Kerr, Alfred

(Alfred Kempner, 1867-1948)

   Critic. Kerr was among the most influential and innovative of theater critics during the late Wilhelmine and Weimar Republic periods. He felt that theater criticism was an art form unto itself, and over a career spanning three decades, he sought to convince everyone that he was its consummation. The certitude with which Kerr held his opinions, along with an enormous ego, fostered self-aggrandizement in nearly all his reviews. His numerous visits abroad, especially to London and New York, made him among the most cosmopolitan of the Berlin critics.

   Kerr's 1909 arrival in Berlin allowed him to develop fully his powers of observation begun as a critic in his native Breslau, then in Königsberg and Frankfurt am Main. Even as a beginner, he championed Otto Brahm, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Henrik Ibsen. His left-of-center political tendencies were apparent in his dismissal of Sudermann, though he was skeptical of both Max Reinhardt and Expressionism. Bertolt Brecht likewise failed to win his favor, describing Mann ist Mann as "nonsense from a small talent." When Kerr found an actress he liked, Fritz Kortner claimed, he "didn't write a review of her performance. He wrote her a love letter." Kerr's wit was legendary, recalling one play as "the hapless laughing at the helpless." He was prophetic in his many observations about the disaster waiting to befall the German theater under National Socialism, and he was among the first writers whom Joseph Goebbels stripped of German citizenship after the Nazis took power.

   Kerr was essentially a modernist, recognizing the novel perceptions of Frank Wedekind, Carl Sternheim, and Georg Kaiser as they consciously applied a fragmented and distorted German for the purposes of stage dialogue. Kerr shared their inventive tendencies in his reviews, eschewing traditional "reportage" narrative in favor of sentence fragments, puns, parenthetical asides, slang, and jargon grouped somewhat randomly under Roman numerals. Curt Goetz's parody of Kerr in the comedy Hokuspokus is a good example: "Roman numeral four. Poetry? A flop? A hit? A flop! All things considered: the eyes glaze over. It's a flop! Roman numeral five. But what a flop! Long live kitsch!"