What The Hell America!

Between 1933 and 1940, roughly a hundred thousand refugees from Central Europe poured into Britain: everyone from socialists scattered by the overthrow of revolutionary regimes such as Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic to German Jews fleeing Nazi antisemitism. Their numbers were enough to form lively enclaves. The pompous but humdrum environs of the Finchley Road in North London became “Finchleystrasse,” where tea rooms stood in for Viennese cafés and Sigmund Freud’s architect son fashioned for him a replica of his old apartment in the Berggasse, complete with the famous consulting couch.

At first glance, this demographic shift was rather unlikely to spark a cultural revolution. Intellectuals and artists were a minority within this minority, many of whom were interned for lengthy periods as enemy aliens after the outbreak of World War II. The most eminent moved on to the United States as soon as they could, where the skies were clearer, the skyscraper urbanism more bracing, and the patrons wealthier.

Perry Anderson argued back in the 1960s that the intellectuals who did stick it out shared the conservatism of the English and so merely reinforced their cautious empiricism. Hatherley objects that Anderson’s argument works only if you share his narrow focus on a handful of émigré thinkers, such as Karl Popper. Cast the net wider to take in art historians, sculptors, and town planners — makers as well as thinkers — and the impact of these exiles becomes unmistakable.

What they brought to Britain was modernism, very broadly defined: expertise in such overlapping and politically charged movements as Expressionism, Dada, and Constructivism as well as affiliation with such institutions as the Bauhaus and the Warburg Institute, which soon reconstituted itself in Bloomsbury. So unfamiliar were these developments in Britain that the exiles sometimes considered themselves as missionaries to the natives, who lived in damp houses in nondescript suburbs, ate tasteless food, and were prone to “anti-alienism.”

Hatherley, who dislikes the fussy architecture of Victorian and Edwardian Britain and its strident Christianity, represents their hosts as more hidebound than then actually were. Victorian Liberals had thrilled to the exploits of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, while Edwardian progressives translated Friedrich Nietzsche and flocked to the Russian ballet. World War I curbed some of this openness to foreign influences: the writer Arthur Koestler found Britain to be a “kind of Davos for internally bruised veterans.” Yet cultivated Britons were suspicious of Central European art less because they feared it than because they were confirmed Francophiles who did not at first relish what they called the “coarseness and hysteria” of Berlin and Vienna.

For their part, many exiles admired much about Britain. Since the Napoleonic Wars, London and the industrial cities of the North had been the acme of commercial and social modernity. Many of the arts that Hatherley’s exiles championed had invoked English influences. The founders of modern German typography admired the achievements of English students of early printing, such as William Morris and Eric Gill. The same went for architectural modernists. German architects who disliked the dark interiors of apartment blocks of their home cities looked to the roomy comfort of garden cities like Welwyn and Letchworth — though their idea of what a good building looked like involved flat roofs rather than mock Tudor detailing.

Hatherley recognizes that the contrast between conservative Britons and sophisticated, progressive Continentals is easily exaggerated. The exiles, after all, had fled societies that had violently rejected their “cultural Bolshevism.” Eva Feuchtwang, a founder of the publishing house Thames & Hudson (named for the rivers running through its target markets of London and New York), recalled attending school in Berlin just after that the Freikorps murdered the Spartacist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Her class marked the occasion with hearty singing, to the horror of her leftist mother.

Many of the most influential exiles shed their revolutionist politics to fit into British society or had never been particularly political to begin with. Stefan Lorant, the Jewish Hungarian photojournalist who founded Picture Post, wrote a book about his stint in a Nazi concentration camp that sold half a million copies. Yet the magazine’s leftism was, at best, implicit — its radicalism expressed through a lively portrayal of working-class life. Lorant was comfortable working for a conservative proprietor, just as he had been for apolitical magnates back in Germany. The Hamburg photographer Bill Brandt, who worked for Lorant, started out with social realist snaps of deprived districts but ended up turning out faintly surreal nudes and charming landscape photographs.

The relationship between Britain and Central Europeans then was more than a teacher-pupil relationship — it was a “complex romance.” The exiles helped advance Britain’s burgeoning culture of social democracy or brought vigor and rigor to the projects that domestic progressives were already pursuing. When Allen Lane created Penguin to bring good paperback books to the masses, he was borrowing an idea from Albatross, a German imprint created by the publisher Tauchnitz to popularize the classics of English literature. From the late 1940s onward, Penguin recruited a series of East German designers who secured its reputation for precision, uniformity, and abstract but expressive covers.

When it came to the study and dissemination of art and architecture, an institutional asymmetry between Britain and Central Europe worked to the former’s benefit. In 1933, Germany had a thousand professional art historians — a quarter of them Jewish — while Britain had none. When these scholars fled the Nazis, they transformed the discipline in their new home, replacing connoisseurship with the systematic study of style and motifs. Yet their popular success relied on tapping Britain’s strong traditions of popular autodidacticism.

Nikolaus Pevsner, later caricatured as the type of the abstracted Prussian professor, superintended many elegant, illustrated books on Western art for Pelican. Projects such as his The Buildings of England series also showed him to be as committed as the tweediest patriot to celebrating the “Englishness of English art.” His work, along with that of exiles who founded publishing houses like Thames & Hudson and Phaidon, added up to a “museum without walls” for the benefit of art lovers on even modest incomes.

Not all collaborations were as memorable. Hatherley, whose portraits of the exiles are as biting as they are affectionate, seems at times unsure whether he is making a critical case for their work or writing a social history of people who did what it took to survive. His discussion of cinema highlights how many Central Europeans eked out a living by churning out forgettable films to satisfy domestic quotas.

There were naturally exceptions to the rule of mediocrity. Emeric Pressburger, a stateless Hungarian, joined forces with Michael Powell to make films whose English whimsy was shot through with a pathos that was entirely Mitteleuropa. Kenneth Adam was a German Jew who brought Weimar flair to designing the lairs for villains in the James Bond films, such as the underwater volcano complex that Sean Connery raids in You Only Live Twice.

Painters and sculptors also survived rather than thrived in Britian. Oskar Kokoschka and Max Beckmann, who by the 1930s were now regarded as conservative painters at home, earned some renown in Britain after the Nazis targeted them as “degenerate” artists. Hatherley is polite about such gifted but minor artists as the muralist Hans Feibusch, a German Jewish convert to Christianity who turned out Expressionist Christs for the Church of England.

Yet the missed opportunities weigh more with him. The Dadaist Kurt Schwitters had to rely on American funding to continue his experiments in the Lake District, where he lived with an English partner he nicknamed “Wantee” for her habit of continually putting the kettle on. The neglect of Schwitters continues to the present: the “Merz barn” in which he conducted his experiments is crumbling into ruin.

The book really catches fire when it turns to architecture. Hatherley finds so many Jewish architects at work that one wonders if Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist should have been set in Britain rather than the United States. They designed everything from seaside amenities — such as Eric Mendelsohn’s De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on Sea, a prototype for many cinemas in the Moderne style — to synagogues. Hatherley gives particularly gripping accounts of the British careers of Berthold Lubetkin and Ernő Goldfinger, both of whom pushed hard against the limits of the International Style, which was making belated headway in Britain when they arrived.

Lubetkin, who itched to subvert modernist orthodoxy, added unexpected flourishes to the second of his two blocks of luxury flats at Highgate in North London. He textured the building’s facade — perhaps in recollection of the carpets he had known growing up in Tbilisi — and placed two caryatids beneath the porch entrance, a touch more commonly found on the busy frontages of Continental apartment buildings. His aesthetic games (also seen in his Penguin Pool at London Zoo) were not just about having fun; they advanced a social vision. His housing estates sought to infuse the lives of working people with spatial drama, adapting his Soviet idealism to a social democratic context.

Lubetkin’s Bevin Court in Islington, which treated its residents to a bright red, corkscrewing staircase, was originally named after Vladimir Lenin, whose bust once adorned the lobby. (The thrifty council later rebranded it after World War II, choosing a sturdy Labour politician whose name shared most of Lenin’s letters and so reduced the expense of cutting new ones).

Yet Lubetkin’s vision ran up against financial restraints. Hatherley ruefully admits that his estates in East London were shoddily built and have been lamentably maintained since their construction. Grand stairwells and bold architectural gestures have not counted for much against creeping decrepitude. Lubetkin eventually abandoned architecture altogether to become a pig farmer.

Ernő Goldfinger, who had fought for Kun in Budapest, pursued similar ideas but with more pragmatism. When his Hampstead neighbor, Ian Fleming, discovered he was planning to build a house next to the Heath, he was so furious at the prospect of a modernist monstrosity that he gave Goldfinger’s name to a Bond villain. But he need not have worried: Goldfinger clad his concrete frame in red brick to make it blend in with its decorous Georgian surroundings.

No one could accuse his later social housing projects — such as his mammoth Trellick and Balfron Towers — of such politeness. Yet they showed the same intense experimentation with materials. Goldfinger saw in hammered concrete not just an economical solution to straitened budgets but a heroic medium — one that could elevate mass housing into something tough and noble.

This monumental work secures for Hatherley his place in the tradition of English writers who have moralized about architecture, a lineage stretching from John Ruskin to Ian Nairn and, yes, Pevsner. But it is hard to extract from its absorbing details an easy moral for the present.

Hatherley plainly intends it as a parable about the evils of xenophobia, arguing that Britain — perhaps more properly England — has always struggled to recognize how immigrants might enrich its national identity. His caustic asides imply that Britain has never escaped from the tyranny of the Daily Mail newspaper, which was soft on fascism in the 1930s and today foams at the mouth about illegals hopping off small boats.

Yet although there are undoubted and striking continuities in xenophobia, it has also been sensitive to changes in the nature and reach of the British state. Although many of Hatherley’s Central Europeans were doubly alien on account of their Judaism and their national origins, what they had to face was mostly the contemptuous indifference of an imperial people who considered they were still the Top Nation.

The peevish racism that is increasingly evident today in the Reform Party’s polling and on social media is arguably a different and more virulent phenomenon. The discontent of the English with their flailing state and diminished standing in the world fuels Enoch Powell’s old nightmares of reverse colonization, in which hordes of Muslim outsiders threaten to replace the natives. Against such anxieties, no amount of lessons about the contributions of Europeans to British Bildung seems likely to conquer the mounting nativism of internet posters who claim that mosques and Indian Deliveroo riders are making the English strangers in their home.

This fierce and scholarly tract against narrow-mindedness is also infected with the elegiac gloom of earlier moralists: it dwells on loss rather than potential. Hatherley notes that from the 1970s onward, the Punk rediscovery of Bertolt Brecht’s darker, edgier Weimar made the social democratic politics of many exiles look tame.

The thinking of Friedrich von Hayek, yet another exile, undermined confidence in the grand plans Goldfinger and a host of lesser planners and architects used to create towns and remodel cities. Much of what the exiles built now lingers as stranded and wasting assets — products of a fortunate conjuncture of economic and social circumstances that will not return.

The jerky but sustained growth of the postwar years generated new towns and funded their lavish provision of social services, from hospitals and shopping centers to churches and museums. The influx of émigré architects and designers who contributed to these projects arrived under conditions that cannot be replicated. The strenuous culture of popular self-education to which many European intellectuals catered is not what it was.

I used to pass Kossowski’s mural a lot, because I lived just round the corner from the Old Kent Road, in a leaky flat designed by Peter Moro — another of Hatherley’s socially minded Jewish architects. Now that I live on the West Coast of Canada, a rich society with a thin public realm, I find myself missing the achievements of welfare state modernism, which this book convincingly establishes as a European phenomenon.

The exiles gave to Britain what Hatherley calls the “superfluous, excessive” gift of beauty, whatever its cost to the taxpayer. Yet far from building on their legacy, their admirers must often settle now for preserving their work from obsolescence. The Twentieth Century Society fought to relocate Kossowski’s mural before the building it decorates is demolished; the flats in Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower have been emptied of their working-class renters and sold off to investors. Hatherley urges us to rediscover the ethos that created such things “before it’s too late.” Yet it is no criticism of this passionate, erudite book to say that it works better as a memorial than as a manifesto for the future.