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

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 years between 1900 and 1912. During those years he had risen in rank and responsibility, becoming deputy director of the Evidenzbüro, where he was considered to be most adept professional in military intelligence and counterintelligence, a reputation bolstered by his appearance as the prosecution’s formidable expert witness in a series of espionage-treason trials held in Vienna in the middle of the previous decade.11 He had his chauffeur take the car to a workshop, where its interior was to be refurbished with red silk lining.