Name Alfred Kerr Role Critic | Children Judith Kerr Books Essays: Theater - Film | |
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Died October 12, 1948, Hamburg, Germany Grandchildren Matthew Kneale, Tacy Kneale Similar People Judith Kerr, Michael Kerr, Richard Strauss, Nigel Kneale, Erich Wolfgang Korngold | ||
Alfred Kerr (né Kempner; 25 December 1867 – 12 October 1948, surname: [kɛʁ]) was an influential German theatre critic and essayist of Jewish descent, nicknamed the Kulturpapst ("Culture Pope").
Contents
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. 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. 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 Bombs on Aunt Dainty (originally published as 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). He was buried, without references to religion according to his wishes, in Ohlsdorf Cemetery in the position "Z 21-217" [1] and his wife was cremated with her ashes buried at the foot of his grave when she died in 1965.
The Alfred-Kerr-Preis für Literaturkritik was established in 1977. After the publication of Wo liegt Berlin in 1997 (a best-seller) 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. His second marriage was to the talented musician, Julia Weismann (1898–1965) in 1920. 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
Wo liegt Berlin 1895–1900 (1997)
Sucher und Selige. Literarische Ermittungen Werke Band IV, (2009)