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

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      Kisch’s claims about his priority and singular importance in reporting the story in 1913 were exaggerated, as shown by excerpts of articles published in other newspapers that are noted by Patka4 and quoted in John Sadler and Sylvie Fisch’s 2016 re-examination of the Redl case.5 Between May 26th and June 6th, 1913, Bohemia published 17 unsigned articles about the Redl case that have been attributed to Kisch.6 They vary greatly in length. Their sourcing is often anonymous, though Kisch also wrote longer pieces that paraphrased reports in other newspapers (mostly Viennese). They were speculative at times, repeating various rumors about aspects of the case that made for an exciting story. The speculation took place in a context of meager and deliberately misleading or outright false information released by official sources (whom Kisch also quoted).

      Kisch’s 1913 pieces about the case were an integral part of a swelling ‘call and response’ effect in the local newspapers, with each day’s succession of competing speculations about the case driving further criticism of the General Staff by parliamentarians, factional politicians, and the designated Successor, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. By May 29th the General Staff had to reverse itself, cancelling Redl’s military funeral and admitting through a terse published notice that Redl had committed suicide in order to avoid prosecution for espionage on behalf of a “foreign power” and for engaging in homosexual activity, an offense under both civil and military law.7 As stated, the two clauses of the indictment implied that Redl had been blackmailed into espionage by foreign agents aware of his homosexuality. The link between Redl’s homosexuality and his spying had not, in fact, been established through forensic investigation in 1913 and is still an open question (that is, Redl might have been blackmailed into espionage, or he might have volunteered his services in order to fund his increasingly lavish manner of living―the point is still moot and, historically, inconsequential).

      By the time he wrote his last article on the Redl case for Bohemia, Kisch had established the following (with the assistance of reports from other papers), more or less correctly: Redl’s espionage on behalf of Russia; his homosexuality, including an affair with his protégé, the cavalry lieutenant, Stefan Horinka; the fact that, in spite of an official counter-version, Redl had not been under suspicion before May 24th; police (Secret Service) involvement in the case as well as active investigation by members of military intelligence; the existence of the letters carrying cash, which had been under watch at the Central Post Office for about seven weeks; the police surveillance trap; the detectives’ pursuit of an unknown suspect and their discovery of a pen-knife sheath in a taxicab used by Redl; the detectives’ recovery of incriminating scraps of paper disposed of by Redl while under surveillance; the successful ruse that ensnared Redl at the Hotel Klomser; Redl’s dinner with his old friend, the jurist Viktor Pollak; the commission of officers that visited Redl on the night of the 24th; his suicide by pistol; and, based on the first (false) news releases, the General Staff’s attempt to cover up the real reasons behind Redl’s suicide. Kisch had also passed along incorrect speculations and, like other reporters, remained ignorant of various details of the case. He learned some of these through research and interviews in the early 1920s. His 1913 coverage of the case was aggressive journalism, skeptical of the authorities, but in no sense reportage. But his 1924 book on the case, discussed below, was hailed as one of his first “great” reportages, though this term might also be applied to his war diary published in 1922. Note that the 1924 book dealt with recent history, not ongoing events, indicating the suitability of reportage techniques for dealing with the past as well as the present.

      Hostile public and parliamentary reactions to the Redl scandal continued to flare up during the latter half of 1913, by which time Kisch had departed for Berlin. Because important members of the Austro-Hungarian leadership class and a sizeable proportion of the general public believed that Redl’s espionage had disastrous consequences in 1914–1915, dissatisfaction with the official ‘resolution’ of the case in 1913 lingered on at the end of World War I. In this climate of suspicion Kisch became the journalist who pursued the case in the face of resistance thrown up by conservative elements in Austrian political life, who, even under the new post-1918 regime, wished to divert responsibility from the General Staff and the higher reaches of Austrian officialdom. He interviewed military and civilian officials who had been involved in the events of May 24–25, 1913 and in the subsequent official investigation. He also examined any documents he could find that might shed light on what had really happened. However, official files on Redl’s career and on the case and its investigation by the General Staff and various ministries remained sealed and off-limits, to both journalists and historians. The first ‘outsider’ to gain access to many of these files, dispersed among half a dozen archives, was Robert Asprey, an American who wrote an “interpretive biography” of Redl during the late 1950s.8 Georg Markus, an Austrian journalist and television personality, duplicated some of Asprey’s research for his 1985 book on the Redl case and also claimed to have made new discoveries based on Russian sources; the probative value of this Russian material was far from definitive in resolving contested aspects of the case, discussed below. And historians came back to the case in the 2010’s, often in conjunction with revisionist histories of World War I and its causes. Some of the relevant files about the Redl case may have been deliberately destroyed, and there were claims that Russian files bearing on Redl had been confiscated by the Germans in Warsaw in 1915 and thereafter “gone missing”.9

      The 1924 book can be broken down into five separate stories that Kisch wove together, combining investigative journalism with speculation and an historical appraisal: the events of May 24–25, when Redl was detected as a foreign agent and persuaded to commit ‘compulsory suicide’; a survey of Redl’s long career in military intelligence; the serendipitous tale of how Kisch acquired his first clue that the official press release about Redl’s death was false; an assessment of how much damage Redl’s espionage had done to Austrian military plans and foreign policy during a period of increasing international tension over the Balkan Wars and during the opening months of the world war; and a depiction of the behavior of the General Staff officers in their failed attempt at a cover-up. Viewers and readers of Die Hetzjagd are exposed to only the first story that describes the detection and apprehension of Redl on his last day on earth, a tale of crime and dereliction of duty at the highest levels of Austria’s military-political leadership.

      What exactly, according to Kisch, happened on that day? Although many particulars of his 1924 version of the story have been challenged by historians and by Redl’s and Kisch’s biographers, his account supplies the basic timeline and record of events that have been written about time and again. It is given immediately below, with some supplementary information from Robert Asprey’s 1959 biography of Redl, The Panther’s Feast.10 Its errors and misleading parts (whether inadvertent or deliberate) will be discussed farther below, though they have no actual bearing on the construction and narrative of the play derived from Kisch’s reporting about the events of Redl’s final day.

      On the morning of Saturday, May 24, 1913, Colonel Alfred Redl left Prague for a short trip to Vienna, where he planned to deal with problems he was having with his protégé and paramour, Lieutenant Stefan Horinka (named Hromodka in Die Hetzjagd), whom he had led his friends and colleagues to believe was his nephew. He told his commanding General, Arthur Giesl von Gieslingen, that his ‘nephew’ wished to leave the army in order to marry a woman of modest means and that he was going to attempt to talk him out of this rash decision that would terminate a promising career as a professional cavalry officer. Redl had been stationed in Prague since early 1912 as the General Staff Chief of the VIIIth Army Corps, an important liaison position that included training officers and evaluating the readiness of the Corps in the case of war. In keeping with his special skills, he also had an intelligence remit to report on nationalist unrest in Prague.

      Redl’s chauffer drove him to Vienna in his expensive Daimler-Benz convertible, an extravagance he explained by false stories about having inherited a considerable sum of money from an uncle (he could have hardly afforded the automobile, much less all the other tokens of his luxurious life-style, on a Colonel’s pay). He was dropped off at the Klomser Hotel, close to military intelligence headquarters, his old workplace for eleven СКАЧАТЬ