The Adventurer Richard Katz: Some Early Twentieth-Century Travel Stories

By Martin Wasserman

During the early twentieth century, one of the most notable travel writers in Central Europe was Richard Katz. After obtaining a job with the Ullstein Publishing House, Katz convinced his superiors to allow him to start his own newsletter called the “Green Post,” which would print travel stories about his adventures while roaming around the world. This newsletter eventually became so successful that it had over a million subscribers. Professor Wasserman’s current book of German to English translations now offers today’s English reader a sample of various Richard Katz travel pieces that were so greatly enjoyed by German readers almost one hundred years ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664133105

Martin Wasserman

Martin Wasserman, the creator of this book, is a Professor Emeritus at SUNY Adirondack, a college in the State University of New York system where he taught for thirty-six years. During his career he published over thirty journal articles and three books. One of those works, Kafka Kaleidoscope, was chosen as a “Best Book” by the Small Press Review in 1999. Professor Wasserman’s two most recent works are an original poetry piece entitled Kafka, Rilke, Nadel: Three German Writers Pulling Me Toward the East and a poetry translation called What There Is, As It Is: The Epigrammatic Poems of Ludwig Feuerbach.

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Copyright © 2020 by Martin Wasserman.

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Rev. date: 10/19/2020

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CONTENTS

The Adventurer Richard Katz

Travel Stories

Distress On The Hooghly

Some Dervish Rituals

Never Trust A Branch That Quivers

Those Clever Crows Of India

A Fierce Hurricane Finds Cuba

Some Helpful Hints For A Long Journey

THE ADVENTURER

RICHARD KATZ

In his essay, Prague—City of Three Peoples, Hans Tramer points out the remarkable literary achievements made by the relatively small community of German Jews living in the Czech capital during the first half of the twentieth century. Tramer indicates that in the area of travel writing one of the most notable authors was Richard Katz. Because I am a devotee of this genre; and, also, since I know absolutely nothing about Richard Katz’s work, I thought it would be both interesting and challenging to translate some of his travel stories. (It should be mentioned at this point that what Katz meant by the notion of travel stories was not a fictional account of some real-life events but, rather, the reporting of actual incidents which were experienced by him during his years of roaming around the world.)

Richard Katz was born in Prague on October 21, 1888. After completing the rigorous German-language curriculum at the Prague gymnasium, he attended the law school at Charles University. However, his real desire was to become a newspaper reporter and luckily, upon graduation, he was able to obtain a position with the Vossische Zeitung (or Voss’s Times in English).

With the end of the First World War, Katz moved to Leipzig. In 1920 he became an assistant director for the Leipzig Publishing Company. After two years he resigned this position to become an editor for the Ullstein