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 …
