High Treason and Low Comedy. Robert T. O’Keeffe

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

Chapter 3. The Pursuit

      THE PURSUITA TRAGICOMEDY OF THE IMPERIAL AND ROYAL1 GENERAL STAFF IN FIVE ACTS

      Archduke Viktor Salvator, Inspector-General of the Troops2

      Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of the General Staff of the Austro-Hungarian Army3

      Major General Anton Höfer, Conrad’s Deputy Chief4

      Colonel Alfred Redl, General Staff Chief of the 8th Army Corps stationed in Prague5

      Colonel Peter Umanitzky, Chief of the Intelligence Bureau of the General Staff6

      Wenzel Worlitschek,7 Major-Auditor*

      Stefan Hromadka, Lieutenant in the 7th Ulan (Cavalry) Regiment8

      Franzi Mittringer, Hromadka’s fiancé9

      Baroness Daubek10

      Rigo, Leader of a gypsy band11

      Strebinger and Steidl, Detectives of the Viennese Police Force12

      The head porter of the Hotel Klomser

      Franz, a bellhop at the Hotel Klomser

      The events involving the above take place in Vienna on the evening of May 24, 1913.

      * Rank and title of a lawyer serving as an officer in the army’s Judge-Advocates Corps.

      So then, who’s going to provide for your wife

      ACT I

      IN COLONEL REDL’S HOTEL ROOM

      Redl, Hromadka, Franzi enters later

      REDL (he sits down on the sofa and throws his arm over Hromadka’s shoulder): Tell me that you’re not serious about this, I’m begging you, please tell me you’re not serious. For God’s sake, Stefan, you can’t be serious, can you? Don’t you realize everything that I’ve done for you ...

      HROMADKA: Of course I realize it. And I’m certainly very grateful for everything ...

      REDL: No, you really don’t understand what I’ve done for you. How far out on a limb I’ve gone for you, Stefan, dangerously far out, and now you want to leave me. Tell me that you don’t mean it, tell me that you don’t really want to leave me.

      HROMADKA: I don’t want to leave you. I just want to get married.

      REDL: Married? You call that not leaving me! With marriage it’s all over between you and me. You’re a young man, a good-looking lad too — everybody likes you, the whole world is there for you to grab. And now you want to give all that up, you want to put yourself in chains — and on top of it all, on account of a woman! On account of a woman! So then, who’s going to provide for your wife? What, you’ll hang around in bars, take business trips, stay in hotels, is that it? And all the time there are hundreds of wenches out there, far better than just one. And just what are you going to talk about with your wife? I’ll lend you a book, it’s called On The Congenital Feeble-Mindedness of Women.13

      Something important has been pending for months

      HROMADKA: But what if I really love her?

      REDL: Hold on, you don’t love her. You only let yourself get grabbed by her, you just let her nurse you along, and you let it happen because ... well, you were available because I haven’t been around for you for so many months. It’s been far too long since I’ve been in Vienna. I’ve been afraid to come here because— because I thought that you’d been unfaithful to me. I didn’t come, even though there’s something very important waiting for me here—something big has been pending for months—and yet I still didn’t come ...

      HROMADKA: Your appointment as Bureau Chief?

      REDL: No, not that, not yet, anyway. Something else.

      HROMADKA: What, something bad, some kind of unpleasantness?

      REDL: Not unpleasant for you. But if you leave me, well then, there goes all my good luck, that’s unpleasant. Look, Stefan, take a trip with me—we’ll go to Switzerland, then Italy, and your thinking will change for the better. Blow off this whole idea of a woman!

      HROMADKA: She loves me too.

      REDL: СКАЧАТЬ