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The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century
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.
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.
608 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 27, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 12, 2026
I am accustomed to reading and enjoying Owen Hatherley's acerbic books about architecture, from A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain to Artificial Islands: Adventures in the Dominions. I was therefore a little surprised by the wider scope of The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century, which examines the broad impact on twentieth century British culture of refugees and exiles from Central Europe. Successive sections examine influences upon film, photography, publishing and book design, visual art more generally, then finally architecture and spatial planning. I was impressed by the ambition of mapping the involvement of Central European émigrés in so many fields. Hatherley has evidently conducted a considerable amount of research, although he doesn't claim that the book is entirely exhaustive. One result is that at times the reader is faced with a blizzard of names that can be a little overwhelming. It is undoubtedly fun to spot the familiar ones, e.g. Albert Doblin, whose deranged novel Mountains Oceans Giants: An Epic of the 27th Century featuring the deliberate destruction of Iceland I enjoyed.
Even when losing track of individuals, I thought the overall thesis came through very well: Britain's culture, from high to popular, was changed in many profound and lasting ways by those fleeing the Nazis and other genocidal regimes. The country shook off some insular traditionalism in the arts and moved to the forefront of modernist trends that had been essentially dismissed or ignored in the 1920s. Such a secondary effect of fascism's rise in the 1930s hadn't really occurred to me before and I found it very interesting to learn about. However The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century isn't quite as accessible as Hatherley's previous books. He still includes illustrations, which I appreciated, while moving closer to an academic style than before. I applaud the rigor of this, while finding it fairly demanding in a book of more than five hundred pages. The writing is most confident and fluid when discussing architecture.
There are many fascinating details to be found, as well as some profound reflections upon the arbitrariness of nationality, identity, and belonging. Most of those who fled to Britain were Jewish, obviously a significant factor in the discussion. I found this anecdote about filmmaker Alexander Korda notable:
Across all cultural and artistic fields, the generation of Central Europeans injected new perspectives, not least because the new arrivals had sufficient distance to observe Britain more acutely than the British could:
All this influence upon culture naturally had a political dimension. Quite a few of those escaping from fascism were communists, or at least had communist sympathies, which had at least some impact on their work. As Hatherley comments with characteristic asperity: 'To sum the difference between the positions, Tatlin's school imagined they would create new, better, revolutionary teapots from the ground up; Malevich's pupils were happy to decorate existing teapots with abstract paintings'.
When the Second World War began, a sordid burst of paranoid xenophobia (championed by The Daily Mail, inevitably) caused the German refugees to be interned on the Isle of Man. Ironically, these were probably the people in Britain most hostile to the Nazis most at that point. The experience of internment coloured the work of various artists Hatherley discusses. It also encouraged some of them to move to America as soon as they could. Distrust of foreigners during and after the war shaped the careers recounted here, notably amongst architects. They were forced into partnerships with British firms and required to design conservatively. Britain did not initially welcome modernist architecture; this only started to change after the war:
That last dig refers to the 1934 London Zoo penguin pool, which I recall admiring. This is very elegant but no longer houses penguins. Wikipedia tells me that it is now a Grade 1 listed building.
One especially poignant legacy identified in this book, of which I wasn't previously aware, is the quantity of beautiful works by Jewish artists in Christian churches:
Many examples are described. Indeed, one great strength of this and Hatherley's other writing is the guidebook-like quality. When next in central London, I'm tempted to try the informal modernist sculpture trail around St Thomas's Hospital on the South Bank. The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century is an enlightening book, reminding brexit-era Britain of how crucial 'Europeans' have been to our culture in the past century. It is full of detailed, evocative description and measured, waspish commentary.
Even when losing track of individuals, I thought the overall thesis came through very well: Britain's culture, from high to popular, was changed in many profound and lasting ways by those fleeing the Nazis and other genocidal regimes. The country shook off some insular traditionalism in the arts and moved to the forefront of modernist trends that had been essentially dismissed or ignored in the 1920s. Such a secondary effect of fascism's rise in the 1930s hadn't really occurred to me before and I found it very interesting to learn about. However The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century isn't quite as accessible as Hatherley's previous books. He still includes illustrations, which I appreciated, while moving closer to an academic style than before. I applaud the rigor of this, while finding it fairly demanding in a book of more than five hundred pages. The writing is most confident and fluid when discussing architecture.
There are many fascinating details to be found, as well as some profound reflections upon the arbitrariness of nationality, identity, and belonging. Most of those who fled to Britain were Jewish, obviously a significant factor in the discussion. I found this anecdote about filmmaker Alexander Korda notable:
On Michael Korda's account, 'Alex' enjoyed being back in Hollywood, which had completed for him a series of metamorphoses of the insider-outsider - if in Hungary he was 'a Jew' and in Britain 'a Hungarian', in Hollywood he was now perceived as 'an Englishman'.
Across all cultural and artistic fields, the generation of Central Europeans injected new perspectives, not least because the new arrivals had sufficient distance to observe Britain more acutely than the British could:
Compliments of the Season was very much a typical King Penguin in that it took an apparently unserious subject - Christmas cards - and analysed it thoroughly, albeit with tongue noticeably in cheek. In a context where, then as now, anything invented by the Victorians around the same time as telephones and record players is popularly considered to be age-old and deeply rooted in our history, Ettlinger was keen to point out how extremely novel and modern these cards were. Christmas cards were 'an essential feature of English Christmas... only one example of the Victorians' flight from the drab and horrific conditions of industrial civilisation into the pleasant realm of fantasy, romance, and sentiment'. They were rooted in how during the eighteenth century, 'a comparatively secure and civilised period in England, sensitive men and women developed an artificial nostalgia for the less secure and less civilised periods and places of the world's history' - an economical and brutal way of describing a way of thinking that besets us still. This fakery should be recognised for what it is, Ettlinger insists.
All this influence upon culture naturally had a political dimension. Quite a few of those escaping from fascism were communists, or at least had communist sympathies, which had at least some impact on their work. As Hatherley comments with characteristic asperity: 'To sum the difference between the positions, Tatlin's school imagined they would create new, better, revolutionary teapots from the ground up; Malevich's pupils were happy to decorate existing teapots with abstract paintings'.
When the Second World War began, a sordid burst of paranoid xenophobia (championed by The Daily Mail, inevitably) caused the German refugees to be interned on the Isle of Man. Ironically, these were probably the people in Britain most hostile to the Nazis most at that point. The experience of internment coloured the work of various artists Hatherley discusses. It also encouraged some of them to move to America as soon as they could. Distrust of foreigners during and after the war shaped the careers recounted here, notably amongst architects. They were forced into partnerships with British firms and required to design conservatively. Britain did not initially welcome modernist architecture; this only started to change after the war:
Lubetkin was also designing what in any other context would be an impressive oeuvre, with a large quantity of buildings emerging in his designs, nearly all of them council flats. These were the very projects that he and Tecton had wanted to construct all along in the 1930s, but they were diverted through the reactionary politics of the time into designing homes for intellectuals, flightless birds, and apes.
That last dig refers to the 1934 London Zoo penguin pool, which I recall admiring. This is very elegant but no longer houses penguins. Wikipedia tells me that it is now a Grade 1 listed building.
One especially poignant legacy identified in this book, of which I wasn't previously aware, is the quantity of beautiful works by Jewish artists in Christian churches:
Blake was one of several Jewish sculptors, muralists, and mosaic-makers who worked extensively for British churches from the 1940s onwards - a remarkable and perhaps somewhat surprising legacy, which extended all the way from lettering (often etched in stone by the typographer Ralph Beyer) to lighting (often flickering through candelabras by Benno Elkan). This is a puzzle for various reasons. The record of the Church of England was not perhaps as appalling as some other Churches in the twentieth century, but nonetheless any history antisemitism or of the racism spread by European imperialism would have to place the Church at its centre. Many clergymen was very much aware of this, and the extensive employment of refugee artists - in both the Church of England and the Catholic Church - was part of various attempts to address this legacy, whether though advocating ecumenicalism within Christianity or religious tolerance outside of it.
[...]
Because of this, rather remarkably, the most impressive artistic response in public art to the twentieth-century European Jewish tragedy can, in Britain, be found most often in Christian churches. That this art is so little known owes something to a particular misfortune - that these artists came to work in the Church at a time, the 1950s and 1960s, when attendance would suddenly and unexpectedly collapse, and their work was often placed in modest little modernist churches on housing estates in the suburbs. [...] Nonetheless, there is a great deal of it still extant, particularly in the case of Hans Feibusch, who became de facto a 'church artist' from the 1940s practically until his death in 1998 at the age of ninety-nine.
Many examples are described. Indeed, one great strength of this and Hatherley's other writing is the guidebook-like quality. When next in central London, I'm tempted to try the informal modernist sculpture trail around St Thomas's Hospital on the South Bank. The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century is an enlightening book, reminding brexit-era Britain of how crucial 'Europeans' have been to our culture in the past century. It is full of detailed, evocative description and measured, waspish commentary.
May 3, 2025
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...
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...
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June 9, 2025Perhaps 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.
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.
April 15, 2025
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.
April 1, 2025
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.
January 19, 2026
A comprehensive survey of the Central European emigres who fled fascism on mainland Europe to leave their mark on architecture, urban planning, film (direction/cinematography/set design), publishing and visual arts, as well as the opinions on Capitalism in Britain.
December 14, 2025
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.
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