kisch Gesammelte Werke edition of the play published the 1926 text and footnoted its slang and Czech words and phrases (as well as a few in Latin and Yiddish) with German clarifications and translations.9 Taking a position close to Kafka’s, Kisch believed that Yiddish in particular did not debase German but, as a living spoken language, could be used to enliven and enrich German written in everyday language (rather than in the allegedly pure ‘High German’ of literary culture as defined by critics and by middle-class precepts). He felt the same way about ‘Slavicized German’ spoken in some quarters of Prague.10

      Kisch’s writing often contains foreign words and phrases and a wealth of allusions indicating his extensive background knowledge of history and culture from around the world, not just Germany, Austria, and the Czech lands, with which he was directly familiar at the time. He was widely read and usually well-prepared by specific research when it came to reporting and essay-writing, and he was a scrupulous self-editor and rewriter as well. He prepared himself for his extended trips, which began in late 1925, in the same way. In his cabaret plays this kind of learned material does not appear, but there are allusions to local matters in Vienna and Prague that require either free translation or footnoting. An example of free translation would be my referring to Ober-Pajdakov as “Upper Nowheresville”, taking Toni’s language to refer to a “dump in the middle of nowhere”. Another example is turning a curt phrase and a sentence fragment into a sentence: “Meinetwegen in Prtschitz! Da hinein sind Ihnen Schwämme, Sie alter Vorreiter vom Ringelspiel” becomes “For all I care you can go pick mushrooms in the Jews’ cemetery out in the sticks, you old wooden horse from a merry-go-round.”11 More literally it is something like: “For all I care [go to] Prtschitz! [Go on] out there, there are mushrooms for you, you old etc.” Prtschitz is today’s Sedlec-Prčice, forty miles south of Prague, known for an old synagogue and Jewish cemetery, and mushroom-picking in woods and cemeteries was a popular pastime of the era. The phrase has a broader connotation—even today Czechs say “jdi do Pričice” (“go to Pričice’) to mean “get lost” or “beat it”.

      Some problems for the reader of the 1926 text stem from Toni’s fractured grammar and run-on sentences, and some from practices such as Kisch substituting the letter “j” for the letter “i” in various words and slang terms. (Whereas, in the Berlin dialect, he substitutes “j” with a “yeh” sound for hard “g” at the beginning of syllables, turning “genug” into “jenug”.) Thus in Prague the reader encounters “Hajl”, in this case meant as a derogatory remark about another prostitute. You find “Hai” (shark) in a dictionary and then realize that Kisch is substituting a “j” and using a standard diminutive form (by adding “[e] l” at the end of a word), giving you “little shark”. This is just one of numerous epithets that Toni uses to describe her fellow men and women. Men are bums, guys, drunks, mugs, gents, cabbage-heads, suitors (brothel clients), horse-radishes, and a variety of other things. Women are ladies (those she works with before they turn on her), sows, cows, floozies, broken-down things, and other objects of contempt. In a relaxed mood she compliments Heaven’s High Judge as a friendly paprika (i.e., “peppery old gent”); in the Hamburg-Berlin version this becomes “congenial old rooster”. Sometimes I translate these literally, at others with what I think makes more sense to readers of English. On account of the several different usages of “Herr” in German, I sometimes leave it untranslated in the Redl play. Through exposure to films and television American and English readers are used to the German word and would find phrases such as “Mr. Post Office official” or “Post Office official, Sir” awkward, though salutations such as “Mr. President” or “Mr. Chairman” are commonplace in English. In dialogues among military men and high-ranking civilians I often translate it as “Sir”, just as it would be used in English. Also, where Kisch writes “Parlament”, I use “Reichsrat”.

      Footnotes to the Redl melodrama, most of which are on the title-and-cast page, are long because they include necessary background information about specific historical characters and matters, who and which are probably little-known or unknown to most English-language