Kischmania!

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.