Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In 1943 Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka exhibited an immense, violent painting of a crucifixion called What We Are Fighting For in the bombed ruins of John Lewis Oxford Street. He was thrilled that no one took any notice: “That was only possible in England; there I would hope to carry on my life, not as a talented refugee, but as a free human being.”His fellow refugee Arthur Koestler similarly “found the human climate of England particularly congenial and soothing — a kind of Davos for internally bruised veterans of the totalitarian age”: far from the horrors of Darkness at Noon.The Alienation Effect, Owen Hatherley’s exhaustive, meticulously researched though uneven account of central European émigrés’ contribution to four aspects of British visual culture — photography, painting, architecture, book design and publishing — turns on this benign clash of sensibilities. The émigrés were masters of stark abstraction and grotesque expressionism: full-throttle modernism forged in the tumultuous political battlegrounds of 1920s-30s Berlin, Weimar, Vienna, Moscow. That was entirely foreign to Britain, a “backwater” which, Hatherley writes, “had somehow sat out . . . the twentieth century”. Here homegrown modern art was always a compromise, resisting extremes: we got Graham Sutherland not Picasso, Henry Moore not Giacometti.The émigrés injected a revolutionary spirit, still visible all around us, from Hungarian Ernő Goldfinger’s brutalist Trellick Tower in Kensal Town to Tbilisi-born Berthold Lubetkin’s beloved Penguin Pool, modernist icon for London Zoo. Czech sculptor Franta Belsky’s twisting bronze mother and precariously tilting baby Joyride rises proud in Stevenage Town Square. On the Embankment, Naum Gabo’s purist abstract fountain Revolving Torsion faces Big Ben’s ornate gothic turrets as if enquiring “what exactly it is they think they’re doing, what the point is of all this silly gesticulation”. Hatherley, a historian of 20th-century urban Britain, is an exhilarating guide to the émigré buildings and public sculptures which changed or challenged the fabric of our cities. Other sections are weaker. He adds little to understanding the foreign camera’s estranged, enchanted eye. The chapters on fine art omit the major figures Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, who achieved greatness bringing acute German realist sensibility to British painting.If the overall émigré story is familiar, what is refreshing throughout are anecdotes and first-person testimonies giving voice to some of the 100,000 refugees of fascism who entered Britain between 1933-40. That figure seems small today, though enough then for the Daily Mail to gripe that “the way stateless Jews are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage”. Individually, the arrivals met generally sympathetic if bemused acceptance. “Be kind to the foreigner, the poor chap can’t help it,” summed up native responses, according to a beguiled Koestler. Britain’s reward, Hatherley argues, was that “[t]he aliens made us all a little bit alien too.”In Scotland, Jankel Adler, embraced within a coastal artists’ colony, painted the bold constructivist interloper “Venus of Kirkcudbright”. In Wales, Josef Herman depicted monumental miners as “Egyptian carvings walking between sky and earth”; on his first day in Ystradgynlais he was assured “[y]ou’re no stranger here” and called Joe. At the Isle of Man detention centre, a staging post for male émigrés, a guard accompanied Martin Bloch outside so he could paint en plein air. Bloch’s “Miracle in the Internment Camp” typifies the fluid distortions of German expressionism, baffling to British audiences, though making some impact after the war when Bloch taught at Camberwell.Nearly all the émigrés owed this country their lives, and many like Koestler saw the paradox that Britain, “suspicious of all causes, contemptuous of systems . . . sceptical about Utopias”, was not natural territory for modernism’s formal austerity or exaggerated declarations. The more radical artists, Hatherley suggests, left for America when they could: Bauhaus pioneer Walter Gropius, mourning that “in this neutralized air all imagination withers away”; unrelenting abstractionist Mondrian, who complained that Hampstead had too many trees.The remainers tended to conceal leftist or just highbrow backgrounds, fusing them with English democratic moderation. Thames & Hudson’s founders Walter and Eva Neurath adapted “Red Vienna” socialism to the ideal of offering art to a mass readership. Ernst Gombrich smashed the milieux of elitist English connoisseurship with his accessible bestseller The Story of Art — but its lucidity emerged from theories of painting’s relationship with science and psychology flourishing in his native Austria, unknown in Britain.Others, conservatives anyway, embraced English traditionalism. Nikolaus Pevsner, who initially supported Hitler, was appalled to find himself on the Dover boat train with crowds of “non-Aryans. Dreadful, dreadful — to think that’s where I belong.” His epic series Buildings of England introduced English readers to their own architectural history.Hatherley’s warm-hearted, rambling narrative welcomes them all. His book is bathed in nostalgia for tolerance and assimilation — bus conductors announcing “Finchleystrasse”, Jewish Hans Feibusch’s murals for more than 30 Anglican churches — at the cost of a more subtle understanding of an art often rooted in trauma. We learn of painter Halina Korn that her “entire family were killed in Auschwitz and she suffered from poor mental health”, that designer Germano Facetti “had done time in the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen”: jarring everyday language for terrors that were exceptionally shocking. In this sense Hatherley’s writing evokes the English phlegmatic ordinariness that the émigrés encountered. Kind and well-intentioned, The Alienation Effect lacks the rigour or comprehensive authority of a Gombrich or Pevsner, embodying rather the “leisurely muddle” that Koestler thought characterised — and perhaps redeemed — British intellectual life.The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley Allen Lane £35, 608 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
