Egon Erwin Kisch in Pola. Kriegsreportagen vom Ende des Krieges by Ulrike Robeck

Abstract

Reviews 261 the role of design culture in shaping the social condition of Viennese Jews. The volume presents a series of new approaches in historical scholarship and applied fields, such as public education and architecture, to examine the complex cultural negotiations, including aspects of gender and class, that enabled Jewish designers, funders and their clients to play a pioneering role in the creation of Viennese modernism. From the emergence of fin de siècle design culture, the volume traces the repercussions of the traumatic loss of the First World War and the Empire on Austrian architecture and design in its particular Jewish codifications. Divided into five indicatively subheaded sections, the book comprises individual chapters exploring the role of Jewish designers in creating industrial and residential architecture, as well as in designing schools and religious architecture, fashion and textiles to express a distinctly Jewish self-awareness. As one chapter argues, Orientalism, unsurprisingly, played a significant role in this strategy, given the influence of Japonism on art nouveau and the common view of the Viennese secession, contrary to its universalizing tone, as a Jewish phenomenon. Further case studies include an examination of the colour decorations at Freud’s practice at Berggasse, which are read as self-conscious significations of his middle-class affiliation and professional status, and his belief in the therapeutic potential of colour. Elsewhere in the volume, Freud’s theories regarding repetition compulsion are examined in relation to the quasimythical institution of the Viennese coffee house and its standard design, which literary figures such as Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth cast as metonymies for the lost Empire. Literary perspectives are further explored in the chapter on the journalist and Bambi author Felix Salten’s writings on carpets and home design. Albeit tentative in reference to design, another chapter examines Theodor Herzl’s and Egon Bahr’s responses to Viennese antisemitism. Printed on glossy paper, the volume is beautifully accompanied by blackand -white as well as colour reproductions of historical photographs, paintings and architectural sketches. Its content and attractive presentation make it likely to become a gratifying read and collector’s item for scholars, especially of history, architecture, literature and cultural studies more broadly, as well as for general audiences interested in Austrian and European design history. Cathy S. Gelbin Manchester University Egon Erwin Kisch in Pola. Kriegsreportagen vom Ende des Krieges. By Ulrike Robeck. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2018. 148 pp. €29.80. ISBN 978–3826063800. This is the fifth in a series of short monograph publications by Ulrike Robeck, each presenting contextual close readings of texts by the Austrian-Czech journalist Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948). As was the case with her previous publications, this latest volume explores the original versions of texts which Reviews 262 are best known through their republication in adapted form in 1924, as part of Kisch’s famously self-stylizing anthology of his reportage, Der rasende Reporter. The trio of reports, which in 1924 were given the titles ‘Erkundungsflug über Venedig’, ‘Fahrt unter Wasser’ and ‘Nachtleben auf dem Polesaner Kai’, had originally been written and published in 1918 in the newspaper Bohemia, when Kisch was working for the Austrian-Hungarian military press office (Kriegspressequartier (KPQ)). In the final summer of the war he spent a short period reporting from the naval base at Pola in Istria (now Pula, Croatia), which, with its location in the northern Adriatic close to Italy, was a strategically important base of operations for the Austrian navy. The three reports respectively cover Kisch’s participation as a photographer in a reconnaissance flight over Venice, his experience of a battle exercise in a submarine and the harbourside nightlife in and around the officers’ mess in Pola. As Robeck notes, together they cover a trinity of elements — air, sea and land — but as they were not originally published side by side, and were not grouped together in Der rasende Reporter, this neat observation does not really offer much interpretative leverage. It is, however, true that Kisch saw these reports as providing interest that extended beyond the immediate wartime context. Indeed, readers of the versions published in Der rasende Reporter might be forgiven for missing this context altogether as they are presented...