Egon Erwin Kisch

Origins and early life

Egon Erwin Kisch was born in Prague on 29 April 1885, the son of Hermann Kisch, a cloth merchant, in a well-to-do German-speaking Jewish family of the old town — the family tradition of descent from Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of Prague, is a tradition and nothing more, and this fiche records it as such.

Work and career

He began as a local reporter for the newspaper Bohemia, prowling the taverns and police stations of Prague, and made a method of it: reportage, factual, documented, written with the pace of fiction, which he practiced in Berlin in the 1920s and defined in the collection that gave him his nickname, Der rasende Reporter, 'The Raging Reporter', of 1925. Wounded as a soldier in Serbia in the First World War, he led the Red Guard in Vienna in November 1918 and joined the Communist Party, which he served — and this fiche says it plainly — with a loyalty that his reporting from the Soviet Union did not shake.

Arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933 and expelled from Germany, he became the most famous exile journalist of the anti-fascist cause: in 1934 the Australian government tried to bar him from the country by a dictation test in Scottish Gaelic, and he jumped from the ship onto the quay at Melbourne, broke his leg, and won his case in the High Court.

Later years

He reported the Spanish Civil War, spent the Second World War in Mexico, and returned to Prague in 1946, where the Jewish community — decimated by the Nazi murder of Bohemian Jewry — made him its honorary president; he died there on 31 March 1948.