The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley. Allen Lane, 608 pp., $40.
The Alienation Effect takes its name from the German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht’s famous Verfremdungseffekt, a dramatic technique whereby the everyday or commonplace is estranged, made to appear foreign. Brecht explained in a 1940 essay that the method purported “to make the spectator adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism.” This could be achieved through a variety of means, above all by historicizing a given phenomenon, showing how it came into existence. Owen Hatherley’s latest book examines how the visual culture of Great Britain was shaped by immigrants from the “former Hapsburg and Hohenzollern lands” of Central Europe—Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia—from the 1930s to 1960s. During their time in Britain, the men and women who left these countries brought an outsider’s eye to it (something Hatherley himself has done in his adventures throughout the former communist bloc and, more recently, in New York and Washington, DC). “Great Britain, as seen through the eyes of these newly arrived refugees, is as alien to us now as it was to them at the time,” he writes. Part of the reason it strikes readers as being so different today is due to the changes these émigrés helped bring about.
Here, as in his own travels, Hatherley is looking to recover a usable past. In this search, he is motivated by a pair of contemporary concerns. First, he wants to identify alternatives to the contemporary politics of austerity, finding inspiration in the brief postwar window when Labour-led social democracy in Britain held sway. Under the prime ministership of Clement Attlee, the National Health Service was founded and new towns filled with the most up-to-date housing were built; Central Europeans played a significant role in this latter effort. The social-democratic consensus proved short-lived, however, lasting a mere five years, and after nearly half a century of neoliberal austerity, much of this legacy has been gutted or otherwise lies in ruins. But Hatherley is keen to preserve its memory in order to show that things were not always this way and need not remain so forever. Second, he is concerned about addressing the rampant xenophobia that has arisen in his country over the past decade. As Jews and leftists fled fascist regimes in Central Europe, Britain was seen as a safe haven (even if, for many, the United States was their preferred destination). The country’s record was far from perfect, however: German nationals were indiscriminately interned on the Isle of Man as “enemy aliens,” and many parents of the children saved in the Kindertransport died in Nazi concentration camps. Anti-immigrant rhetoric was common in the pages of the Daily Mail, just as it is nowadays toward more recent arrivals.
Hatherley is ecumenical in his appreciation of the achievements of past efforts to transcend capitalism, whether Eastern European and Soviet communism or Western European and American social democracy.
The Alienation Effect is written with a clear love for the material it covers. While diasporic figures also composed important works of literature, political theory, natural science, and philosophy, the book focuses on their contribution to the visual arts. Just as with Hatherley’s earlier works, the story told is not limited to art or architecture or film or design ephemera but encompasses the modern movement itself. Elsewhere, starting with Militant Modernism (2009), Hatherley has remarked in passing that modernism was largely an “importation,” brought to Britain by exiles from Germany and surrounding states after 1933. Here, that thesis is systematically expounded. Despite its status as the birthplace of capitalist modernity, the United Kingdom had fallen behind the times. Just two decades after the death of the socialist decorator William Morris, the island had regressed into a cultural backwater in comparison with continental Europe and the US.
Needless to say, there was a strong utopian social content behind the revolutionary aesthetic forms promulgated by the international avant-garde during this time, one that lent itself to a certain vision of political transformation. Although the precise relation of these formal and material elements varied from case to case, Hatherley is always interested in the nexus between them. Prior to the interwar emigration wave, there were two principal tendencies among the modernists of Mitteleuropa: constructivism, characterized by sharp rectilinear angles and affectlessness, and expressionism, known for its organic curves and emotional angst. Dadaism, with its raw, amorphous fury, enters The Alienation Effect mainly through the collages and propaganda posters of John Heartfield, whose best work was already behind him when he moved to England. Surrealism, being more of a French current, shows up only peripherally, mostly in the lugubrious Victorian townscapes and interiors of the Freud-obsessed photographer Bill Brandt. However, one of the recurrent themes in Hatherley’s book is that, once in Blighty, many of the pioneering Central European modernists softened the hard-edged stances they previously took. It is often unclear if this was an adaptation to British backwardness or an evolution in keeping with the inner logic of their own stylistic development. Regardless, in Britain they generally allied themselves to the project of postwar social democracy, though for many this meant abandoning the revolutionary communism of their youth.
Modern artists formed an enclave in Hampstead on Finchley Road, affectionately referred to as “Finchleystrasse” by residents.
Following his sharp, theory-inflected introduction, Hatherley recalibrates, offering an overview of the era’s photojournalism. A crucial role is accorded here to the pathbreaking magazine Picture Post under the editorship of Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian Jew who was notoriously cagey about his origins. Before immigrating to England, he spent several years in Germany, where he helped edit the Münchner Illustrierte Presse. Greatly indebted to Weimar periodicals, Picture Post—like its precursor, Lilliput, which Lorant started not long after reaching British soil—cultivated an identity that was antifascist and liberal, even occasionally socialist. It was known for its dignified but unsentimental depictions of working-class life in Britain and even ran a piece on full employment entitled “Work for All!” by the Hungarian-born economist Thomas Balogh. Lorant relied on a range of émigré photographers with avant-garde sensibilities, including Felix H. Man, Zoltán Glass, Kurt Hutton, and Gerti Deutsch. Brandt was also on Picture Post’s payroll throughout the 1940s. Hatherley zooms in on the work of his contemporary Edith Tudor-Hart, a card-carrying communist (and Soviet spy—she played a role in connecting Kim Philby to the KGB) trained at the Bauhaus and influenced by the dispassionate objectivity of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Whereas Brandt went on to achieve great fame, Tudor-Hart gradually faded into obscurity with the advent of the Cold War.
From photography, Hatherley pivots to film, a subject he explored at length in The Chaplin Machine (2016). Central Europeans played a major part in Britain’s movie industry from the mid-1930s up through the early 1970s, none more so than the Korda brothers—Alexander, Zoltan, and Vincent, of Hungarian Jewish extraction—who built a studio empire in Buckinghamshire, near London. (The Kordas’ processing lab and screening room was designed by Walter Gropius, it so happens, though he would disown it as a bit of a rush job.) They had made procommunist films under Béla Kun’s Soviet republic and left after the repression. While the Kordas’ biggest hit was a historical drama, The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), starring Charles Laughton, Hatherley is most impressed by their futuristic vision of Things to Come (1936), based on a novel by H. G. Wells. Zoltan wrote the scripts, Vincent was in charge of special effects, and Alexander directed. Emeric Pressburger, their countryman and coreligionist, also made a name for himself in British exile as a close collaborator of Michael Powell. Of the many films Powell and Pressburger made together, Hatherley focuses on A Matter of Life and Death (1946), which featured elaborate Bauhaus-inspired sets by the German production designer Alfred Junge. Numerous other émigrés worked behind the scenes as cinematographers. Wolfgang Suschitzky, Edith Tudor-Hart’s brother, shot footage of industrial Britain for Paul Rotha’s documentary Land of Promise (1946) and later gave the Brutalist cityscape in Get Carter (1971) its gritty, realistic feel.
“Not an architect, and not a New Yorker, but have fallen in love with NYRA.”
The chapters on book design, or Buchkunst, are superb. Incidentally, The Alienation Effect was published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books. Hatherley reconstructs Penguin’s past in painstaking detail. From the start, it was closely modeled on the example of Albatross, a German publishing house that was able to print copyrighted English-language classics with impunity thanks to a Weimar-era legal loophole. Allen Lane, the imprint’s eponymous founder, wanted to emulate the Albatross formula of handsome, high-quality paperbacks with mass appeal. Moreover, he was eager to dissociate softcover editions from the sort of pulp fiction churned out by American presses at the time, with their lurid covers. After a short initial run, Lane hired Central Europeans to format the series. Jan Tschichold, the renowned avant-garde typographer, took over in 1946. Under his tenure, the fonts and margins were standardized; he even remade Allen Lane’s logo, which has since become a classic. Tschichold’s handpicked successor, Hans Schmoller, borrowed heavily from Leipzig publishers, especially the Insel-Bücherei, in his layouts. Germano Facetti, the sole Italian outlier in Hatherley’s narrative (though he did do time at Mauthausen), contributed memorable surrealistic imagery and later headed up the design division. Romek Marber, a Polish Holocaust survivor and graphic artist, made quasi-abstract gridded covers for Penguin Crime novels.
Once in Blighty, many of the pioneering Central European modernists softened the hard-edged stances they previously took.
Some of the best writing in The Alienation Effect is on the historiography of art and architecture, which, as Hatherley notes, benefited greatly from the sudden rise of paperback publishing. Nikolaus Pevsner and his son Dieter edited The Pelican History of Art, along with the wide range of titles that together comprised The Buildings of England, installments of which could be seen on bookshelves across the island in the second half of the twentieth century. Other mitteleuropäische publishers capitalized on the trend as well. Walter and Eva Neurath founded Thames & Hudson, whose World of Art series continues down to this day. Phaidon was originally a Jewish-owned Viennese operation that moved to London following the Anschluss. E. H. Gombrich’s bestseller for Phaidon, The Story of Art (1950), is given a sympathetic rereading by Hatherley; he nevertheless presents Marxist art historians from Central Europe such as Arnold Hauser, Frederick Antal, and Francis Klingender as a corrective to Gombrich’s disinterest in sociohistoric context. Hauser is now remembered for his sweeping, four-volume Social History of Art (1951), while Antal’s studies of Florentine painting and essays on classicism and Romanticism are still well regarded. Klingender has been unjustly forgotten, however, so Hatherley’s attention to his remarkable Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947)—“a colossal achievement, still one of the most powerful and strange books ever written on British culture”—is salutary. As Hatherley writes, this work was “animated by a fascination with Britain as an urban, industrial moloch, whose … artists were fixated on the contrast between rich and poor, and the potentials and horrors of a liberated technology.” Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949) likewise receives some discussion in The Alienation Effect, read as a riposte to a popular tract by Geoffrey Scott. This little book created quite a stir at architecture schools, inspiring modernists like James Stirling and Alison and Peter Smithson.
Turning from art history to art practice, Hatherley singles out painters such as Oskar Kokoschka and Max Beckmann, who were already quite famous on the continent before their emigration. The anarchist art critic and Germanophile Herbert Read worked with the Hungarian art historian Edith Hoffmann to curate a 1938 gallery in Mayfair on “Twentieth Century German Art,” a polemical response to the traveling Degenerate Art exhibition put on by the Nazis the previous year. (It was received coolly by the parochial British press.) Modern artists formed an enclave in Hampstead on Finchley Road, affectionately referred to as “Finchleystrasse” by residents. Less established figures like the Pole Feliks Topolski and the Austrian Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, both of whom lived in this neighborhood, did the bulk of their work after crossing the Channel. Topolski captured the old imperial capital in vivid expressionistic detail—and on a huge scale—in one massive mural. Motesiczky learned her craft from Beckmann, caricaturing some of the scene’s prominent personalities in her portraits. Eva Frankfurther and Käthe Strenitz, from Germany and Czechoslovakia, respectively, likewise painted avant-garde canvases in London, while others made their way to the “Celtic fringe.” Jankel Adler and Ernst Neuschul were active in Wales, while Josef Herman and Aleksander Żyw drew great inspiration from Scotland.
Émigrés also left numerous sculptures, installations, and even stained-glass windows throughout Britain. Kurt Schwitters, the charismatic dadaist, was celebrated among this milieu, continuing his serial Merzbau project in Elterwater. Naum Gabo, whose constructivist career spanned Moscow, Munich, Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Cornwall, started Circle magazine in London in 1937, although it only released a single issue. (Gabo’s kinetic sculpture outside Saint Thomas’s Hospital is the subject of a poignant anecdote, which serves as Hatherley’s point of departure.) Franta Belsky and Peter Peri made public statues for council housing estates, whimsical monuments to everyday life rendered in concrete or bronze. Siegfried Charoux, an Austrian social democrat, had pieces commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain, as did Peri. After World War II, the Catholic and Anglican Churches employed a number of continental Europeans, many of whom were Jewish, to adorn their cathedrals. George Mayer-Marton, Hans Feibusch, Ernst Müller-Blensdorf, and Adam Kossowski gave a secular gloss on well-worn religious themes; Ervin Bossányi, for his part, made stained glass of Biblical scenes evoking the Holocaust. The book closes with a moving reflection on a mural by Feibusch depicting the history of Newport, which Hatherley dubs “the Sistine Chapel of municipal socialism.”
After nearly half a century of neoliberal austerity, much of this legacy has been gutted or otherwise lies in ruins.
But it is The Alienation Effect’s final section, on architecture and town planning, that is of greatest interest. After all, this is what Hatherley is known for, and he is in fine form here. The two central figures in his narrative are Berthold Lubetkin and Ernő Goldfinger, who towered over the rest of the field. Lubetkin is a fascinating character, an early evangelist of the International Style in Britain. Trained at VKhUTEMAS in Moscow and active in Berlin and Paris prior to his emigration, he cofounded the avant-garde Tecton Group, a radical architectural collective that lasted roughly fifteen years. With his associates, fellow émigrés Peter Moro and Gerhard Rosenberg, Lubetkin designed a string of outstanding modernist buildings over the course of the 1930s: the Gorilla House and the charming double-helix Penguin Pool for the London Zoo, followed by the Highpoints I and II apartment blocks, and finally the Finsbury Health Centre. Plans for Spa Green and Priory Green, adjoining Finsbury, were drawn up in 1938, but they only broke ground in 1945. A lifelong communist, Lubetkin originally planned to erect a statue of Lenin over the site where the great revolutionary had briefly stayed in London in 1902. But as Hatherley is fond of pointing out (see “Buildingsromans,” NYRA #46/47), by 1954 the architect had scrapped the idea under mounting Cold War pressure. Over time, he grew more aesthetically conservative. At Dorset Estate, which Lubetkin worked on after the war, he moderated his strident functionalism somewhat; later, he rejected the “excesses” of Brutalism. When modern architecture came under assault in the 1980s, however, he mounted a spirited defense.
Goldfinger, by contrast, never relented in his constructivism. Born in Hungary and educated in France, he moved into Lubetkin’s Highpoint I in 1934. If anything, Goldfinger’s style became harsher as the years dragged on. One of his earliest designs, the Willow Road terraces of 1937, was actually quite unobtrusive, set against the backdrop of the surrounding cottages. Compared with what came afterward, it seems almost quaint. Trellick Tower and Balfron Tower, built in the late 1960s, were uncompromising in their boldness of vision and have since become synonymous with the petty tyranny and intransigence of the man who made them. Glenkerry House (1977) and Carradale House (1970), their smaller cousins located nearby, possess a similarly foreboding appearance. So much ink has been spilled about them, from their early vilification to their subsequent rehabilitation, that it is difficult to say anything new. (For some exemplary analyses of these buildings, readers should consult Hatherley’s magisterial 2021 survey, Modern Buildings in Britain.) Here Hatherley highlights Goldfinger’s detail-oriented obsessiveness, down to the nuts and bolts, the sort of expert craftsmanship that has allowed these towers to age more gracefully than many of their contemporaries. Like Lubetkin, Goldfinger was a Marxist, designing the Daily Worker newspaper building as well as the headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1940s.
Such works appear tragic to us precisely because, Hatherley quotes Lubetkin as saying, they “cry out for a world which has never come into being.”
While Gropius and his protégé Marcel Breuer are dutifully recalled, Hatherley is more interested in undersung architects like the Slovakian constructivist Eugene Rosenberg and the German Bauhaus affiliate Arthur Korn, who preached the gospel of modernism to pupils, including Alan Colquhoun, Kenneth Frampton, and the Smithsons. The Polish School of Architecture was transplanted wholesale from Warsaw to Liverpool shortly before the war. After hostilities ceased, its members proposed to replace the bombed-out city centers of Merseyside with new neighborhoods featuring sleek, angular town halls. Jerzy Faczyński designed one of the cathedrals decorated by Kossowski, while Magda Borowiecka was responsible for the “Barrier Block” of housing in Brixton. Egon Riss, a Jewish architect from Red Vienna, drew up plans for a series of avant-garde collieries in the 1950s, overseeing their construction. But as Britain’s industrial base shrank, these were all demolished.
The book closes with a moving reflection on a mural by Feibusch depicting the history of Newport, which Hatherley dubs “the Sistine Chapel of municipal socialism.”
The treatment on town planning is by far the longest in The Alienation Effect. Because it involves such a vast allocation of resources, urbanism is deeply entangled with economics; its fortunes therefore have tended to shift with the prevailing ideological winds of the latter discipline, Keynesianism giving way to Austrian School neoliberalism. After the war, the London County Council green-lit a number of ambitious projects by left-wing planners as part of the broader social-democratic experiment. Goldfinger tried his hand at planning, authoring an article in support of a 1943 plan to rebuild London following the devastation of the Blitz. Walter Bor, a Jew from Prague, was another such planner, submitting a proposal to radically remake Liverpool in the mid-1960s. Konrad Smigielski, from Poland, was yet another. He championed robust public transportation in his virtually carless Leicester Traffic Plan in 1965 and in his sketches of cooperative villages for Stanford Hall thirteen years later. Smigielski leaned on the “small is beautiful” ideology promoted by E. F. Schumacher, an émigré planner who later gained notoriety as a countercultural guru. Already with Schumacher, though, there is evidence of an antiplanning attitude against grandiose, centralized schemes, rooted in skepticism toward the possibility of a fully rationalized society. This change of attitude could be glimpsed in the work of the German British architect Walter Segal, who for most of his career held social-democratic assumptions but turned against planning later on.
To explain the newfound skepticism toward bureaucratic rationality that took shape during this period, Hatherley capably restages the “socialist calculation debate” that was waged largely between Central Europeans such as Otto Neurath (a major figure in The Alienation Effect), Karl Polanyi, and Friedrich Hayek. It began on the continent in the 1920s but was carried into British exile. From the 1970s onward, Hayek’s argument—that individual needs could not be accurately calculated by the state and that the market is uniquely equipped to respond to the capriciousness of human desire—gained the upper hand, infamously endorsed by Margaret Thatcher at a Conservative policy meeting. Ruth Glass, a Jewish communist born in Berlin, emerges as the protagonist for Hatherley at the end of this section, providing intelligent criticisms of the antiplanners’ screeds in the 1980s against socialism and modernism. Her outlook is at the same time more attuned to the complexities of actually existing urbanism than those of some of the social-democratic planners of the immediate postwar decades. Glass is one of the most cited authors in the world, due to an influential 1964 essay she wrote coining the concept of “gentrification.” But her longer studies of urban sociology remain sadly out of print, much to Hatherley’s disappointment.
Here, as in his own travels, Hatherley is looking to recover a usable past.
Hatherley is methodical in his approach, covering a dizzying array of personages. Usually he provides a condensed biographical sketch of when and where they were born, followed by an account of what they were up to before their emigration. Certain commonalities become clear. Most were Jewish or leftist or both. The Jews among them tended to come from nonreligious, middle-class households. Roughly half of them—whether ethnically Jewish, German, Austrian, Polish, Hungarian, or Czech—anglicized their names. For many, London was merely the last stop on a journey that had already taken them from Budapest to Berlin or Vienna to Paris. Some sought to escape first the suppression of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, then the rise of Nazism or Austrofascism, and finally the invasion of France. A number eventually moved on to New York or Los Angeles, using Britain as a mere stepping stone, while others later returned to the continent. Even if many modern artists and architects of the first rank stayed only briefly, Hatherley’s contention is that those who did, along with a host of lesser-known figures, exerted a subterranean influence on British photography, painting, sculpture, architecture, book design, and art history. Overall, the case he presents is convincing. And like the rest of his prolific output, The Alienation Effect is highly readable.
As with his other works, Hatherley is ecumenical in his appreciation of the achievements of past efforts to transcend capitalism, whether Eastern European and Soviet communism or Western European and American social democracy. Of course, he readily acknowledges the shortcomings of each: the totalitarian character of the former and the imperialist character of the latter. But he insists that there are valuable lessons to be learned from both. Much of the art and architecture produced by communists and social democrats in pursuit of a more rational society is indeed impressive and should not be dismissed out of hand simply because this society did not come to pass. Such works appear tragic to us precisely because, Hatherley quotes Lubetkin as saying, they “cry out for a world which has never come into being.” While it ought not be thought impossible that someday capitalism’s transcendence might again be on the table, the preconditions for such a renewed effort are left unclear.
Indeed, were one to take any issue with Hatherley’s argument, it would perhaps be with its unspoken assumptions. For example, in The Ministry of Nostalgia (2016), Hatherley mentions the “utterly unrepeatable” character of Labour’s landslide postwar victory. Those welfare state concessions that were granted by the ruling classes of Europe and the United States after each World War assumed the existence of a militant international workers’ movement and the credible threat of revolution, rather than the popularity of a given set of reforms or the appeal of politicians like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders. Perhaps this is the main thing that separates recent immigrant waves from their historic precedents: Whereas many of the Jewish and other European refugees of the interwar period belonged to one side or another of this movement, either socialist or communist, no such context exists today. Moreover, there is no ready-made reformist project they could plug into once their revolutionary dreams have been dashed. Everything depends on the rebirth of such a movement. Hatherley might well agree.