It comes as a mild surprise to learn that this book doesn’t exist already. Why hasn’t anyone written of how, as the subtitle of Owen Hatherley’s new book has it, “central European émigrés transformed the British 20th century”?
The émigrés in this book – it has never seemed quite apt to call them “immigrants” – are those who were escaping Nazism in the 1930s. The Alienation Effect is concerned specifically with the intellectuals among the exiles, about “how these individuals shaped Britain, and how Britain shaped them”. What they brought to Britain, he writes, was “a more proudly urban, modernist and serious culture”. Though that culture was ridiculed at first, it eventually came to be so well integrated into the texture of national life that today it is poorly understood just “how many aspects of quintessentially British 20th-century culture… were the products of refugees fleeing fascism”.
Hatherley has long been a champion of European modernism, from the time of his first book, Militant Modernism (2009), which underlined the politically radical potential of modern architecture. Architecture, for him, has never seemed a merely technical or even aesthetic matter, but a way to raise the deepest questions of morality and politics. Here, Hatherley covers an impressive range of central European influences on British life: on architecture and urban planning, publishing and graphic design, art and sculpture, photography and film, music and theatre, broadcasting and media. The figures one expect to encounter are all present: Ernő Goldfinger, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ernst Gombrich, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. So too are many figures known only to enthusiasts: Karl Polanyi, Edith Tudor-Hart, Feliks Topolski, Jan Tschichold and Eugene Rosenberg.
If the average reader will not know many of these figures, they will certainly have encountered their work. Anyone who has ever picked up a browned Penguin paperback from a charity shop, taken a walk from Waterloo Station along the South Bank of the Thames, watched a performance at Glyndebourne or Edinburgh in the summer or walked past the Trellick Tower council estate will have come across their influence. It is staggering how many familiar British things have a central European provenance. The British cultural renaissance of the postwar years owed as much to the influence of outsiders as it did to home-grown talent.
When the first intellectual refugees arrived in Britain, the country they entered was “irrational but smooth and pleasant… insular and monocultural; cold and emotionless”, Hatherley writes. It was “a culturally conservative enclave distant in mind from continental Europe and implacably hostile to avant-garde ideas”. Even the artistic elites who had an interest in modernism were Francophiles, and saw little of worth in the culture of Weimar Germany. A New Statesman critic, revolted by the “Twentieth Century German Art” exhibition that had been organised by émigrés to counter Nazi propaganda, wrote that the Führer’s dislike of these paintings “must be one of the best things about Hitler”.
The warnings of the refugee Cassandras were not heeded when they first arrived. Their new hosts, with few exceptions, were “fundamentally uninterested in anything much that happened on the other side of the English Channel.” As war drew nearer, thousands of German and Austrian refugees were interned as potential spies, with anti-Nazi Jews treated as a risk on par with actual Nazi sympathisers.
A sizeable number of the Jewish refugees in Britain at the time had only the vaguest sense of themselves as Jewish. The Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher took the great Jewish intellectual achievement to consist in the contribution of Jewish thinkers to universal ideas. Ernst Gombrich, from a thoroughly assimilated Viennese background, declared that the search for a distinctively Jewish art or culture was “a question of no particular interest except to racists”. More than one figure said, in effect, that “they had been made Jewish by the Nazis”.
Hatherley offers a set of vivid and consistently stimulating portraits of individual artists and thinkers. He introduces us, for instance, to the Hungarian photographer Stefan Lorant, once a Gestapo prisoner, “who brought real photojournalism to Britain” in the pioneering Picture Post, from which we derive our most familiar images of everyday British life in the interwar and postwar years. Many such figures retained their early radicalism, using photography as an instrument of progressive critique. Some, such as the Czech photographer Lucia Moholy, chronicled Britain’s own history of photographic innovation with greater thoroughness than any British historian or archivist of the period managed.
The same patterns emerge in other fields. Nikolaus Pevsner’s indispensable guide to the buildings of England became a fixture on the shelves of middle-class homes, even while his influential conception of “Englishness” in art – marked by “conservatism, smallness of scale, cuteness and wilful irrationality” – revealed a complex ambivalence about it. In publishing, central Europe gave Britain Victor Gollancz and his “Left Book Club”, as well as the distinct (Weimar-inspired) orange spines of the affordable paperbacks published by Allen Lane.
It wasn’t just the political and intellectual content inside the books but their cover design and typography that was owed to central European inspiration. Where pulp publishers, with their garish covers even for serious books such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, aimed “at the loins rather than the head”, Allen Lane’s Penguin opted for the purely cerebral attractions of abstraction. The “monument” of the publisher’s designer Hans Schmoller, one colleague asserted, “is every bookshelf in the country”.
Central European migration, although never large in mere numbers, transformed some areas, particularly of London, into cosmopolitan enclaves. “London bus conductors would regularly call out ‘Finchleystrasse!’ on arriving at the long, wide arterial road that connects shabby West Hampstead with the spacious semis of Golders Green.” If “north London” even now connotes a liberal (inevitably Jewish) intelligentsia, this is where the trope began. But not every émigré came to, or stayed in, London. The Polish painter Josef Herman lovingly portrayed the workers he came to know in his Welsh mining village. Another Polish artist, Jankel Adler, settled for a time in Glasgow. The Jewish painter Hans Feibusch produced an extraordinary range of murals for churches in rural England, bringing an expressionist sensibility to places that had never seen its like. The effects of these artists on their towns and cities did not touch only the intelligentsia. The work of sculptors who made “immense figures of ordinary people, in modern materials, integrated with the new… modern architecture” changed British ideas about the purpose and aims of public art.
In architecture, where their contributions are best known, British eyes saw émigrés as uncompromising radicals but they saw themselves as pragmatists, seeking a design idiom that kept its integrity when brought into contact with local taste. Those tastes were clearly cause for great frustration for many of Hatherley’s main figures, as they are for him. He devotes a good deal of space to what he sees as the pernicious effects of the then Prince Charles’s infamous remark about a proposed extension to the National Gallery by the architects Ahrends, Burton and Koralek. As the firm’s name suggests, two of its partners were émigrés, one from Berlin and the other from Vienna. To have their project described as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend” may have contributed to the subsequent decline of their careers.
This is an admirable book, ambitious in its scope and very readable even at more than 500 pages. The voice of the critic, opinionated and frequently polemical, gives the book an energy a more dispassionate survey would have lacked. It is clear, despite the many qualifications he proposes, that Hatherley accepts Perry Anderson’s 1968 description of Britain, influential on the left, as “the most conservative major society in Europe”, cursed with a “mediocre and inert culture”. Anderson regretted that the influx of émigré blood wasn’t enough to shake British inertia, as the new arrivals rarely “took” unless they “had some elective affinity to English modes of thought and political outlook”. Hatherley devotes much energy to showing that Anderson’s thesis emphatically does not apply to art, architecture and design. Yet, he evidently agrees with Anderson’s pungent assessment of English philosophy and political thinking, unimproved by the contributions of such stridently anti-communist émigrés as Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Friedrich Hayek.
Hatherley proves himself a fair-minded historian, capable of intellectual generosity even towards people and traditions he deplores. Nostalgists for the world before the Industrial Revolution, John Betjeman and assorted anti-modernists all get the chance to make their case in their own words. This book will stimulate readers who do not share the author’s politics or his tastes – for modernism, socialism, internationalism and the avant-garde. Readers coming to Hatherley’s book from a different political position can employ his materials to assemble other stories, with different heroes and different villains.
Nikhil Krishnan is the author of “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60” (Profile)
The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British 20th Century
Owen Hatherley
Allen Lane, 608pp, £35
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[See also: Picasso’s mistreated muses]
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?