Background
Kisch was born in Prague to a linen merchant on April 29, 1885.
Kisch was born in Prague to a linen merchant on April 29, 1885.
He studied in the German university of Prague.
From 1906 to 1913,he was the crime reporter of the Prague journal Bohemia and wrote about the Prague underworld in his Prague Streets and Nights. At this time he moved in circles with the city’s literary figures, both the German writers, such as Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Max Brod, and Czech authors, such as Jaroslav Hasek. He then spent a short stint in Berlin, where he began to write as a political journalist in the Berliner Tageblatt (uncovering the famous Redl spy case) and worked as dramaturgist at the Kunstler Theater. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I in Serbia and was later press officer at army headquarters in Vienna.
Kisch traveled extensively (Europe and Africa, 1922-1924; the Soviet Union 1925-1926; the United States (visited illegally) 1928-1929; China, 1932), each journey being the subject of a descriptive book, with political and social analyses.
After the 1933 Reichstag fire, he was arrested and then freed on the intervention of the Czech government, and deported to Czechoslovakia. He then moved to Paris.
In 1934 he arrived in Australia but was refused admission as an “undesirable alien,” whereupon he jumped overboard into the sea at Perth, was arrested, sent to prison for six months and deported. In 1937-1938 he fought in the Spanish Civil War, but when World War II broke out he moved first to the United States and settled in Mexico, where he worked on the Freies Deutschland newspaper. After the war he returned to Prague, where he was honorary president of the Jewish community.
Apart from his travel books, he wrote extensively on Prague, including stories of Prague, Jewish life (Tales from Seven Ghettos, 1948) and an autobiographical work (Sensation Fair, 1941). His collected works were issued in 1960. He was highly respected throughout post-World War II eastern Europe and under the East German Communist regime one of the most prominent cafés on East Berlin’s Unter den Linden was the Egon Erwin Kisch Café.