The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century

by Owen Hatherley

Britain. Made in Europe.

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.

Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.
Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the émigrés all around us – many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash – and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Architecture, Art, British Literature

608 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 27, 2025

About the author

Writer and editor

Reviews

[Oscar Jelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vintage Hatherley, this - bolshy and thoughtful in just the right measure, crammed with fascinating details, unashamedly 'presentist' (and why shouldn't it be?), eclectic, surprising, and often very moving, with an insistent moral urgency that avoids reductivism by staying rooted in close attention to the objects under discussion and the circumstances of their creation. Reviewers love to say that such virtues make a book like this worth reading 'even if you don't share the author's politics', which is surely true, but for what it's worth I don't recall finding anything to object to in Hatherley's humane, undogmatic, sensible yet visionary brand of socialism, which acknowledges mistakes made while remaining obstinately committed to the view, as he's put it elsewhere, "that human problems can be solved, politically, practically, aesthetically".

Maybe the number and quality of the illustrations (all black-and-white) are a little inadequate for a book almost entirely concerned with the visual arts, but Hatherley writes so acutely and evocatively about the films, books, sculptures, paintings, buildings etc. under consideration that seeing them entirely through his eyes is probably preferable to squinting at two-dimensional reproductions of them and trying to make them chime with his fresh and estranging descriptions. The relatively famous figures - e.g. Nikolaus Pevsner, Bill Brandt, Kurt Schwitters, Powell and Pressburger, Berthold Lubetkin, Ernő Goldfinger, Friedrich Hayek - are discussed in a way that you'd hope would be accessible to novices, but he synthesises a frankly staggering amount of reading, looking and thinking, so I suspect even readers quite well acquainted with such people will come away with some new angles to look at them from (I say that as someone who sits somewhere between the two).

Plenty of the other émigrés he discusses are more obscure, sometimes unjustly, sometimes for understandable reasons; I was especially taken with the impish Jack Bilbo, a sort of left-wing Wyndham Lewis who described himself in the subtitle of his autobiography as an "Artist, Author, Sculptor, Art Dealer, Philosopher, Psychologist, Traveller and a Modernist Fighter for Humanity", and did some spectacularly odd paintings that aren't exactly 'good' but aren't straightforwardly 'bad' either. One of the last chapters, 'The Planners and the Anti-Planners', should be turned into a standalone pamphlet and disseminated to every city-dweller in the country, or at least used as part of a campaign to get the work of Ruth Glass back into print. Also made me want to visit places like Leicester, Stevenage and Newport, and what more could you want from a book like this, really? A thrilling, enviable achievement - my book of the year so far.

Wrote an even longer appraisal of the book here, if that sort of thing floats your boat: https://oscarjelley.substack.com/p/ow...

[History Today]

Perhaps you’ve heard the stories about those years when northwest London was home to so many German-speaking refugees that bus conductors, when pulling up to the top of the Finchley Road, would call out: ‘Finchleystrasse! Passports please!’ Hampstead had, since the Nazi rise to power in 1933, become an intellectual and social hub for those fleeing fascism in Central Europe: Jewish people, leftwing intellectuals, avant-gardists, and more, all of whom brought something of the continent’s radicalism with them. By one estimate some 25,000 German speakers had moved to Hampstead around this time, as Owen Hatherley notes in his new book, The Alienation Effect. Downshire Hill, in particular, became the ‘unlikely fulcrum of the displaced leftist aesthetes of Weimar, “Red Vienna”, and golden-age Prague’. Here the Austrian Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka rubbed shoulders with Jewish-German writer Fred Uhlman, Berlin’s antifascist photomontage artist John Heartfield, Bulgarian-born author Elias Canetti, and the Russian sculptor Naum Gabo, who regaled his London friends with tales of Moscow. Some of these émigrés remained in England; others returned to Europe after the war, or continued on to the US. Yet it is a generation that made a lasting mark – not least, as Hatherley observes, in the fact that Hampstead has the highest density of 1930s modernist houses in Britain.

Finchleystrasse is just one of the stops in Hatherley’s wide-ranging book, which argues that this émigré generation – mistrusted, mistreated, demonised, even interned as ‘aliens’ after arrival – ended up having a ‘decisive, transformative, and positive effect’ on British culture. In doing so, Hatherley argues, the émigrés brought much-needed radicalism to the insular ‘backwater’ that was interwar Britain. Those continental modernisms were not universally welcomed in a nation still bound to a certain aesthetic conservatism and regular fits of Victorian nostalgia. Their impact proved considerable, however, and not always in obvious ways. The Alienation Effect sets out to recover this impact from the 1930s until the 1980s, when the neoliberal era ushered in a new cultural transformation of its own.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Alexander Wells is a writer based in Berlin.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really four or even five books in one, so extensive is the range and so comprehensive is its exploration of the subject. Encompassing such a vast amount of information in one volume makes reading it quite overwhelming, and although I found the book absolutely fascinating and one which introduced me to such a large cast of characters and so much interesting material, I found it quite exhausting. The subtitle explains clearly what it’s about – How Central European Emigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century. Some of these emigrés were familiar to me. Some I’d never heard of. Tens of thousands of Central European fled to Britain to escape fascism and profoundly influenced the artistic and intellectual culture of the place that gave them refuge. The research is meticulous and the style is clear and accessible in spite of its academic and scholarly subject matter. The book is an important and valuable addition to British cultural history, and one that I will go back to time and time again – when I’ve had a rest.

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book of cultural history, exploring the impact that a wave of immigration from Central Europe to the United Kingdom in the 1930's and 40's transformed a stale, parochial British society for the better. I won't go into it now because I'm talking to him about it at a book launch tomorrow. Suffice to say, if you are interested in cultural history in Britain and Central Europe, design, architecture, the book industry, the film industry, art, photography etc... you should read it.

[Faye · Rating 4 out of 5]

deeply interested in the politics behind artistic/aesthetic/cultural developments. very comprehensive. some humour dotted throughout but quite restrained, which at times makes it a bit hard to get through. still worth it.