I Went to England: A British Journal, 1935-1940. By Alfred Kerr

Forced to flee Germany in 1933, the drama critic and journalist Alfred Kerr wrote about the British people with much dry wit and some perplexity in his journal, translated here from the German. He grew to love this country, wondering whether it would emerge at long last to confront the Nazis and become the saviour of civilisation.

Alfred Kerr (1867-1948) was a leading Berlin-based theatre critic and journalist, whose writings and radio broadcasts made him a public intellectual in Germany, popularly known as the «Culture Pope». Of Jewish heritage, he was fiercely and openly anti-Nazi, so his exile in 1933 was lifesaving. He fled first to Switzerland, then to Paris and, finally, in 1935, to Britain, where his connections included G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells.

Alan Bance, Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Southampton, has taught also at the universities of Graz, Strathclyde, St Andrews, Cologne and Keele. Among his many publications are The German Novel 1945-1960 (1980) and Theodor Fontane: The Major Novels (1982). His translations include Sigmund Freud’s Wild Analysis.