About this ebook
Born in Prague under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kisch began his career as a crime reporter for local newspapers. He saw combat in Serbia as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I, led an abortive left-wing coup d’état in Vienna in 1918, and became famous in the German-speaking world as der rasende Reporter (the raging reporter) when he exposed the attempted cover-up of a case of treason in high places that rocked the Habsburg Empire on the eve of World War I.
He visited North Africa, the Soviet Union, Central Asia, Australia, China, and the United States, where he traveled from one coast to the other as an ordinary seaman, made friends with Charlie Chaplin and Upton Sinclair, and commented with wit and irony on American life.
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About the author
Born in Boston, Harold Bernard Segel (1930-2016) graduated from Boston Latin School in 1947, Boston College in 1951 with a degree in Modern Languages, and Harvard University with a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1955. He started teaching at the University of Florida in 1955 and joined the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University in 1959, where he eventually became professor emeritus of Slavic Languages and of Comparative Literature.
At Columbia, Segel held appointments in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of the Arts, the School of International and Public Affairs, and the School of General Studies. He was director of graduate studies in the Department of Slavic Languages (1977-80); member of the Council for Research in the Humanities, Columbia University, (1977-79; chair 1978-79); member of the Columbia University Senate (1978-82); and director, Institute on East Central Europe (1978-88). He was a visiting professor at Indiana University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stockholm University, Sweden.
Segel was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Kosciuszko Foundation and of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, both in New York City. The recipient of numerous fellowships, grants and awards, he was twice decorated in 1975 by the Polish government for contributions on behalf of Polish culture, at the Ministry of Culture in Warsaw and at the Polish Consulate in New York.
Segel published extensively on Polish literature and culture, authoring numerous monographs on Polish drama, Romanticism, Renaissance Culture, and the place of Jews in Polish culture. He also wrote on eighteenth century Russian literature and on twentieth-century Russian drama. An authority on Eastern Europe more broadly, he authored The Columbia Guide to the Literature of Eastern Europe Since 1945, and Egon Erwin Kisch, the Raging Reporter. He was also a prolific comparatist, publishing on Austrian and German culture, Baroque poetry, turn-of-the-century cabaret in cities across Europe, puppets, robots, and automatons in avant-garde drama, and on the physical imperatives of modernism.
Prague-born Egon Erwin Kisch (1885-1948) established narrative non-fiction as an art form in Central Europe. The son of a Jewish draper, he became a journalist and part of a circle of writers that included Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo Bergmann and Franz Kafka. Their literary hybrid of Czech, Jewish and German cultures was unique and they were mocked for sitting in cafés where they “werfelt und brodet und kafkat und kischt.”
Kisch attended technical university, dropped out, and studied journalism in Berlin. After returning to Prague, he became police reporter for the German-language paper Bohemia from 1906 to 1913. His muckraking features ran under the headline “Roaming Through Prague” and explored the city’s underworld of bars, dives, gambling dens, prostitutes and murderers. His first major scoop was the story behind the sensational forced suicide of Colonel Alfred Redl, intelligence officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, in 1913. A homosexual, Redl had been blackmailed into spying for Russia. Kisch served in World War I and was wounded in action. He kept a diary, later published as Write It Down Kisch! His military experience further radicalized him and in 1918, Kisch participated as a Red Guard in a failed putsch in Vienna. He returned to Prague journalism and theater, but was drawn to Berlin. In Weimar Germany, his “literature of fact” became part of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) cultural movement.
In 1924, his collection of pieces Der rasende Reporter (The Raging Reporter) became a bestseller, followed by many other books of reportage from Europe, North Africa, the Soviet Union, China, and the U.S. The Nazis arrested Kisch, a Communist and a Jew, in 1933 and deported him to Czechoslovakia. His books were banned. That year, he wrote Tales from Seven Ghettos, accounts of Jewish communities from the Thirty Years’ War until the 1930s. Kisch was himself a secular Jew whose family claimed descent from Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of Prague. Kisch inspected the attic of Prague’s Old-New Synagogue for traces of the Golem.
In 1934, he sailed to Australia for an anti-war congress, was denied entry, but jumped off the boat, and broke his leg. The “Kisch Affair” became a cause célèbre, raising Australian awareness of Nazism. Kisch wrote it up in Australian Landfall before going to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Kisch fled to New York, was detained at Ellis Island and denied residence in the U.S. He and his wife Gisela spent the war in Mexico City where he completed his memoir Sensation Fair as Stefan Zweig was writing The World of Yesterday in Petropolis, Brazil. Unlike Zweig, Kisch lived to see Nazism defeated. In 1946, he returned to his birthplace a hero. He died in Prague in March of 1948.
