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Kischmania!

By Peter Vallee - posted Wednesday, 13 September 2006


The process by which an unlovely propagandist for Joseph Stalin has become an exemplar to so many Australian intellectuals today provides another glimpse into the dynamics of political myth.

The brief visit of Egon Erwin Kisch to Australia in 1934-5 has been revisited no fewer than 13 times in the last seven years by the ABC alone, and has in the same period been made the subject of a novel (Nicholas Hasluck, Our man K), a history and an anniversary exhibition, among many lesser references from further left.

Kisch’s deeply-flawed account of Australia, Australian landfall, is recommended by four major national cultural institutions as a key “resource” for the study of 100 years of citizenship. How on earth has this come about?

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When in November 1934 Egon Erwin Kisch jumped ship in Melbourne he also leaped into the arms of the waiting publicity apparatus assembled by the Communist Party of Australia. He was, after all, their guest.

The party was directing its energies to support Moscow’s then policy of promoting popular fronts around Soviet policy objectives (“Rotfront” Kisch shouted to his supporters on the dock), particularly their opposition to re-armament by the democracies in response to Hitler’s rapid re-armament of Germany.

The Lyons Government, acting on advice from the British security service, barred his entry to Australia and later sought to deport him using the notorious dictation test - in Scottish Gaelic. The matter was fought through the front pages of the media, by public rallies and in the High Court where, ultimately, H.V. Evatt was able to deliver a rebuke to R.G. Menzies, Lyons’ Attorney-General.

Kisch’s subsequent speaking tour was judged by the Communist-led left to have been a resounding success. The visit had little observable political consequence, for example through promoting the isolationist policies of the Labor Party. His writings were never widely read in English, and still aren’t. We need to look further for the roots of the current myth.

Kisch grew up in Prague before the World War I under the Austro-Hungarian Empire: a German speaker with little affiliation to the native Slav culture. He became a journalist after failing in his early attempts at overt fiction. He served in the Austrian army in the World War Iand took a leading role in an amateurish attempt at a putsch by a faction of the army inspired by the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia.

He had joined the Austrian Communist Party in 1918 and remained a member of the party when he later moved to Germany to further his writing career. Kisch became part of the large stable of writers and artists managed by Willi Münzenberg, the head of Stalin’s western European propaganda arm.

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His journalism and books on his travels to exotic places (including the Soviet Union, China and the US) were popular on the European left and brought Kisch a degree of celebrity there, for which an exuberant personality equipped him well.

After Hitler’s destruction of all political opposition in 1933 Kisch like Münzenberg became an exile in Paris. In 1940 Kisch failed to gain entry to the US, settling in Mexico for the duration of the World War II. After the war he returned to Prague and held minor office, but died at the time the Communists were destroying their competitors in 1948. He was still a member of the party.

Judging by the work most readily available to Australian readers, Australian landfall, Kisch’s style has the breezy facetiousness of a school trip report; but it is also arch and circumlocutory. The information supplied is often unreliable or simply fanciful.

To take one example, Kisch says this of the fall of the Bruce Government in 1929: “the conservative Prime Minister, S.M. Bruce … foresaw its [the Great Depression’s] arrival earlier than the above-mentioned Socialists. He abdicated and made way for a Labour Cabinet, allowing it to take over the responsibility”. With this simple canard, Kisch (or his collaborator John Fisher who is thought to have ghost-written most of the commentary on Australia) reproduces for his European readership the slander of both major Australian political parties.

The Kisch account of Australia is, in effect, the view from the Stalinist left of Australian politics, dressed up as reporting.

In other words, Kisch wrote propaganda. It was not the stodgy Socialist Realism required of writers in the Soviet Union, and all the better as propaganda for it. The East German Government made of Kisch posthumously the model of a communist journalist. (In West Germany, too, the founder of Stern magazine established in his honour an award for journalism.)

Kisch, and his later admirers, labelled his form of propaganda “reportage”. Reportage, pronounced as in French and used in its continental sense, was characterised partly by its subject-matter - the people and events that were not, by the standards of 19th century journalism, the source of news.

Ordinary, non-office-holding people and their lives, but especially those people whose lives were extraordinary in ways that newspaper-readers do not wish to share: foreigners, criminals, prostitutes, the destitute.

Other defining characteristics of “reportage” include discarding the reporter’s usual detachment in favour of identifying with his subjects. More dangerously, reportage fills in the gaps left by reporting, using the techniques of fiction writing to construct the subjects’ subjectivity when they don’t report it themselves, and constructing stories where the observed events failed to provide such a satisfying form. Making stuff up, in other words.

And if all that fails, the writer can be himself or herself a player in the action, where there is some action to play a part in. Travel writing provides many occasions for the writer’s participation. On top of this intriguing mix could be added a kind of overt commentary that drew conviction from the artful story-telling on which it was built.

Kisch was, as practitioners of reportage tend to be, both a deliberate and a surreptitious propagandist. Perhaps judging more by his assessment of the Comintern than from intimate knowledge of Kisch’s writing, Professor Stuart McIntyre concludes that “Kisch and his circle of publicists who worked for the Communist International … By the 1930s … were required to follow every twist and turn of Stalin’s strategy of building a united front against fascism that would answer to his instructions and serve his own needs”.

In 1923 Kisch asserted proudly his role as propagandist for Communism although he denied it two years later in the introduction to his first popular book, The rampaging reporter. I have seen no evidence that Kisch ever informed his more naïve readership of his party membership. It is reasonable to come to the simple conclusion that deception was essential to Kisch’s role as a propagandist for the Soviet state. He knew that to lie effectively one had to pretend to tell the truth.

According to one who has read them, his commentary on other countries is as reliable as his account of Australia. As McIntyre also records in his history of the Australian Communist Party, Kisch made facts in the service of propaganda a popular literary style among Australian Communist writers of the 1930s. Among those regarded as his followers were Rupert Lockwood and Wilfred Burchett.

On the face of it, it is hard to see what there is in Kisch’s story for 21st century Australian intellectuals to like, but like it they do.

As I wrote this piece the ABC was in the process of devoting two hours of its air-time to readings from Kisch’s writings (using a reader whose heavy Slavic accent Kisch would surely have detested) and reflections on his Australian imitators. Just this year Radio National’s history unit has given Kisch two hours, as has the documentaries unit. Go back a few years and he bounces up on Breakfast (twice), Perspective (as an op-ed by author Heidi Zogbaum), Late Night Live (of course), Books and Writing, the Media Report, The Europeans, Encounter (religion - Kisch’s family were Jewish) and Lingua Franca (twice). The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age both based articles on the publication of the short book on Kisch in Australia by Heidi Zogbaum.

If Kisch’s talents as a propagandist are the source of his appeal to those who are currently celebrating his work, it is strange that they soft-pedal his commitment to Stalinism. The ABC’s program makers are satisfied to define Kisch in their program blurbs as a “gutsy, anti-fascist fighter”, “a theoretician of classical journalism”, “the original foreign correspondent” and “inspiration to journalists and writers alike”, leaving his Communism to be dealt with lightly in the fine print.

His current admirers portray his Communism as not determinative in his writing, to put it mildly. But Kisch’s party membership survived Stalin’s famines, the purges of party members, including Germans, in the 1930s, the show trials, the gulag, the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 and the diverse Comintern bastardries during the Spanish civil war (where Kisch was employed behind the lines).

The lie promoted by the Communist-led left that Kisch was an independent voice was accepted, from lack of public evidence to the contrary, by histories of the period.

Professor Ernest Scott (died 1939) in his A short history of Australia described him as “a Czech writer”. As late as 1956 Professor Geoffrey Sawer in Australian federal politics and law thought Kisch a “Czech left-wing writer” while calling Kisch’s fellow “anti-fascist” speaker Gerald Griffin “a New Zealand Communist”.

Most recent authors reveal the fact of Kisch’s Communism, but not all. Brian Murphy, in his 1993 book The other Australia, experiences of migration, prefers the suggestive “Czechoslovakian journalist and political activist”.

For those who like their Stalinism in the old style, without nuance, the Cambridge guide to women’s writing in English offers this gem: “This Czech journalist, who opposed the Nazi regime which Australia then supported …”. Kisch’s Australian sponsors of the 1930s could not have put it better. For those who prefer their misrepresentation up-to-date, The Age gives us Kisch “The first boatperson”.

In hindsight, Egon Kisch was no more than a minor cheer-leader of the totalitarian left. What his embalmed celebrity does reveal is that the relationship between myth and history is two-way. Selective recall of events is needed to maintain the force of the myth. Once established in the demi-monde of media archives and academic papers, the myth of the heroic “anti-fascist fighter” is available to be resurrected, re-used to defy the historical record, and thereby re-charged for long-term storage.

Just this one small myth can endorse so many contentious assertions about our past simply by endorsing a man who asserted or implied them. Among them, I deduce, we may find these: the pre-war Stalinists were uniquely pure in their opposition to fascism and trust-worthy partners, indeed leaders, for democratic socialists and liberals, despite their plans to destroy them. Communist opposition to the re-armament of the democratic states, and the fact of the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, may reasonably be played down.

The Australian conservatives (in this case, the Lyons Government and its young Attorney-General Robert Menzies) were intolerant and crypto-fascist. The ALP Scullin Government (1929-31) was gutless and subservient during the Depression (Jack Lang’s story is more refractory, despite his vehement anti-Communism). Australian intelligence agencies were stupid, ill-informed and repressive. Australian society was insular, ignorant of important trends overseas and intolerant.

How many of these contentious historical themes you buy into when you swallow the myth of Kisch the “gutsy, anti-fascist fighter” may be determined by your prior acquaintance with them, but at the least the myth prepares you to believe them on the next occasion they are presented to you. As a package, the historical interpretations supported by the Kisch myth repeat the extreme left’s denigration of Australian democracy in the turbulent 1930s.

I hope that we have to wait many years to hear the broadcast celebrating retrospectively the historic role of John Pilger, gutsy anti-imperialist warrior. I suspect, however, that the script has already been written by his partisans.

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About the Author

Peter Vallee is a retired private sector manager who lives in Canberra. He has completed a study of Aboriginal people, pastoralists, police and missionaries in Central Australia during the 1880s, what they did with and to each other, and why. His book God, guns and government on the Central Australian frontier is available from all booksellers who'll take the trouble to ask the distributor and a few booksellers who already have.

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