REVIEW BY MAX WATTS
Kisch in Australia — The Untold Story
By Heidi Zogbaum, afterword by Marcus Patka
Scribe Publications, Melbourne 2004
240 pages, $26.95 (pb).
Just 70 years ago, on November 13, 1934, Egon Erwin Kisch, a German-writing Czech-Jewish journalist, anti-fascist author and stirrer jumped five metres off the afterdeck railing of the departing British liner Strathaird onto a Port Melbourne quay. He broke his leg, but the ship was recalled, and Kisch carried back on board and the ship sailed to NSW.
Kisch had been invited to the Melbourne congress of the small left-wing Movement Against War and Fascism to speak about the new German leader Adolf Hitler. For still-debated reasons, the conservative Australian government was determined to prevent his arrival.
By the time the Strathaird arrived in Sydney, High Court judge Herbert Vere Evatt had decided that the government's confidential reasons for banning Kisch were "not conclusive".
Kisch was briefly freed. He was carried ashore on a stretcher, but almost immediately re-detained, taken to the nearest Sydney police station and given a dictation test in Scottish Gaelic. Under Australian law, arrivals could be asked to take a dictation test in "any European language". This was a common method for keeping "non-whites" out of the country, and was occasionally applied to political undesirables such as Kisch.
Kisch refused to play, shouted from the police station: "This will make Australia the laughing stock of the world!" Now declared an illegal immigrant, he was given a six-month jail sentence. But Kisch was soon released on bail ("he won't run far with a broken leg" — a judge said), and the language test was thrown out of court, and Scottish Gaelic was rejected from that time forward as a European language. A third attempt to jail Kisch also failed.
So, the now famous "jumper", spoke about Hitler, war and fascism not just to a few hundred convinced anti-fascists in Melbourne, but to hundreds of thousands of people across five states. Kisch remained in Australia until March 1935. He left in triumph, accompanied by new friend John Fisher.
The then attorney-general, Robert Menzies, utterly ridiculed, almost fled to England — but his admiration for Hitler did not decline. . In September 1939, a week after he was forced to declare war against Germany, Menzies wrote to a friend: "we are on the wrong side".
Many Australians, including journalist Wilfred Burchett, were deeply affected by Kisch's visit. Many date the upswing of the Australian anti-fascist movement, and of the Communist Party, from Kisch's triumphant visit.
I myself have always felt deep admiration for Kisch — journalist, writer, stirrer. So the various events to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the visit — a Kisch symposium, Kisch exhibitions and a new book — all tend to warm the cockles of my heart.
I opened Heidi Zogbaum's book with great hopes. I had spoken with the author some months ago, and Zogbaum was obviously sympathetic, unlike Nicholas Hasluck, the author of a 1999 book called Our Man K, which was a vicious attack on Kisch. However, my hopes were partly disappointed.
The author and her colleague Marcus Patka have done an enormous amount of detailed, painstaking research, recorded in 30 pages of extensive notes and bibliography. (Unfortunately, as so often nowadays, no index.)
Given such extensive, and intensive, checking by Zogbaum and Patka, I was surprised at how much Kisch material was not mentioned, for example, his Czech/English International Organisation of Journalists biography. From the Australian material, there is no mention of Mona Brand's very successful play Here Comes Kisch, nothing about Wilfred Burchett, and Kisch's effect on his life. Also, despite an extensive discussion of events after Kisch's death, the yearly Kisch prize for the best German-language reportage is not mentioned.
On page 199, I found what might be a clue to not-so-accidental omissions. Zogbaum notes that a 1988 Kisch biography by Fritz Hofmann is "useless", because "(Hofmann), working under the ideological restraints of the former East Germany could not... mention important aspects of Kisch's life". But this implies that there are not restraints, less recognised blinkers, in capitalist democracies. It is not necessary to have a dictatorship, an Orwellian Ministry of Truth, to rewrite history.
My compliments go to Zogbaum and friends for resurrecting Kisch's Australian memory. But it is a pity that the book is permeated by a sympathetic snideness, which at first I found hard to pin down, but on rereading, noticed many examples of.
There are constant anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet and anti-communist comments, even for a once-only mentioned person. To introduce Albert Einstein as a "chief dupe" of the Comintern propagandist Willy Muenzenberg on page five could be a once-off prejudice, but on page 15, Zogbaum says: "Kisch.. participated in the short-lived and ineffectual Red Revolution in Vienna". In fact, Kisch played an essential role organising the very effective resistance inside the Imperial Austrian army and led the Vienna Red Guard soldiers who ended the century-old Habsburg Empire.
Zogbaum's anti-communist snideness also produces simple errors of fact. On page 19: "the much-reduced German army was secretly trained in the art of the Blitzkrieg by the (Soviet) Red Army". That's back to front; the Germans trained the Soviets.
The descriptions of the evils of Stalin are sourced to professional anti-communists, such as Robert Conquest. There is no bibliographic entry for a real insider, for instance Nikita Khrushchev, nor the Australian Wilfred Burchett, who might have helped Zogbaum find out more about Noel Field "the focus of Stalin's last show trials".
I have not commented on Zogby's detailed study of the British intelligence operative "Snuffbox", and British attempts to stop Kisch from speaking. Heidi Zogbaum argues that it was this muddled "British Connection" which led to the Australian anti-Kisch campaign, rather than Nazi German pressure. I do not believe that one excludes the other.
[A Kisch exhibition is being held at the Jewish Museam of Australia, in St Kilda in Melbourne from November 10 to January 30. Sydney and Brisbane venues for the exhibition will be announced later.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 17, 2004.
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