I Went to England

Translator’s Introduction

Unless you read German, you will only encounter Alfred Kerr (1867–1948) in this previously untranslated Journal of his exile. To quote the words of Alfred’s son Michael, in his memoir As Far as I Remember (2002): ‘His style and presentation were unique … But … unfortunately, they made him untranslatable and far less known abroad than his translatable contemporaries.’ A poet and theatre-critic, Kerr was a leading public intellectual in Wilhelmine Germany, and later in the Weimar Republic. He was fiercely and very vocally opposed to the Nazis from their inception. Hence, he was at the top of the Nazi Blacklist, and when Hitler came to power, Kerr’s life was in imminent danger. In February 1933, when he lay in bed with a ’flu-induced high temperature, there was a call from the Berlin police, who were not pro-Nazi, to tell him that the Gestapo were intending to confiscate his passport the next day. The loss of his passport would have been a death sentence. By evening Kerr was in Prague, taking only a small rucksack with him. He never again saw his comfortable house in Berlin’s select Grunewald area, nor any of his possessions. From Prague he went on to Zurich, where he was joined by his family, his wife Julia, and two children, Judith and Michael. They stayed for a while in a hotel in Küsnacht by Lake Zurich. Then came Paris, for a longer stay, before the family finally left for England, in 1935. To provide some context: ‘The most reliable recent estimates state that over 70,000 refugees from Hitler’s pre-war Reich, the vast majority of them Jewish, reached safety in Britain’ (Anthony Grenville, ‘The Integration of Aliens’, Wallace, p. 1).

This book is not a diary but a loosely chronological and thematically organised collection of sketches about scattered occasions. It is worth remembering that Alfred Kerr is writing here primarily for a future, post-Nazi German readership. He aimed to publish the Journal first in German, and then in English. The German edition did not appear until 1979.

Kerr grew to love Britain and was immensely grateful for his reception here. In fact, the Journal could be considered the longest-ever thank-you letter from a migrant to Great Britain.

Who was Alfred Kerr? He was born at the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve in Breslau [Wroclav], Silesia, to a pious but not orthodox Jewish family. He had one sibling, his sister Annchen: the children were allowed to visit the Breslau Christmas market and have a Christmas tree. His father was a wine merchant, who also kept a wine tavern in the town. Alfred enjoyed a comfortable and stable childhood: the household at least ran to the expense of a French governess, who gave Alfred near-native French.

In 1886 Kerr matriculated as a student of German studies at the University of Breslau, but by 1887 he had moved to university in Berlin. The city was fast becoming a Weltstadt ‒ a world metropolis, a lively intellectual centre, albeit also rife with antisemitism, which Alfred countered in his first publication, an article promoting the enlightenment values and the plea for religious tolerance of Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise [Nathan the Wise 1779]. Kerr was not quite 20 when he wrote it. The local Breslau newspaper, the Breslauer Zeitung, rejected the article, but it was accepted by a prestigious Berlin journal, the Tägliche Rundschau, whose editor then offered Alfred further column space.

It was an exciting time to be in the capital, especially for a theatre-lover. Ibsen’s plays were being performed, and Kerr was highly receptive to the new style of drama. He became an enthusiastic admirer of Gerhart Hauptmann, whose naturalistic play Vor Sonnenaufgang [Before Sunrise] premièred in 1889, his respect lasting until Hauptmann later compromised himself with the Nazis. With his unusually open-minded attitude to the latest drama, Kerr was emulating his model, the Berlin novelist and theatre-critic Theodor Fontane.

By 1893, Kerr had completed his DPhil dissertation on the Romantic writer Clemens von Brentano, which passed with the highest honours. In different times, Kerr might have become an academic, but any career in the Army, politics, diplomacy or the universities was closed to Jews in his day. However, Kerr had truly begun his journalistic career shortly after the summer semester of 1890, writing about Ibsen, Strindberg and Hauptmann.

At least one new play would open in Berlin every week, and many people have told me that his column would be the first thing they would turn to the following morning, not for the sake of the plays, which they would never see, but because it made irresistible reading. People read him in the local papers all over Germany, living the first nights of the Berlin stage, even though they would never see them. (Michael Kerr)

In 1893 he became the theatre-critic of the newly founded Magazin für Litteratur. He was enjoying Berlin life enormously and declared that he would never want to live anywhere else, despite his social-critical attitude to the Prussian ‘Hohenzollern-State’ and more particularly to the prevailing rigid censorship of the theatre, a hugely important cultural and intellectual institution in Wilhelmine Germany. As a fierce campaigner against the restrictions of censorship, and a witty and humorous commentator, Kerr rose rapidly to the status of respected public intellectual.

In 1895 he branched out with his Berliner-Briefe, letters from a bustling metropolis to the readers of provincial newspapers in Breslau and Königsberg [Kaliningrad], widely read in Berlin too, including sketches and often personal impressions. Kerr was also an enthusiastic and frequent traveller, sometimes even during the theatre season: he published a series of well-received travel books: New York und London (1923); O! Spanien (1924); Die Allgier Trieb nach Algier (1929); Yankeeland (1925); Eine Insel Heisst Korsika (1933).

Although never a member of any political party, in the summer of 1896 Kerr attended the International Socialist Congress in London (a first meeting with August Bebel).

His initial impression of England can be summed up in his contrast of the role of the British police to those of Germany: ‘In England the police serve the public; in Prussia they serve the government.’

Kerr’s reputation in Berlin grew ever greater. He was offered space in leading journals like Die Nation and Die Neue Deutsche Rundschau. His great strength lay in his ability to synthesise his overview of tendencies in modern German drama – and to spot the best-emerging talents – as he did in the case of the Viennese dramatist Arthur Schnitzler, and much later the Austro-Hungarian playwright Ödön von Horváth, though he had no time for Brecht until his 1928 Dreigroschenoper.

The strength of Kerr’s convictions sometimes carried him into feuds and vendettas. After a fierce piece of his criticism appeared in 1894, one playwright was so incensed that he challenged Kerr to a duel, unaware that Jews were not satisfaktionsfähig [eligible to fight duels]. This truculence would lead later to a lifelong vendetta against his Viennese counterpart, Karl Kraus, which was to cost him dear during his years of English exile.

In 1901 Kerr was invited to write for a new Berlin newspaper Der Tag. In the same year he travelled to Paris, where he enjoyed a meeting with Emile Zola, who was deeply involved with struggles on behalf of Dreyfus, the victim of a notorious antisemitic affair. The case was also followed by Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist reporting from Paris for the Neue Freie Presse, whose influential Zionist ideas were already in circulation. In 1903, Kerr chose to visit Palestine, prompted perhaps by the incessant pressures of antisemitism in his own environment.

This visit may have caused him to develop the new pride in his Jewish ancestry which he subsequently displayed, an antidote to the constant onslaught of antisemitism around him. Yet even while he was imbued with a sense of historical continuity and awe while contemplating the Holy Land, Kerr also felt utterly German, especially because of Germany’s wonderful musical heritage (he was an excellent pianist). The Journal contains numerous musical references.

For Kerr, the early 1900s were a time of new discoveries and encounters: Max Reinhardt, new Strindberg plays, Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Shaw’s Arms and the Man, the writings of Robert Musil. His own book, Das Neue Drama, a collection of his published articles, appeared in 1905.

A new journal, PAN, gave Kerr the chance to argue vehemently against censorship. In the first issue he presented excerpts from the diaries of Gustave Flaubert, which the Berlin Chief of Police judged to be highly offensive to conventional morality. PAN saw Alfred’s full debut as a political publicist, not just a theatre-critic. It was in PAN that he began to tackle political and social questions. Previously a lyricist with great satirical talent, he now began dealing more prosaically with current affairs. Tired of controversy, the management of the magazine gave up, and by 1913 Alfred had become the publisher of PAN. The magazine represented Socialist hopes but stood for no political party. In May 1914, Alfred paid a visit to the USA and was deeply impressed by the American pace of life and breathtaking modernity.

As the World War began, Alfred, like many other writers, such as Thomas Mann (unlike his brother Heinrich Mann) was full of patriotic fervour and concern for the Fatherland, whose cause (despite his coolness towards the Wilhelmine State) he believed to be a just one. He was too old to take an active part in hostilities, but nevertheless offered his services to the authorities, to no avail. In 1918, Alfred finally abandoned his bachelor status, and at the age of 51 married the 19-year-old Inge Thormählen. Sadly, she died six months later in the prevalent Spanish ‘flu pandemic’.