Kisch, Egon Erwin b.April 29, 1885; Prag (Bohemia), Austria-Hungary d. March 31, 1948; Prague, Czechoslovakia
Famous German-speaking journalist who was exiled to Mexico during World War II. In the early 1900s, Kisch became a leading German-speaking journalist in Prague, before joining the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I.
His wartime experience made him both a pacifist and a Socialist. In 1918, he joined the Arbeiter und Sol- datenrat (Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet) in Vienna before helping to found the Rote Garde (Red Guard) in the Austrian capital later that year. In the 1920s, he joined the Communist parties of both Austria and Germany, and he traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States. In 1930, his trip to the latter country produced a travel account highly critical of U.S. capitalism, Paradies Amerika (America the Paradise). After Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power, he settled down in Paris, from where he participated in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939 he joined thousands of other German-speaking exiles in moving to Mexico, then governed by the populist president Lazaro Cardenas, who carried out an extensive program of worker and peasant mobilization. In Mexico, Kisch became one of the founders of Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), the leading anti-Fascist publication of the Germans in Mexico that opposed the dominant right-wing tendencies within the German community. Published in 1945, his account, Entdeckungen in Mexico (Discoveries in Mexico), stands out among German-language descriptions of his host country in that it is one of only a few accounts written from a Marxist point of view. The book depicts the ongoing material struggles of Mexican peasants and workers and the difficulties of Cardenas and other revolutionary leaders to steer Mexico away from the influence of U.S. capital.Jurgen Buchenau
See also Intellectual Exile; Mexico; Travel Literature, Germany-United States
References and Further Reading
Kisch, Egon Erwin. Egon Erwin Kisch beehrt sich darzubieten: Paradies Amerika. Berlin: Universum, 1930.
------. Entdeckungen in Mexiko. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1979 [c. 1946].