The Englishness of English Art sounds like something a parish-pump little Englander might like to bang on about, but it is in fact the title of an arresting study by the German Jewish émigré Nikolaus Pevsner. “Neither English-born nor English-bred,” as he put it in his foreword, he nevertheless pinned down with startling precision the qualities that characterised English art and architecture: a rather twee preference for cuteness and compromise, for frills and fripperies.
This shouldn’t surprise us. Newcomers are typically better placed than natives when it comes to deciphering unwritten social codes. Unencumbered by textbook propaganda and excessive knowledge, the stranger’s-eye view very often has the merit of freshness, even originality. Bertolt Brecht dubbed this the Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect, from which Owen Hatherley takes his title.
The Alienation Effect is a collective biography of the central Europeans who washed up on British shores between the wars. In the decades that followed, Hatherley argues, they exerted a colossal influence on British cultural life. Sometimes the influence manifested itself transparently, as when Thatcher whipped out a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty from her handbag and said to her party colleagues: “This is what we believe!” At others, it hid in plain sight, as in the iconic moquette used for London Transport, designed by the Czech Jacqueline Groag, or in films such as Get Carter, where brutalist Newcastle deserves joint billing with Michael Caine; it is through the Viennese lens of the cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky that we see this unforgiving landscape.
They didn’t exactly get a warm welcome. Nearly a third of the 100,000 refugees from fascism were interned on the Isle of Man as “enemy aliens” in 1940. Many more of these supposed Nazis were briefly deported to Australia and Canada, where they surprised their wardens with kosher food requests.
So why, then, did they elect to stay in England? It was a peaceable, conservative society that had “somehow sat out the 20th century”, Hatherley says. It appealed to the likes of Arthur Koestler. Here was a land “bored by ideologies, sceptical about utopias … enamoured of its leisurely muddle, incurious about the future, devoted to its past”. Even British communism was a tame affair; Communist Party of Great Britain meetings “were like tea parties in the vicarage”. As a fairly recent migrant, it’s a picture I instantly recognise: a land that sets great store by ancient universities, members’ clubs and quaint cathedrals – a land where even a Crosland-like Corbyn was presented as Stalin reincarnate.
Such migration, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson argued, paradoxically made Britain more parochial, not less. The Hayeks and Koestlers, Namiers and Poppers, did not so much challenge as vindicate insular received wisdoms. Hatherley, who describes himself as a “sentimental English socialist”, offers a gentle critique here. Where Anderson focused on the intelligentsia, Hatherley looks instead at architecture, publishing and film, where radicals dominated the landscape. His conclusion is that the net effect of central European migration was “largely positive”.
The adverb there does some heavy lifting since many figures come in for rough treatment as exhibits of the wrong kind of migrant. The Hamburg-born photojournalist Bill Brandt, for instance, is condemned to Hatherley’s sixth circle of hell for his “extreme Anglophilia”: “One can make out a sickly sexuality, a class-climbing obsession with upper-class women in some of the more ornate nudes.” The popular art historian Ernst Gombrich, meanwhile, stands accused of neglecting social history for the reassuring empiricism of “Oxbridge English culture”.
Hatherley’s heroes are the Jewish architects Berthold Lubetkin and Ernő Goldfinger, both unabashed Marxist modernists, the latter of whom was famously turned into a gold-loving Bond villain. Perhaps John le Carré was on the money when he said that there was “something neo-fascistic” about Ian Fleming’s taciturn spy.
The radicalism of the émigrés, Hatherley convincingly shows, has been concealed by the manipulations of national memory. Take Pevsner. These days he’s remembered solely as a stone-fancier and building-cataloguer rather than a tireless champion of the pioneers of modern design. What’s more, he didn’t uncritically suck up to the Anglos. There’s a touch of Teutonic energy, the spirit of the art historian Aby Warburg, in the grand, 48-volume series he edited, the Pelican History of Art.
Warburg’s credo was Kulturwissenschaft, a scientific approach to cultural studies that turned on connections and juxtapositions. Hatherley is a worthy heir to that tradition, and he has a canny eye for lineages. His potted genealogies are dazzling performances in concision, effortlessly gliding from the new brutalism of his home patch of Camberwell, London, through the works of art historian Rudolf Wittkower to the 15th-century Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti – all in a single page.
To be sure, Hatherley might tell you more than you might care to know about every inch of Hampstead. But these perambulations still yield some lively vignettes. We meet the artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, doyenne of the north London enclave, who painted a voluptuous naked woman on a small boat crossing the Channel to escape Hitler. Solemn critics took the precious piece of cargo she is clutching in the painting to be a Torah scroll – before she revealed that it was in fact a large Austrian wurst.
• The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley is published by Allen Lane (£35). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
