DYou cannot simply read his four volumes. You have to start them like sailing at sea. This is the question of crossing the ocean of time-a time long ago, sunk for more than a hundred years, but still exists in buildings, pictures and books. The destination of the trip is not important at all, the decisive factor is the voice that accompanies us on the road. It belongs to the greatest and most influential German theater critic, criticizing the founder of an art form: Alfred Kerr.
The story of how Königsberger Allgemeine Zeitung rediscovered Kerr’s column is itself column material. In the early 1990s, when Günther Rühle, editor of Kerr Complete Edition published by Argon und Fischer, searched the newspaper archives of the British Library for the Berlin report written by Kerr for Breslauer Zeitung, he found two articles from Königsberger Allgemeine. Kerr’s “Letters from the Capital of the Empire” sent to Breslau between 1895 and 1900 appeared in book form in 1997 and became a bestseller after being exhibited in the “Literary Quartet”. In the same year, the British literary scholar Deborah Vital-Engrand began to study the “chat letters” written to the readers of Königsberg, as the author called it, as part of her work in writing Cole’s biography.
When the first “chat letter” appeared, Bismarck was still alive
When she found the first “chat letter”, as the footnote said, the editor won “Mr. AK, a talented young writer from Berlin”, and Vietor-Engländer knew they had a major project to do. The date of this article is June 1897; the columns discovered by Rühle are from 1917 and 1919. It was later discovered that until September 1922, Cole had been writing for Königsberger Allgemeine Zeitung-for a quarter of a century. Vietor-Englishmen found hundreds of other columns in the archives of Olsztyn (formerly Allenstein) and Toruń (Thorn). Part of the text is missing and part of the Königsberger Allgemeine volume is incomplete. In 2016, amid applause, the biography of Victor-England Kerr was published. Now, the “chat letter” she published is finally available. As I said, there are four volumes. They contain 733 articles with nearly three thousand pages.
Three thousand pages! This is the heavyweight of “Looking for Lost Time”. Reading also has a Proust taste, not style, but gesture. When the first weekly “chat letter” appeared-it was about a fraud trial-Bismarck was still alive (Cole quoted this in the first paragraph), and Germany had colonies in Africa and the South China Sea (this is The second “chat letter” is about), almost all of Europe is ruled by emperors, tsars and kings.When Kerr’s last column was printed, the Ruhr occupation was just around the corner, inflation was racing, Lenin’s Bolsheviks ruled Moscow, and right-wing sects were preparing for Munich. Adolf Hitler His coup against the Weimar Republic.
