Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948)

Egon Erwin Kisch was born into a wealthy, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were Ernestine (Kuh) and Hermann Kisch, owner of a textile shop, and he had four brothers. Egon briefly attended the German Charles-Ferdinand University (Charles University). He was a member of the Prague Circle along with Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Paul Kornfeld, and others. Kisch began his professional journalism career in 1906 at Bohemia, the leading German-language paper in Prague. In 1910, the paper began publishing his weekly column of reportage and essays, "Prague Forays" (Prager Streifzüge), which ran for more than a year and made Kisch a local celebrity. Inspired by the works of Jan Neruda, Emile Zola, and Charles Dickens, Kisch saw journalism as a form of social critique intended to arouse public concern, and he focused on the lives of the poor and the underclasses. He published his only novel, Der Mädchenhirt (The Shepherd of Girls) in 1914. At the outbreak of World War I, he was called up and served as a corporal in the Austrian army, fighting on the front lines in Serbia and the Carpathians. He later wrote about his wartime experiences in Schreib das auf, Kisch! (Write That Down, Kisch!, 1929). Radicalized by the war, Kisch joined the Communist Party and participated in the short-lived 1919 Revolution in Vienna. Soon afterwards, he left for Berlin, where he became involved in organizing on behalf of the Comintern. His books of collected journalism such as The Roving Reporter (Der Rasende Reporter, 1924), followed by his accounts of trips to the Soviet Union (1926), the USA (1929), and China (1933) established his reputation as the most significant and successful writer of reportage in German. In these works, he cultivated the image of a witty, gritty, daring reporter always on the move, with a cigarette between his lips. On February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire in Berlin, Kisch was arrested and imprisoned, but then expelled from Germany as a Czechoslovak citizen. His books were banned and burned in Germany, but he went to Paris, where he wrote for the Czech and émigré German press. In the years preceding World War II, Kisch continued to travel widely to report and to speak publicly about the horrors of the Nazi regime. Kisch went to Australia in 1934 as a delegate to an anti-war congress, but was refused entry on arrival. He daringly jumped from the deck of his ship onto the wharf at Melbourne, breaking his leg in the process. He put back on board by the authorities, but this dramatic action mobilized the Australian left on his behalf. After a prolonged legal battle, the Australian High Court overturned his conviction for being an illegal immigrant. In February 1935, Kisch addressed a crowd of 18,000 people in Sydney warning of the dangers of fascism and of another war. He later chronicled his experiences in his book Australian Landfall (Landung in Australien, 1937). In 1937-1938, Kisch was in Spain, crisscrossing the country, speaking in the defense of the Republican cause in the Civil War, and reporting from the front lines. Following the Munich Agreement of 1938 and Nazi Germany's occupation of his country, Kisch was unable to return home. France also became too dangerous for him after the outbreak of WWII in 1939, and he and his wife Gisela went to the USA. He was denied a visa and moved on to Mexico City, where he remained for the next five years. He continued to write, producing a book on Mexico and a memoir, Marktplatz der Sensationen (Sensation Fair, 1941). In 1946, he was able to return to Czechoslovakia and work as a journalist again. In 1977, Stern magazine founded a prestigious award for German journalism named the Egon Erwin Kisch Prize in his honor.