In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

REPORTERS
In its June 26 issue, the magazine Die literarische Welt presents a debate
on "news reporting and literature." Together with a number of nationally
prominent authors, such as Max Brod, Alfred Dablin, Leonhard
Frank, and Heinrich Mann, the journalist Leo Lania analyzes the impact
of news reporting on contemporary literary styles and genres. Lania
focuses on the relation between what he calls "the penetrating voice of
the present" and a particular style of thought: "The penetrating voice of
the present cannot be ignored. It pushes the most romantic dreamers
from their remote corners into the merciless light of day. There, all things
acquire new shapes and colors, and their meaning and existence disclose
themselves only to those who have the courage to measure its contours
without presumption. To look at them, to listen to them, to experience
them anew turns them further into lived experience" (Lania, 322). Coming
at the end of a sequence of verbs-"measure," "look," "listen"-that
are meant to characterize the reporter's relation to the world, the concept
Erleben receives specific emphasis in Lania's text. It returns in the highly
unusual substantive form der Erleber ("the experiencer") in a series of
quotations from recent review articles with which the Berlin publisher
Erich Reiss Verlag advertises the fifteenth edition of Egon Erwin Kisch's
book Der rasende Reporter (The Raging Reporter). In the two years
since its original publication, this volume of about thirty essays, most of
which were previously published in newspapers, has consolidated Kisch's
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