Читать книгу High Treason and Low Comedy - Robert T. O’Keeffe - Страница 6

The texts of the two plays translated into English for the first time here were published in a wide-ranging 1926 collection of pieces Kisch had written during the early and mid-1920s, Hetzjagd durch die Zeit (Pursuit through Time, or, alternatively, Pursuit throughout the Ages).1 Kisch (or his publisher) selected the book’s title on the basis of the inclusion of his play about Colonel Alfred Redl, Die Hetzjagd. During the interwar era interest in the Redl case persisted in Germany, Austria, and Prague, where Kisch was a well-known reporter and Redl had been stationed at the time of his detection as a spy, though the day of his downfall occurred in Vienna. Kisch kept this interest alive and came back to the story several times between 1913, when he first reported on the case, and 1941–1942, when he devoted a chapter of his memoirs to the espionage affair and his role in bringing it to the public’s attention.

The origins of the plays are quite different from each other. Die Hetzjagd relied for its basic material on Kisch’s post-World War I research into the famous espionage scandal, resulting in his 1924 book of investigative journalism about the case. He didn’t have to wait until his research was completed to work on the play —as discussed in Chapter 4 below, he could have easily used material from a more ‘telegraphic’ version of the Redl story written in 1921 but not published until 1936.2 This version would have sufficed for the play’s narrative outline. The story about the Prague prostitute nicknamed “Toni Gallows” first appeared as a newspaper feuilleton in Prager Tagblatt in early 1921.3 Kisch had encountered Toni (or had heard of her story) during his pre-war years as a reporter covering his native city’s demi-monde and criminal haunts. During the 1920s and 1930s Kisch returned to these two stories several times in prose articles of varying length, so the published and performed plays were bracketed in time by newspaper, magazine, and book-form treatments of their narratives. As with the Redl story, his last return to the tale of Toni the prostitute came in a chapter of his memoirs. The memoirs were among the first of the books he wrote after the Nazi ban of 1933 to be issued in Germany and Austria after World War II, thus bringing these two stories and the rest of the book’s contents to the attention of younger German readers for the first time.

The word Hetzjagd carries the connotation of “harrying”, as in the chase and hunting of game. If considered either in its widest extension of meaning or metaphorically, it supplies an interpretive framework for several other pieces in the collection. However, it is possible that with “pursuit(s) throughout the ages” Kisch was alluding to the fact that he himself was ‘always on the hunt’ for both gripping stories, and, in many cases, for ‘the story behind the story’. The book came out at a time when he was writing prolifically and casting about for new publishing links and travel opportunities, having made up his mind that the kind of reportage that had succeeded so well in Der rasende Reporter (released in late 1924) laid out a promising path for future works. By the time Hetzjagd durch die Zeit appeared Kisch’s historical melodrama about Redl and his sharp-edged comedy about Toni Gallows had been presented in variant versions in several venues in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.

These two cabaret plays (the Redl play was performed in small theaters as well) were Kisch’s most popular works for the stage. They appeared under a variety of names in two languages during the 1920s and early 1930s. The play about Colonel Alfred Redl’s last day on earth was performed as either Die Hetzjagd (The Pursuit) or Der Fall des Generalstabschefs Redl (The Case of General Staff Chief Redl, which was the title of Kisch’s 1924 book about the affair). In Czech the play was called Vyzvědacská aféra obstra Redla. The play about Toni Gallows appeared as Die Himmelfahrt der Tonka Šibenice and Die Himmelfahrt der Galgentoni (The Ascension of Toni Gallows to Heaven), alternatively using Czech and German nicknames for the protagonist. In English “Toni the Gallows Girl” would also be an appropriate sobriquet, as will be seen when the origin of her nickname is revealed in the play. The Czech version of the play was titled Tonka Šibenice na onom svété. Variations in the plays’ titles depended on their performance sites. Czech performances preceded German ones, for reasons discussed below in Chapter 7, which gives an overview of Kisch’s playwriting career, the performance histories of his plays on Czech and German stages, and critical responses to them.

As to the published texts of the plays, variations depended on what Kisch thought would attract readers. For instance, in the 1926 German text for his play about Toni Gallows, the play is billed as “a real Prague legend”. This entailed using the Czech names from the 1921 feuilleton for the play’s characters and for the names of various dives, brothels, streets, and well-known neighborhood markers in Prague, familiar to readers there. Because his potential audience was larger in Germany, Kisch published two German-setting versions of the Toni Gallows play, in which local details of the story are altered accordingly. They are slightly less developed than the 1926 Prague version translated here. The earlier German version of the play was published in a 1922 issue of a Berlin weekly magazine, Das Tage-Buch, at a time when it was being performed in Berlin.4 In this version Toni’s life-story unfolds first in Hamburg and then in Berlin, and the language of the three deceased souls is in heavy regional dialect (a few Hamburg touches and a host of Berlin usages and pronunciations).

Here are the 1926-text Czech names used in the present translation and their German counterparts: Antonie Havlová (nicknamed Tonka Šibenice) is Toni Pelzer (nicknamed Galgentoni); Barbara Upejpavá is Frieda Kniefall (“on her knees Frieda”); Mungo Natscheradetz is Moritz Meseritzer; blondie Mirko is blondie Willy; and the repulsive murderer, Ferdinand Prokupek, is Hugo Klos. The third and last version of the play was published in Kisch’s 1927 reportage collection, Wagnisse in aller Welt (Worldwide Exploits).5 It is a slightly edited re-publication of the 1922 text,6 taking us back to Hamburg and Berlin again.

In the 1922 and 1927 texts of the play, the slums and demi-monde of Prague have been transferred to Hamburg’s Reeperbahn district, notorious throughout Europe for its brothels, streetwalkers, and dives that served the city’s natives and foreign seamen who thronged the port. For the Berlin passages similar seedy neighborhoods and streets are named. Kisch had been in Hamburg several times, was fascinated by the city’s hustle and bustle, thought of it as a potential ‘red’ city, given its large working-class population, and knew about its vice district, but he certainly did not have the long and close familiarity with its nooks and crannies that he had with Prague’s neighborhoods, having resided there from his birth in 1885 until 1913. Presumably he became well-acquainted with Berlin’s vice districts during his 1913–1914 and 1921–1933 years there. The Hamburg-Berlin version would have been more suitable for performance in German cities, while the 1926 Prague version would have played better in Vienna, where much of the population was more familiar with the Prague accent and everyday Czech expressions than they were with the dialects of Hamburg or Berlin (and, it was a tale of the late Habsburg realms and years, which resonated in Austria). Linguistic and narrative variations in versions of both plays will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 4 and 6 below.

In both fiction and nonfiction Kisch’s language is usually colloquial and idiomatic, especially when it comes to direct and indirect speech; it has passages in local dialects. This stems as much from his intellectual commitment to socialism (implying that art about everyday people should be written in the language such people use) as it does from the kind of neighborhoods he covered as a Prague journalist. It has slang peculiar to various parts of the vanished Dual Monarchy and Germany. It is often ‘breezy’ and informal, never flowery or over-ripe. His dialogues in the Redl play go back and forth among the dreary clichés of love affairs going sour, comical banter among policemen, the imbecilic patter of a worthless Habsburg dynast, and the formalities observed by officials engaged in their duties. For the most part his language in the 1926 version of the play is the ‘standard German’ of his day, with a few Austrian touches. He had used more of the local dialect in his 1924 nonfiction book about the Redl case. For instance, in creating a conversation between detectives on the spy’s trail and a porter at the hotel, he has the latter say:

“Grad’ jetzt saan zwaa Herren im Auto ankommen, Kaufleute saans aus Bulgarien” – “Under vorher eine Herr allein?” – “Im Auto? Dös waass i net. Vor einer Viertelstund’ is der Herr Oberst Redl kommen. Im Zivil war er, dös waass i. Aber i waass net, ob er im Auto vorg’fahren is.”7

To see how much this drifts from standard German: “Dös waass i net” is “Das weiss ich nicht” (“I don’t know about that”). Kisch used this conversation in the Redl play, but dropped his phonetic representation of the broad Viennese accent, though this might have amused play-goers in Berlin, Prague, or Brno. Actors playing some of the roles may have used Viennese accents on the stage without the need for instructions in the working scripts of the play. As mentioned above, the 1922 and 1927 versions of the play about Toni Gallows employ a Berlin accent and local slang. A typical line, in Kisch’s phonetic representation of this accent in Toni’s mouth, is:

Ick habe lange jenug jewartet. Zweeundfuffzig Jahre wart ick uff den Klimbim. Ich will direkt in den Himmel, sonst misch ick hier auf.8

In the play about Toni Gallows the language is inventively coarse and somewhat scatter-brained. The 1926 version includes Czech and German slang. Brief phatic phrases, adverbs, and interjections, often used as an ironic or questioning gloss on the ongoing conversation, can be translated in several ways. The Austrian “Na ja” is one such phrase—when in Prague, Tonka says, “No jo”, using a local accent. I do my best in these instances to turn such short phrases and verbal tags into their era-appropriate (American) English counterparts. In the 1926 text of the play Tonka refers to locations in or near Prague in Czech and German. The editors of the Kisch Gesammelte Werke edition of the play published the 1926 text and footnoted its slang and Czech words and phrases (as well as a few in Latin and Yiddish) with German clarifications and translations.9 Taking a position close to Kafka’s, Kisch believed that Yiddish in particular did not debase German but, as a living spoken language, could be used to enliven and enrich German written in everyday language (rather than in the allegedly pure ‘High German’ of literary culture as defined by critics and by middle-class precepts). He felt the same way about ‘Slavicized German’ spoken in some quarters of Prague.10

Kisch’s writing often contains foreign words and phrases and a wealth of allusions indicating his extensive background knowledge of history and culture from around the world, not just Germany, Austria, and the Czech lands, with which he was directly familiar at the time. He was widely read and usually well-prepared by specific research when it came to reporting and essay-writing, and he was a scrupulous self-editor and rewriter as well. He prepared himself for his extended trips, which began in late 1925, in the same way. In his cabaret plays this kind of learned material does not appear, but there are allusions to local matters in Vienna and Prague that require either free translation or footnoting. An example of free translation would be my referring to Ober-Pajdakov as “Upper Nowheresville”, taking Toni’s language to refer to a “dump in the middle of nowhere”. Another example is turning a curt phrase and a sentence fragment into a sentence: “Meinetwegen in Prtschitz! Da hinein sind Ihnen Schwämme, Sie alter Vorreiter vom Ringelspiel” becomes “For all I care you can go pick mushrooms in the Jews’ cemetery out in the sticks, you old wooden horse from a merry-go-round.”11 More literally it is something like: “For all I care [go to] Prtschitz! [Go on] out there, there are mushrooms for you, you old etc.” Prtschitz is today’s Sedlec-Prčice, forty miles south of Prague, known for an old synagogue and Jewish cemetery, and mushroom-picking in woods and cemeteries was a popular pastime of the era. The phrase has a broader connotation—even today Czechs say “jdi do Pričice” (“go to Pričice’) to mean “get lost” or “beat it”.

Some problems for the reader of the 1926 text stem from Toni’s fractured grammar and run-on sentences, and some from practices such as Kisch substituting the letter “j” for the letter “i” in various words and slang terms. (Whereas, in the Berlin dialect, he substitutes “j” with a “yeh” sound for hard “g” at the beginning of syllables, turning “genug” into “jenug”.) Thus in Prague the reader encounters “Hajl”, in this case meant as a derogatory remark about another prostitute. You find “Hai” (shark) in a dictionary and then realize that Kisch is substituting a “j” and using a standard diminutive form (by adding “[e] l” at the end of a word), giving you “little shark”. This is just one of numerous epithets that Toni uses to describe her fellow men and women. Men are bums, guys, drunks, mugs, gents, cabbage-heads, suitors (brothel clients), horse-radishes, and a variety of other things. Women are ladies (those she works with before they turn on her), sows, cows, floozies, broken-down things, and other objects of contempt. In a relaxed mood she compliments Heaven’s High Judge as a friendly paprika (i.e., “peppery old gent”); in the Hamburg-Berlin version this becomes “congenial old rooster”. Sometimes I translate these literally, at others with what I think makes more sense to readers of English. On account of the several different usages of “Herr” in German, I sometimes leave it untranslated in the Redl play. Through exposure to films and television American and English readers are used to the German word and would find phrases such as “Mr. Post Office official” or “Post Office official, Sir” awkward, though salutations such as “Mr. President” or “Mr. Chairman” are commonplace in English. In dialogues among military men and high-ranking civilians I often translate it as “Sir”, just as it would be used in English. Also, where Kisch writes “Parlament”, I use “Reichsrat”.

Footnotes to the Redl melodrama, most of which are on the title-and-cast page, are long because they include necessary background information about specific historical characters and matters, who and which are probably little-known or unknown to most English-language readers, whether they hail from the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada or elsewhere (e.g., my long note on Conrad von Hötzendorf, who was one of the most important players in late Habsburg political and military affairs; or the note on how the army’s ‘marriage bond’ worked). There are only a few footnotes to the Toni Gallows play, supplying supplementary information. In both plays I use asterisks to flag brief notes shown at the bottom of a page―these allow for continuous reading of the text while supplying information to make immediate sense of what is flagged (e.g., the name or reputation of a person or locale).

My formatting of the plays follows the appearance of the pages in the 1926 text of Hetzjagd durch die Zeit, which allows the reader to see the running headers that encapsulate material on the page, a common practice of the era―Kisch’s headers use a telling phrase from the dialogue or summarize the page’s contents; these are shown in italics, centered on the pages as they appeared in 1926. Kisch puts stage directions and background and mood descriptions in parentheses; I replicate these. The characters’ names and their accompanying dialogue hew to the present-day formatting convention in English. My only apology to the reader is that I cannot supply the full context―sights, sounds and smells―of a Weimar-era cabaret theater, a place of sensory overload, where customers buzzed and hooted while partaking of alcohol, sausages, and a pile of cabbage and potatoes. Now, on to the plays.