Description

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.