Hans Keller and Internment: The Development of an Emigre Musician

The story of influential music critic, Hans Keller's months in British internment camps in 1940 and its effect on his intellectual development.

After World War II, the musical life of Britain was transformed by the Hitler emigrés. None was more influential than the writer and broadcaster Hans Keller who arrived in London from Vienna in 1938. Although his thought was grounded in the work of Kant and Freud, he devoted himself to music after hearing Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes. His remarkable development was accelerated during the nine months he spent in British internment camps, where from 1940 onwards the deracinated flower of European culture was confined .

This book sets the story of Keller's internment in the context of what is still a too-little remembered part of British wartime history and traces its remarkable effects in the decade following his release as he gradually found his niche in London life. It includes several important texts, including that of his famous broadcast on the Kristallnacht, 'Vienna 1938', a selection of poignant letters from his two camps (in translation) and ends with a spirited memoir by Donald Mitchell of 'Hans Keller in the Early Years'. It is a remarkable and elegant contribution to our understanding both of Keller's development and of Britain in the 1940s.

Alison Garnham was educated at Magdalen College Oxford and Goldsmiths' College London. She became archivist in the Cambridge University Library for The Hans Keller Archive in 1996 and published her monograph Hans Keller and the BBC (Ashgate) in 2003. She was assistant editor for Keller's Music and Psychology (Plumbago, 2003) and part of the team that produced The Proms: A New History (Thames and Hudson, 2007). She is currently a Research Associate at King's College London.
Christopher Wintle (Editor) is a Senior Research Fellow at King's College London. His monograph on Benjamin Britten, All the Gods, was published in 2006 (Plumbago), and he has edited four volumes of writings by Hans Keller and four further volumes, by Julian Littlewood, Hugh Wood, Bayan Northcott and Leo Black.