Egon Erwin Kisch, the raging reporter

Egon Erwin Kisch (1885-1948) was born into a German-speaking Sephardic Jewish family in Prague, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and began his journalistic career as a reporter for a Prague German-language newspaper. His most notable story of this period was his uncovering of the spy scandal involving Alfred Redl. The hungarian film-maker István Szabó made a film about this scandal in 1985 : « Colonel Redl », with Klaus-Maria Brandauer in the main rôle.
At the outbreak of World War I, Kisch was called up for military service and became a corporal in the Austrian army. He was briefly imprisoned in 1916 for publishing reports from the front that criticised the Austrian military's conduct of the war, but nonetheless later served in the army's press quarters along with fellow writers Franz Werfel and Robert Musil.
The war radicalised Kisch. He deserted in October 1918 as the war came to an end and played a leading role in the abortive left-wing revolution in Vienna in November of that year. Kisch became a member of the Austrian Communist Party and remained a Communist for the rest of his life.
Between 1921 and 1930 Kisch, though a citizen of Czechoslovakia, lived primarily in Berlin, where his work found a new and appreciative audience. In books of collected journalism such as Der rasende Reporter (The Raging Reporter or, more accurately, the reporter that runs like mad) he cultivated the image of a witty, gritty, daring reporter always on the move, a cigarette clamped doggedly between his lips. His work and his public persona found an echo in the artistic movement of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) , a major strand in the culture of the Weimar Republic.
From 1925 onwards Kisch was a speaker and operative of the communist international and a senior figure in the publishing empire of the West European branch of the Comintern run by communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg.
On 28 February 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, Kisch was one of many prominent opponents of Nazism to be arrested, but as a Czechoslovak citizen, he was expelled from Germany and his works were banned and burnt.

Portrait by Rudolf Schlichter, 1927