Alfred Kerr

Alfred Kerr (né Kempner; 25 December 1867 – 12 October 1948, surname: German pronunciation: [kɛʁ])^[1] was an influential German theatre critic and essayist of Jewish descent, nicknamed the Kulturpapst ("Culture Pope").

Biography

Youth

Kerr was one of two recorded children born into a prosperous family in Breslau, Silesia. His father, Meyer Emanuel Kempner, was a wine trader and factory owner. Alfred Kerr took the surname Kerr in 1887, making the change officially in 1909. He studied literature in Berlin with Erich Schmidt. He was also taught by Theodor Fontane.^[2] Alfred Kerr subsequently worked as a reviewer for numerous newspapers and magazines. With the publisher Paul Cassirer he founded the artistic review Pan in 1910.

Career

Kerr changed his surname to avoid association with Friederike Kempner.^[3] Kerr was noted for his treatment of drama criticism as another branch of literary criticism. As his fame grew he engaged in polemics, with the critics Maximilian Harden, Herbert Ihering and Karl Kraus in particular. In the 1920s he was hostile to Bertolt Brecht, and assailed him with accusations of plagiarism.

Exile

In 1933 Kerr, his wife, Julia, and their children fled Germany for France via Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. They moved on to London in 1935. These years of exile were described, from a child's perspective, by Kerr's daughter in her books When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and The Other Way Round. His books were amongst those burnt in May 1933 by the Nazis when they came to power; Kerr had attacked the Nazi Party publicly, and he had already gone into exile with his family. After visiting Prague, Vienna, Switzerland, and France, he came to London in 1935 where he settled, in penury. He was a founder of the Freier Deutschen Kulturbund, and worked for the German PEN club. An old feud with Karl Kraus worked against him at the BBC.

Kerr became naturalised as a British subject in 1947. In 1948 he visited Hamburg at the start of a planned tour of several German cities but suffered a stroke, and then decided to end his own life (overdose of veronal procured for him by his wife).^[4] He was buried, without references to religion according to his wishes, in Ohlsdorf Cemetery in the position "Z 21-217" and his wife was cremated with her ashes buried at the foot of his grave when she died in 1965.^[5]

The Alfred-Kerr-Preis für Literaturkritik was established in 1977. After the publication of Wo liegt Berlin in 1997 (a bestseller) his works are more widely read in Germany and an edition is in progress.

Family

Alfred Kerr married for the first time when he was over 50, to Ingeborg Thormählen, who was much younger than he, and who shortly afterwards died in the 1918 flu pandemic while pregnant: the bereavement affected him deeply.^[6] His second marriage was to the talented musician, Julia Weismann (1898-1965)^[6][7] in 1920.^[8] Julia was the daughter of a Prussian Secretary of State, named Robert Weismann. The Kerrs' son Michael Kerr became a prominent British lawyer. Their daughter Judith Kerr wrote a three-volume autobiography and the children's book The Tiger Who Came To Tea; the writer Matthew Kneale is her son with Nigel Kneale, the writer of Quatermass scripts.

Works

Memorial plaque in Berlin-Grunewald

• Godwi. Ein Kapitel deutscher Romantik (1898). Dissertation on Clemens Brentano.
• Das neue Drama (1905)
• Die Harfe (1917) poems
• Ich sage, was zu sagen ist: Theaterkritiken 1893-1919. Werke Band VII, 1.

Wo liegt Berlin 1895-1900 (1997)

• Warum fließt der Rhein nicht durch Berlin? Briefe eines europäischen Flaneurs. 1895 bis 1900
• New York und London, travel
• O Spanien!, travel
• Caprichos (1926) poems
• Buch der Freundschaft (1928) children's literature
• So liegt der Fall Theaterkritiken 1919 - 1933 und im Exil
• Der Dichter und die Meerschweinchen: Clemens Tecks letztes Experiment
• Diktatur des Hausknechts
• Walther Rathenau. Erinnerungen eines Freundes
• Gruss an Tiere (1955) with Gerhard F. Hering
• Theaterkritiken (1971) selected criticism
• Ich kam nach England (1979) diary
• Mit Schleuder und Harfe (1982)
• Wo liegt Berlin? Briefe aus der Reichshauptstadt (1997)
• Alfred Kerr, Lesebuch zu Leben und Werk (1999)
• Mein Berlin (2002)

Sucher und Selige. Literarische Ermittungen Werke Band IV, (2009)

Further reading

• Out of the Hitler Time trilogy (When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Bombs on Aunt Dainty (originally published as The Other Way Round) and A Small Person Far Away) (1971, 1975 and 1987 respectively) Judith Kerr
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Alfred Kerr
• German Writers in French Exile, 1933-1940, by Martin Mauthner (London: 2007), ISBN 9780853035404.
• As Far As I Remember. Hart Publishing, Oxford and Portland/Oregon 2002, ISBN 1-901362-87-6 Michael Kerr

References