In the early 1940s, the publisher Collins launched a series of books called Britain in Pictures – “bright, slim volumes”, as Owen Hatherley calls them, on such quintessential national subjects as cricket, inns, “English clocks” and “British explorers”, written by the likes of John Betjeman, Edith Sitwell and George Orwell. It’s hard to imagine a more patriotic project (“a paroxysm of island backslapping”, Hatherley says) except that, “at every level except for the texts”, this was “an entirely central European endeavour”.
Its mostly female staff of designers, editors, typographers and publishers was made up of recent refugees from countries that had succumbed to fascism, many of whom had to be released from internment on the Isle of Man in order to work on the books. Adprint, the company that produced and packaged Britain in Pictures, was the creation of the Viennese-born publishers Wolfgang Foges and Walter Neurath. The latter, with his wife Eva, would go on to found Thames & Hudson.
This is one of many examples described in The Alienation Effect where Britain’s cultural furniture was rearranged and redesigned by women and men, often under-credited and under-recognised, who had fled here in the 1930s and 40s. Some, like migrants today, landed on the coast of Kent in flimsy craft. Between them they shaped film, art, architecture, planning, publishing, broadcasting, children’s literature and photography. We owe to this diaspora (in whole or in part) the Royal Festival Hall, Penguin Books and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Hatherley also highlights less famous and metropolitan glories such as the murals in Newport civic centre – the “Sistine Chapel of municipal socialism” – created by the Frankfurt-born Hans Feibusch and his artistic partner Phyllis Bray.
Most (not all) were from the political left and the artistic avant garde, and Hatherley’s aim is both to explore their trajectories and to honour and mourn the postwar attempts at building a more fair and enlightened society in which they played a significant part. There is also a simple point, relevant to the present, about the contribution that feared and despised migrants can make to their host country.
New arrivals – fleeing persecution because they were Jewish, or on account of their politics, or both – reacted in various ways. Many, while grateful for their refuge, were dismayed by the bad weather, overcooked food, cultural conservatism and lifeless streets of 1930s Britain, the “identical little houses built quickly out of dirt”, as one put it. Nor was their welcome warm. Graham Greene attacked, in the Spectator, the numbers of migrants in the film industry. The Daily Mail railed against the “outrage” of how “stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country”. A brigadier from Eastbourne suggested they be forced to wear identifying armbands. Calls to lock up “dangerous aliens” led to their internment in sometimes atrocious conditions.
Some, like the architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, responded by moving on quite quickly to the greater opportunities of the United States. Others embraced British culture and became its eloquent champions: the Dresden academic Nikolaus Pevsner, for example, would lovingly catalogue architectural treasures in his county-by-county Buildings of England series and write a book celebrating The Englishness of English Art. The cinematographer Walter Lassally, who came on the Kindertransport, would eventually move from gritty portrayals of working-class life such as A Taste of Honey to filming the imperial-age nostalgia of Merchant Ivory films in the 1980s.
Some tried to keep alive their social and artistic radicalism and re-grow it on sometimes unpromising British soil. It is these types that Hatherley likes best. The artist Naum Gabo is, he says, “the sort of modernist I find easiest to like – futuristic, unsentimental, abstract, pure, uncompromised, a real link from the October revolution and Weimar Berlin to London (and St Ives)”. He also admires the photographer Edith Tudor-Hart, born Suschitzky, who combined her documentation of Welsh coalmines and London slums with work for the communist-aligned National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and (it is believed) the KGB’s forerunner the NKVD. He makes space to write about Bertolt Brecht, even though the Marxist playwright never settled in Britain, and borrows from him the book’s title.
Perhaps the most emblematic of these European-made British icons was Picture Post, a magazine that the Hungarian leftwing journalist Stefan Lorant, previously imprisoned by the Gestapo, helped to found. Here, powerful photographs by the likes of the Hamburg-born Bill Brandt documented contrasts of privilege and poverty, or else portrayed ordinary people living their lives. They shot Eton, Oxford, northern back streets, village fetes, seaside frolics and funfairs, and helped create a climate of opinion that contributed to Labour’s landslide election victory in 1945. Now they are familiar images of the good old days with which Nigel Farage might feel comfortable.
Possibly you already had some knowledge of the works of these migrants, but The Alienation Effect reveals their sheer breadth and depth. Hatherley, whose background is in writing about architecture, moves with confidence through the fields of film, typography and art. The book is thick with information, sometimes resembling the gazetteers or guides he has previously written. It’s an occasionally chewy read, but it’s more often acute, informative, passionate and witty, a sometimes moving tribute to achievement in the face of diversity, and an essential antidote to crude theories of national identity.
The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
