Overview

After the First World War, the Berlin theater critic Alfred Kerr travels to America and Great Britain. Kerr, who calls New York the ""greatest city in the world"", visits the Broadway theaters and Wall Street, marvels at the subway, Times Square and Grand Central Station. He writes about Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, talks to the satirist Henry Louis Mencken, the railroad magnate W. Averell Harriman - banking partner of the Bush family - and Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times. In London, he meets the poet George Bernard Shaw. But the book, written concisely and wittily, is much more than just a travelogue. After the war, when the mood in America and England became extremely hostile towards Germany, when German professors were dismissed and propaganda films agitated against Germany, Kerr is on a mission to explore the situation and ask for understanding and help for the fragile Weimar democracy. ""Although a major literary and cultural figure in pre-1933 Germany, the writer and critic Alfred Kerr is sadly little known in Britain where he spent his last years in exile and where he is best known, if at all, as the father of artist and children's author Judith Kerr. By translating Kerr's exile memoir, I Went to England, Alan Bance has already helped to redress this balance. He now brings Kerr's reflections on America and Britain in the years after the First World War to an anglophone audience, capturing Kerr's individual and aphoristic style. Kerr's reflections on subjects as diverse as postwar Anglo-American attitudes to the Germans, the skyscrapers of New York, a trip to the Henley Regatta or the beauty of the Scottish landscape offer a brilliant and kaleidoscopic view of a German traveller's experiences in the USA and Britain in the early 1920s."" -Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections, British Library, London Has there ever been a better traveling companion than Alfred Kerr? Urbane, keen-eyed, and generous in spirit, he surveyed New York in the Roaring 20s-""the most alert, the most stupendous, the truly newest of new worlds""-capturing its throbbing intensity in quick brushstrokes before taking on Britain, with London as his starting point. ""New York and London"" is a kaleidoscopic, breathless tour straddling two continents, filled to the brim with rapid-fire observations, philosophical asides, pithy character studies, and sharp commentary on national character. ""My advantage is that I come from somewhere else, with a fresh eye for differences,"" he wrote. Precisely. -William Grimes, The New York Times Alfred Kerr, feuilletonist and phrase-coining tastemaker, was the great theater critic of the Weimar Republic. As this pungent and addictive volume shows, he was also one of the great travel writers. -Drew Lichtenberg, Dramaturg and Theater Critic

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9783960260769

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Reviews

""Kerr's reflections on subjects as diverse as post-WWI Anglo-American attitudes to the Germans, the skyscrapers of New York City, or the beauty of the Scottish landscape offer a brilliant and kaleidoscopic view of a German traveller's experiences."" -Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections, British Library, London ""Alfred Kerr, feuilletonist and phrase-coining tastemaker, was the great theater critic of the Weimar Republic. As this pungent and addictive volume shows, he was also one of the great travel writers."" -Drew Lichtenberg, Dramaturg and Theater Critic . ""New York and London is a kaleidoscopic, breathless tour straddling two continents, filled to the brim with rapid-fire observations, philosophical asides, pithy character studies, and sharp commentary on national character."" -William Grimes, The New York Times

Author Information

Alfred Kerr was the most influential theater critic of the Weimar Republic. The journalist and essayist, born December 25, 1867 in Breslau, Silesia, was of Jewish descent, the son of wine trader Meyer Emanuel Kempner and his wife Helene, née Calé. He studied literature in Breslau and Berlin and completed his Ph.D. in Halle.Kerr worked as theater critic for Der Tag and later for the Berliner Tageblatt and Vossische Zeitung. He went on to write for Breslauer Zeitung, Königsberger Allgemeine Zeitung, and Frankfurter Zeitung while also publishing numerous books. In 1910, he founded (and edited) the artistic review PAN, together with the publisher Paul Cassirer and the arts critic Julius Meier-Graefe. He also campaigned successfully for a monument to be erected to the much-loved Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, who had died in Paris fifty years earlier. Among his friends were the authors Robert Musil, Henrik Ibsen, and Gerhart Hauptmann as well as Walther Rathenau, Germany's Foreign Minister, who was assassinated by rightwingers in 1922. During this period he became caught up in a lifelong feud with the Austrian critic Karl Kraus.Passionate, courageous, outspoken and widely followed, Kerr, called the 'Culture Pope', publicly attacked the Nazi Party very early on. When the Nazis came to power, his books were among the first to be burned. He was stripped of his German citizenship. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, threatened that he should be put against a wall. Kerr fled to Prague and then to Switzerland. His wife Julia and their children, Michael and Judith, followed him soon afterwards. They moved on to Paris, finally settling in 1935, in London, where they lived in extreme poverty. In exile, he founded the Freier Deutscher Kulturbund, and also worked for the German PEN club. Kerr became naturalized as a British citizen in 1947. One year later he flew by RAF plane to Hamburg, planning a tour of several German cities. There he suffered a stroke, and on October 12, 1948 he decided to end his own life with an overdose of Veronal, procured for him by his wife. He was buried according to his wishes, at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery. Alan Bance, born in London in 1939, is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Southampton, UK. He has two daughters, Georgia and Miriam and recently celebrated his diamond wedding to Sandra née Davis. Alan comes from a working class family in London's East End. After attending prestigious Hackney Downs Grammar School, he majored in Germanistic at University College London, subsequently receiving State funding for Ph.D research, initially at UCL, and continuing at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His dissertation, The Post-war German Novel and the Concept of Realism was submitted in 1967, after he had begun his teaching career in Graz and Glasgow. From 1967 to 1981 he taught at the ancient University of St. Andrews, interrupted by a sabbatical at the University of Cologne. Alan took up the professorial chair at Keele, in Staffordshire, in 1981, proceeding to the professorial chair in Southampton in 1984. He served as Germanic Editor of The Modern Language Review and was President of the Conference of University Teachers of German in the UK and Ireland.

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