The Alienation Effect

A momentous history of the 1930s émigré generation, and how they reshaped Britain

As the horrors of fascism ran riot through Europe in the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans, most of them Jewish and many of them artists, fled their countries seeking sanctuary in an imperial island at the edge of the continent. The world they found when they reached these shores – damp, grey and parochial – was a far cry from the modernity and dynamism of Weimar Berlin, Red Vienna or modernist Prague, but it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: 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.

In The Alienation Effect, the historian Owen Hatherley leads us into the technicolour world of this exiled generation of artists and intellects, from celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger to forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass. Across four expansive sections – the photograph and the film; the book; the work of art; the building and the city – Hatherley shows that, in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, the cornerstones of our visual culture, and thus 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.

The émigrés changed how we saw the world and their legacy is everywhere around us. But today we are in danger of forgetting our proud tradition of asylum, and the vital cultural exchange it engenders. The Alienation Effect is therefore both a celebration and a warning: we must rediscover this spirit and open our hearts once again, before it is too late.