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
