Herr Egon Kisch, the gentleman in the white shirt, seen here addressing a workers' meeting in a Queensland railway shed, was the famous "Whirlwind Reporter", who set all of Australia on its ear during the hot summer of 1934/35, speaking out against War and Fascism A native of Prague, who had become the "King of German Reporters", Kisch was incarcerated in Berlin the day after the Nazis' rise to power, experiencing the terror at first hand but escaping by the skin of his teeth thanks to his Czechoslovak passport. Illustrated with some of the original photographs gathered by his New Zealand sidekick on this tour, peace activist Gerald Griffin (left), my article outlines Kisch's remarkable adventures Down Under. It also traces the trajectories of the German Kisch Prize for excellence in journalism, initiated in 1977 by a former-Nazi-propagandist-turned-magazine-editor in West Germany.
The article can be found here....This is a new type of activity I stumbled into more or less by happenstance when an American friend asked me to decipher some old hand-written German family documents from the 1820s for her. This wartime Feldpostkarte came from another American family originating from Silesia. The undersigned "Heinrich" had written to his "Onkel und Tante" and then written some more over the top when he ran out of space -- providing a lively document to the cross-currents at work during World War One.
Here's a picture from my Persian collection, taken at some Christmas bazaar, I imagine, in Tehran in the mid-1950s. The young women all appear to be girl scouts or nurses, smiling at Princess Shams Pahlavi. I wonder if any of these ladies are still alive today and whether they can recognise themselves and their friends in this picture, or if they can recall what the occasion was and what year it took place?
Blood and gore. If that's what the cover of this book suggests to you, so be it. It appeared in print in 1999, and had been edited at the time by a Mr Neumann, which I took to be an auspicious sign, seeing as how the man for whom the Neander Valley was named was a composer named Neumann. ("Neander" being the Grecianised version of "new man".) A friend reading the book for the first time recently said, "I keep reading, off and on, in your Neumann book. With great pleasure. It's one of those rare examples of a really good, bright and very readable factual book."
Casey Jones is a lady in this crime series by Katy Munger. Well, maybe not a lady, but she ain't no engineer, either. I translated three volumes featuring this detective character, and enjoyed the books' brazen, over-the-top sense of humour, reminiscent, to my way of seeing it -- or hearing it -- of the Les Norton books of Robert G. Barrett, albeit in a more feminine vein. Or vain. I even wrote an article for "Die Presse" in Vienna about how I got my cat, Cuddles, co-involved in helping me with the work of finding a shape for these books in German, under the title of "So sollte das klingen: Jjäpfxtzh!"
The article can be found here...T
his was the only other article of mine in "Die Presse" I was able to locate on the web. A portrait of Vienna's Lerchenfelderstrasse. This is a picture I took, but I contributed other photographs for that article, in particular one of a heroic old character from the early 1900s lifting up a balcony on his shoulders right above a fitness studio. However, they used their own.
This is where the article can be found....I wasn't a Neil Young fan, but someone who was provided me with a half dozen cassettes of rare recordings, and I listened to the whine and buzz of Neil Young and Crazy Horse exclusively over the five weeks I slapped this book into the computer. I thought I had done a pretty nifty job, finding different voices for all the different writers who had contributed to this compendium, but the reviews were scathing. Rock fans are like sectarian priests, I discovered, believing only they have a right to worship at the altar of their god. Anyone else does it, needs to be stabbed in the back. I'd love to do a Dylan, sometime.
Travelling through New Zealand with photographer Holger Leue -- pronounced LOY-yah -- was a fascinating experience, and two of my magazine stories were reprinted, years later, in this glossy, tall book of Holger's photographs.
This was a photograph I took in Austria in September of 2007, and it appeared in print in June 2010
Here it is...
