In his 2024 article ‘Radio Waves’, Hatherley gave a three-page précis of his new 600-page mammoth, The Alienation Effect (2025). Reviewing a biography of Ernst Schoen, another émigré artist in Britain, Hatherley articulates a truncated response to Perry Anderson’s essay, ‘The Components of National Culture’ (1968). Anderson argued that émigrés leaving socialist Central European states with a strong modernist inheritance did not leave a progressive stamp on British life; those who stayed sought “refuge from the instability of their societies”, and found it in the “tradition, continuity and orderly empire” of England. For Anderson, only those who already had an affinity with English modes of thought that stayed. True political and artistic visionaries crossed the Atlantic for the thumping metropolises of America.
Hatherley accepts this claim when it comes to art history and philosophy, and even potentially in natural sciences: Karl Popper, E.H. Gombrich, and Nikolaus Pevsner assimilated to a moderate British sensibility. But Hatherley absolutely refutes Anderson’s thesis when it comes to visual cultures. In ‘Radio Waves’, Hatherley presented a catalogue of counter-examples: Otto and Marie Neurath’s Isotype Institute, Naum Gabo’s modern sculptures, Erno Goldfinger’s and Berthold Lubetkin’s socialist modernist architecture, and Walter Segal’s self-built housing.
The Alienation Effect expands on this thesis. Hatherley takes ‘Central Europe’ as a sensible, though flexible, category for his analysis. The region shares some historical characteristics – many countries in ‘Central Europe’ have experienced German cultural domination since the Middle Ages or have been subject to Russian imperialism; many were caught up in a Communist wave post-1945. More importantly, there was a constant exchange of intellectual and artistic culture across the region, both from the movement of refugees across borders, as well as more innocuous reasons. An émigré artist arriving in Britain during the interwar and postwar periods may have been born in Germany, but moved across Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam in the past few decades. Bringing with them a continental, rather than national, heritage, these artists generated a wholesale transformation of British life.
One element of this is the literal visual impact they had on British streets, especially those in London. Hatherley focuses on forms of artwork that are still present and accessible; to do otherwise, he says, would moot his point that emigration still has a lasting effect on everyday life. While staying in London over the summer I ran into at least three of the works Hatherley covered in my daily commute: Naum Gabo’s modernist statue, Revolving Torsion, in St Thomas’ Hospital; Hans Feibusch’s paintings in St John’s Church; and Peter Peri’s monumental statue, The Sunbathers, in Waterloo Station.
A number of the archetypes of modern Englishness were crafted by the émigrés: Jan Tschichold, the German calligrapher and typographer, designed the Penguin Classics cover during a brief stay in Britain; another German designer, Hans Schmoller, took responsibility for subsequent iterations in the Penguins series. Some displays of ‘Britishness’ were more overt. In the London County Council’s Festival of Britain in 1951, the first national exhibition of the post-war period, émigrés contributed open-air sculptures that lined the Thames: Gabo’s Revolving Torsion, Siegfried Charoux’s The Islanders and Motorcyclist, Franta Belsky’s Shell Fountain, and Bernard Schottlander’s abstract South of the River, to name a few. Others were more deliberate and overtly nationalistic in their pursuit of a ‘British’ artistic identity. German art historian Nikolaus Pevsner, was a determined proponent of an English “national character” in art. Pevsner was inspired in the writing of his guides to English art by contemporary scholars like Wilhelm Pinder, a German nationalist and occasional supporter of Hitler obsessed with deriving a pure “German essence”.
Hatherley’s thesis differs from Anderson’s in its acceptance that such a huge wave of migration will bring contradictory impacts. A relatively small portion of refugees had the kind of progressive contribution The Alienation Effect deals with – they were a “minority within a minority”, as Hatherley acknowledges – and many left to America or faded into obscurity in Britain.
While The Alienation Effect is presented as a response to Perry Anderson’s essay, it is hard not to read it as a response to Britain’s current bout of xenophobia. Though it’s clear that Hatherley is critical of anti-immigration appeals, he rarely explicitly acknowledges the current valence of the book. At moments in the text, he hints towards it: Hatherley suggests that the only comparable example of transformation through immigration were the “pop cultural upheavals of the 1970s and 1990s as a result of migration from the Caribbean and South Asia.”
Such indirectness also seems part and parcel of Hatherley’s project. He never suggests that Britain ought to have taken in Central European émigrés because of the skills they brought or the contributions they made – an appeal of this kind would be trite. Instead, Hatherley constructs a precise account of the lives of each of these émigrés: their technical training and work on the continent, their politics, and how they were treated – as refugees and as artists – when they arrived in Britain. Against Anderson, Hatherley repeatedly emphasises how the socialist politics of many of the émigrés was suffused into their work, and determined their ambitions. Hatherley doesn’t paint their lives in dramatic sweeps; his tone remains restrained throughout, with occasional bursts of humour. An indomitable sense of optimism also suffuses the text. Small details reveal Hatherley’s adamant hope that a better world is possible and make clear his appreciation for the artists and émigrés who believed the same.
Prior to the 1930s, Britain and continental Europe suffered from a mutual unintelligibility. The Central European avant-garde noted an “English oddness and insularity”; little of Weimar’s Germany bursting cultural scene culture made it to Britain during the republic’s brief lifespan. Visiting England in 1924, Czech writer Karel Čapek noted that although London was the centre of imperial wealth, “you can ride for hours and miles on the top of a bus… and you will scarcely find a place where your eye could derive pleasure from the beauty and lavishness of human work.” In 1936, Gollancz, Laski and Strachey created the Left Book Club in imitation of the modernist socialist culture that had flourished during the Weimar Republic. But Central European writers that emerged in this period like Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, György Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno didn’tmake it onto the Left Book Club’s monthly book choices; most of their works were not even made widely available in English until the 1960s.
This unfamiliarity meant that the émigrés arrived in an impoverished artistic landscape unfamiliar with Central European modernism. With the dreamy Mediterranean landscapes of the Ecole de Paris as their standard for modern art, British audiences were revolted at a 1938 exhibition in Mayfair on ‘Twentieth Century German Art’. German Expressionism—with its violent strokes, aggressive colours, and distorted subjects—faced disdain from this reserved public. Hatherley points out how ironic it is that, the famous Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition displaying ‘un-German’, Jewish art featured a more comprehensive range of modernist artists than the Tate. In architectural design, while ‘The International Style’ was coming into bloom at the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), Britain refused to send delegates to its annual conference.
Amidst this paucity, the émigrés brought a smattering of novel artistic forms. Stefan Lorant, previously the editor of Germany’s Münchner Illustrierte Presse, can be credited with introducing photojournalism to Britain with his magazines Weekly Illustrated and Picture Post. He left for America by 1940. In his magazines, John Heartfield, born Helmut Herzfeld, produced some of the first photomontages in Britain, anti-fascist works that familiarised Britain with the horrors of the continent. Walter and Marianne Neurath published the ‘World of Art’ series in 1958, the first serious English books on the Central European avant-garde.
But it is in architecture that Hatherley argues the émigrés brought about “an absolute revolution”. Some architects struggled to accommodate British weather and materials in their designs; others simply rejected the constraints. Eric Mendelsohn’s De La Warr pavilion in East Sussex “displays no perceptible adaptation to his new clients”, uncompromising in its sweeping white facade. Although continental planners had long been inspired by the Garden Cities of Britain, in which self-contained communities proliferated around greenbelts, many émigrés broke with this prosaic vision of England, opting for one of “Britain as an industrial country, and of London as a metropolis.” Ernő Goldfinger’s construction of Balfron Tower and Brownfield Estate in Poplar, and Trellick Tower and Cheltenham Estate in Ladbroke Grove are prime examples. Hatherly waxes lyrical: “beautifully wrought raw concrete, with expressive, melodramatic profiles of walkways and service towers…” Goldfinger also maintained fastidious control over the quality of materials and design: a missing detail designed to carry rainwater from the face of the wall, in order to slow down weathering, was described in his notebook as ‘a scandalous state of affairs’. His emphasis on quality derived from a socialist politics that many of his fellow architects shared, keen on breaking down accepted notions of who deserved what kind of housing. Berthold Lubetkin, a Russian émigré, brought a heavily theorised Constructivism to British shores, based on the idea that architecture should be driven by a socialist concern for the needs and tastes of the working class, that it should be a science not an art, and that it should be deliberate and intellectual. Hatherley is sympathetic to Lubetkin, despite the fate his constructions have suffered: his Cranbrook and Dorset estates are “astonishing and heartbreaking in their conflict between poverty and ambition.”
It is inspiring and saddening to read about the ambitions that many of these émigré architects had for council housing in the era of post-war reconstruction. Their radicalism often outstripped the direction of public sentiment and political will, as was the case with many other émigrés. Fred Uhlman, a member of the SPD Lawyers Association in Germany before he left in 1933, founded the Free German League of Culture (FGLC) to help émigré artists. Hampstead’s intellectual and creative circles revolved around the FGLC, forming pockets of ‘Red Berlin’ and ‘Red Vienna’ within London’s tapestry.
Photography rooted in Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’), like Kurt Hutton and Felix H. Man’s portraits of shipyard workers in the series ‘THEY BUILT “QUEEN ELIZABETH”’, drew on radical Weimar photographers like August Snader and his ‘The Face of Our Time’ project. Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky) applied an explicitly communist lens to English life, treating her marginalised subjects (those living in slums, mine-workers, children with dignity. Hatherley argues that this kind of image of working-class strength, depicted as facts of life rather than calls to action, “simply didn’t exist in British media before the émigrés arrived.” Their politics were born not just from an aesthetic revulsion to working-class squalor but a theory of class rooted in the vibrant socialist movements of Central Europe.
Émigré artists often had a direct role in crafting systems and objects of dignity for the working class. Egon Riss, Austrian-Jewish architect and furniture designer, became chief architect of the Scottish section of the National Coal Board after the industry’s nationalisation. His design for ‘Superpits’ in the central belt of the coalfields demonstrated a clean futurism for a new era of the industry: gleaming towers (not unlike higher-end apartment blocks) housed the gears and winding lifts of the pits. In a declining industry, Riss’ vision sadly could not last for long. The Rothes Colliery, the site of one of these planned ‘superpits’, was opened in 1958, closed in 1962, and demolished by 1993. Some monumental public sculptures have had a longer lease on life. Peter Peri’s Following the Leader, a relief of children dancing down the staircase of Darley House in Vauxhall, still survives, as does Siegfried Charoux’s earliest commission from the London County Council, The Neighbours, in Quadrant Estate. Coming from the public artistic tradition of the 1920s ‘Red Vienna’, where municipal governments invested heavily in enriching new working-class environments, Charoux was sorely disappointed by the British estate. In a 1953 address to the Royal Institute of British Architects, Charoux pointed to the impact of the environs on its inhabitants: “[London flats] are mean, hard-looking machines for living, without a soul, and the people look the same.” The Neighbours is, to me, especially affecting its rough hewing and everyday subject lend the statue an understated pathos and beauty.
One émigré in particular has also come to affect the way that we understand cities, although she is largely forgotten the German-Jewish Ruth Glass. Hatherley argues that Glass was one of the first planners to look at cities as they actually were rather than projecting onto them an “image of dysfunction and horror” like other urban planners. Glass wrote extensively reviews of various cities and their social organisation. She critiqued the English city of Middlesbrough not for its stylistic backwardness but for how it reproduced the inequalities of class in space through a central park that divided rich and poor. Noting the changes in housing markets throughout London, Glass coined ‘gentrification’: mews previously used for horses, and cottages that housed servants became private houses; Victorian houses were upgraded into middle-class flats all throughout Hampstead, Chelsea, Islington, Paddington, and Battersea. She also noted the failure of the New Towns, settlements planned to remedy London’s overcrowding – while they moved families out of London, they did not negate London’s role as a centre of commerce and employment, leaving bottlenecks in public transport and traffic. Hatherley’s rediscovery of Glass will hopefully lead to a broader reassessment of her legacy; many of her books have, for the moment, gone out of print.
The émigré impact also involved a sometimes quieter intrusion into British life. Filmmaking was one of “the most heavily émigré-dependent art form of all in Britain”. Although none of the Central European auteurs moved to Britain, much of the set design, screenwriting, costume design, and other essential elements of production were led by émigrés. A string of Central European architects, like Richard Seifert, Bernard Engle, Rudolf Jelinek-Karl, Inette Austin-Smith and Isi Metzstein also worked for developers on carparks, shopping centres, and other commercial buildings. Isi Metzstein, an architect from Germany, and Andy MacMillan, a Scottish one, were responsible for converting a Victorian brewery into Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art.
The effect of immigration was not one-way: artists were changed through their interactions with British cultural life. Bill Brandt, a photographer featured in Lorant’s magazines, started out an explicit social critic, though he adopted an “increasingly uncritical, abstracted attitude towards his adopted country….”, shifting from Neue Sachlichkeit-inspired depictions of wealth inequality into landscapes and nudes framed with Victorian backgrounds. Hatherley also notes a widespread pattern of Jewish sculptors, muralists and mosaicists working for British churches, starting from the 1940s. This was plausibly a response by clergyman to redress the Church’s role in the European legacy of imperialism, antisemitism, and violence. It has resulted in some raw, Expressionist artworks that contended with the Holocaust’s legacy, like Hans Feibusch’s Crucifixion. Plummeting rates of religiosity mean that much of this work, if it still survives, is not well-maintained. Byzantine mosaics by George Mayer-Marton, a Hungarian-born Viennese painter and muralist have been transferred between churches, and his mosaic Crucifixion in Oldham was painted over for nearly 40 years. The constraints of British materials released immense creative potential from certain artists. Naum Gabo, a Russian artist influential in the import of Constructivism, began his iconic use of Perspex in sculptures following a visit to an Imperial Chemical Industries factory in Welwyn Garden City. Peter Peri, finding that bronze exorbitantly priced in London compared to Berlin, began to use reinforced concrete for his sculptures instead. Eventually he created ‘Pericrete’, a coloured aggregate of concrete and polyester resin.
Throughout The Alienation Effect, Hatherley portrays the experience of Central European emigration as rich and varied; his depictions of individual characters are similarly nuanced, and occasionally humorous. Jan Tschichold, strident typographer and designer of the Penguin Classics covers, “was a typographer who was not taking any hostages”. He held that his enemy was “degenerate type faces”. Hatherley also emphasises the stark tragedy that afflicted many of the artists’ lives as a result of the Holocaust, and the impact of such immense grief had on their artistic output. Aleksander Żyw, a Polish Jewish artist who settled in Scotland, became “suddenly violent, abstract and incredibly forceful” in his work after the war. His son, Tommy Żyw, contends this is from Żyw learning of his family’s murder in the Holocaust. The outcome is an oeuvre of Scottish Expressionism, departing from ideals of a Mediterranean landscape and arriving at a distinctly Scottish landscape of vast, brooding, angular reality.
History is never far from Hatherley’s account; the broader émigré population, besides the artists, suffered inhumane treatment at the hands of the British government. The 1905 Alien Act limited émigré intake even as waves of refugees fled pogroms; Britain’s immigration policy towards European Jews only became slightly more permissive after Kristallnacht. Right-wing broadsheets like the Daily Mail carried on with their favourite pastime, hawking anti-immigration rhetoric and decrying the number of “stateless Jews pouring in from every port of this country…” In 1940, all German, Australian, Czechoslovak and Hungarian citizens were interned in camps: many had escaped from Nazi concentration camps only to find themselves in a similar situation. The British government estimated that 85% of these so-called ‘enemy aliens’ were refugees from Nazi oppression and between 80-90% were Jewish. While Hans Schmoller, Jan Tschichold’s eventual successor as cover designer at Penguin, was interned in South Africa between 1940 and 1942, both his parents were murdered in Auschwitz. A non-exhaustive list of refugee artists mentioned in The Alienation Effect who were deported or interned include: Walter Gernsheim, German art historian; Fred Uhlman, founder of the Free German League of Culture; Ernst Eisenmayer, who had escaped to England from Dachau while escaping Austria with the Anschluss; Australian graphic designer and artist Hugo Dachinger, who released an exhibition ‘Art Behind Barbed Wire’ (1940) while imprisoned on the Isle of Man; Siegfried Charoux; Friz Kormis; and Margarete Klopfleisch, a German sculptor who suffered a nearly fatal miscarriage during her internment. Some émigrés were deported to Canada or Australia. In a particularly brutal case in July 1940, one deportation ship, the SS Arandora Star was sunk by a U-Boat, killing 805. The survivors continued their journey on the Hired Military Transport Dunera to Australia.
It is chilling to read of this cruelty and to see how little in immigration policy has changed. Some things differ vastly between the inter- and post-war wave of immigration and the today’s –many of the Central European artists were well-off, well-educated, and could assimilate as white fairly easily. They arrived before a system of international asylum had been formalised, while today’s migrants seek refuge at a time when governments globally are turning against this system. But it is instructive to look at the similarities. Both groups are the scapegoats of changing notions of the ‘good’ immigrants: throughout the 19th century, migration from Italy and from British colonies in Ireland, Italy, the Caribbean, Africa, and India was tolerated in Britain – including Sephardic Jewish migration. What differentiated the treatment of Ashkenazim and other Central European émigrés of the 1930s was that they arrived during an economic depression. Towards the end of The Alienation Effect, Hatherley also draws out this comparison directly: “In 1940, the British state dumped ‘asylum seekers’ in the open spaces of unfinished council estates, incarcerated them in disused cotton mills on the outskirts of Manchester and on the Isle of Man, and then deported them to Australia; the Conservative governments of the 2010s and 2020s stuck them in disused hotels, incarcerated them in the Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire or the diseased corridors of the huge Bibby Stockholm barge, and attempted to fly them to Rwanda.”
The ‘aliens’ arriving in Britain after the world wars arrived in a strange land that gave them a cold welcome. Their influence has reshaped the British landscape, but their individual fates were less straightforward. Some reluctantly acquiesced to the British way of life; others embraced it. A few reshaped it beyond reckoning, bringing radical hopes for political and social transformation to the staid island.
Near the beginning of his book, Hatherley points out that what he offers “is not a complete picture of the emigration and what it was up to in British cultural life; it is a story, not the story.” In fact, The Alienation Effect is not just a story, but a multiplicity of stories about the dreams, hopes, devastations, tragedies, and ambitions that landed on these shores.