Alfred Kerr(Alfred Kempner)
Im Februar 1933 die Warnung, man wollte ihm den Pass wegnehmen. Ich weiß nicht, wer ihn damals anrief. Irgendjemand von der Polizei. Er lag zur Zeit mit Grippe im Bett, aber meine Mutter hat ihm schnell einen Koffer gepackt, und er ist innerhalb von zwei Stunden über die Grenze in die Tschechoslowakei gefahren, noch mit hohem Fieber.
[In February 1933 came the warning they wanted to take his passport away. I don't know who called him. Someone from the police. At the time he was in bed with flu, but my mother quickly packed him a suitcase, and in two hours he had driven across the border into Czechoslovakia, still with a high fever. (ed. trans.)]
Judith Kerr in a speech about her father, Berlin, 7 October 1990
| Born | on 25 December 1867 in Breslau (East Prussia), German Empire |
|---|---|
| Died | on 12 October 1948 Hamburg, British occupation zone |
| Exile | Switzerland, France, Great Britain (United Kingdom) |
| Profession | Writer, Critic, Dramatist |
The Berlin theatre critic and writer Alfred Kerr had publicly warned of the threat of national socialism in the years before 1933. For this reason in February 1933 he already lived in fear for his life and had to flee Germany. He was 65 years old when, on returning from Prague in March 1933, he met up with his wife Julia and the children Michael and Judith in Switzerland and emigrated together with them to France. Since his childhood he had been fluent in French, meaning that he was soon able to take over the "Paris Theatre" section in the Pariser Tageblatt emigrant newspaper and keep the German-speaking readers abreast of the French theatre scene.
In January 1936, Kerr moved with his family to London. He wrote public appeals and leaflets and also political commentary for the BBC. In the United Kingdom, Kerr was a founding member of the Freier Deutscher Kulturbund from 1939 to 1947, and President of the German PEN Club in exile. The fact that he was not able to gain a position as a theatre critic in the British press filled him with bitterness. Of the literary texts he wrote while in exile, the satires Die Diktatur des Hausknechts (1934 in Brussels) and the poem cycle Melodien (1938 in Paris) were published during his lifetime. In his later years, he focussed on the subject of Judaism and his own Jewish ancestry (Ein Jude spricht zu Juden). He also wrote an English diary and a number of film outlines. For the first time after emigrating he returned to Germany in September 1948 to give a lecture tour. While there, he suffered a stroke and died on 12 October 1948 in the British Military Hospital in Hamburg.
Selection of major works:
Die Diktatur des Hausknechts (polemics, satires, 1934)
Melodien (poems, 1938)
Die Welt im Licht (collected reviews and polemics, 1961)
Ich kam nach England. Ein Tagebuch aus dem Nachlaß (notes, 1979)
Wo liegt Berlin? Brief aus der Reichshauptstadt 1895 – 1900 (Feuilletons, 1997)
Further reading:
Haarmann, Hermann / Siebenhaar, Klaus / Wölk, Thomas (ed.): Alfred Kerr. Lesebuch zu Leben und Werk. Berlin: Argon Verlag 1987.
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