Egon Erwin Kisch | Of warriors and cows

Egon Erwin Kisch, the popular reporter with a chubby stomach and sweaty chin. Photo: Archive Egon Erwin Kisch shaped travel journalism in the 20th century like no other. Born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he made a name for himself among Austrian, Czech and German readers as a “raving reporter”. From the summer of 1937 to the spring of 1938, Kisch also traveled with his typewriter to the hinterland and the war zone of the Second Spanish Republic, which was threatened as a result of a right-wing military coup.

A volume published by the Vienna publishing house Atelier on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War now offers the most comprehensive collection of his publications from this period to date. These are reports and stories, but also interviews and letters from (or about) Kisch, and sometimes also later memories. The collected texts were provided with source-critical comments and supplemented by a foreword, an afterword and an editorial note.

Most of these texts had been published in Madrid in a contemporary publishing house of the International Brigades (whose volunteers Kisch had visited and interviewed) or abroad in the German exile press. Announcements and references to Kisch's reporting that appeared in the Spanish or foreign press at the time are documented in the form of excerpts inserted between the individual texts.

In view of the extensive photographic material, previously unpublished motifs by photographer Walter Reuter should be highlighted. The impressive images show Kisch in the surroundings of the participants in the Second International Writers' Congress for the Defense of Culture, which took place in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona in July 1937.

The editors are both experts on the subject. Georg Pichler, professor of German language and literature at the Universidad de Alcalá, distinguished himself early on as an expert on the Spanish Civil War in German-language novels. Together with Erich Hackl, he also made a significant contribution to research into the pro-republican Spanish volunteers from Austria in the historiographical field. Most recently he published the civil war novel “Telefónica” by Ilse Barea-Kulcsar with the same publisher.

In addition to the afterword, he is also responsible for the German translations from Spanish, Catalan and French for this volume. Joachim Gatterer, who teaches at the University of Innsbruck and deals with the social and cultural history of the international workers' movement there, has already re-edited Kisch's best-known Spain report, which we will return to later, individually in an annotated version.

Readers who are not very familiar with the subject of the Spanish Civil War would be well advised to read the afterword directly after the foreword, as it goes beyond the central biographical aspects and at the same time provides a successful contextualization of the historical framework and unburdens the content of the almost 300 pages.

The focus of his reports is always on the people, never on the war events themselves.

Three texts stand out from the collection. First of all, we should mention "Soldiers on the Sea Beach", a curious description of the strikingly anti-fascist patient environment in an International Brigades rest home on the Mediterranean coast in the seaside resort of Benicasim (which was temporarily run by Kisch's brother), where wounded war volunteers hobbled along the beach at the time. It is also the longest contribution in the volume.

Kisch's story "The Three Cows", on the other hand, is probably the most well-known, a true story that revolves around an impoverished farmer from Tyrol with a sense of justice in the world, who sold his cattle out of idealism in order to enable himself and three like-minded people to make the arduous journey to Spain as civil war volunteers. Both texts are exemplary of the popular reporter with a chubby stomach and sweaty chin, who came close to sitting on a box of hand grenades during a visit to the front outside Madrid.

A strong contrast to the droll overall impression emerges, both linguistically and thematically, in Kisch's lesser-known article "In the Cleared-Out Prado." Here, in a thoughtful and dark tone, a parallel is drawn between current bomb attacks in the main gallery of the Madrid art museum of the same name and well-known horror scenes from recent Spanish history (depicted in Goya's painting "El 3 de mayo en Madrid", which were evacuated from the museum for security reasons).

To put it briefly: Kisch was not impartial as an eyewitness. As Georg Pichler explains in the afterword, his texts can be assigned to “affirmative literature”. As a convinced communist who led the “Red Guard” in Vienna in 1918, Kisch never fundamentally questioned his own camp. In this sense, his Spain reports were entirely useful in the defense of the Spanish Republic.

He was a “trendy writer,” but not a party soldier. This is also expressed in the wording of the texts in the fact that the conflict in Spain appears simply as a civil war, and Kisch never followed the wooden terminology of "national-revolutionary liberation struggle" that Palmiro Togliatti had coined for the Comintern. And he was anything but a Stalinist. Kisch showed skepticism about the Moscow trials early on and maintained contact with acquaintances in Spain who later fell victim to the "purges", such as Maria Osten, which meant that he himself was temporarily targeted.

The fact that Kisch's Spain texts can still be read profitably even in the 21st century is ultimately due to the fact that the focus of his reports is always on the people, never on the war events themselves. Overall, the text collection, which is also visually appealing, makes an interesting contribution to the literary and journalistic resonance that the Spanish Civil War left behind in its international context.

Due to its careful and well-founded tradition, the collection also closes a gap within biographical Kisch research, especially since the Spanish Civil War is not particularly illuminated in Christian Buckard's most recent biography; the biographer did not need Kisch's cadre files from the former Comintern archive in Moscow (today: Russian State Archives for Socio-Political History) for his research, which were used by the two editors for this edition. 

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