THE REFUGEES WHO TRANSFORMED CULTURE Insiders/Outsiders Is a Year-Long Festival Celebrating the Contribution to British Life of the Refugees Who Fled Nazi Europe
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BRITISHTHE REFUGEES WHO TRANSFORMED CULTURE Insiders/Outsiders is a year-long festival celebrating the contribution to British life of the refugees who fled Nazi Europe. It is a timely commemoration, says Daniel Snowman ll migrations bring they had been forced to flee. London was what, if anything, they had in common. ‘culture’ with them, as becoming the centre of the musical world. Deutscher argued that these people gained much of British history Former musical capitals such as Berlin, their strength from the fact that they dwelt testifies: consider the Munich, Vienna, Prague or Budapest found on the borders of various civilisations, legacy of the 400-year themselves on the frontiers of the emerging religions and cultures. The fact that Marx, Roman occupation, the Cold War, while the introduction of the jet Gustav Mahler and the rest transcended Irish following the Great Famine, Jews plane soon enabled London to be reached their Jewishness and reached out to cross Aescaping Russian pogroms in the later 19th from New York in a mere seven hours. boundaries of mind, place and time arose century and many other migrations since. What better location for a string quartet from deep within Jewish tradition: a view So what of the culture brought to Britain by such as the Amadeus to launch itself or for that put a modern gloss on the image of the refugees from Nazism? What resulted Otto Klemperer to take up the reins – or the the Wandering Jew. In Judith Kerr’s semi- when people schooled in Expressionist baton – of the Philharmonia Orchestra? autobiographical novel When Hitler Stole Clockwise: Lucie Rie potting on the wheel in her studio Britain. Nikolaus Pevsner, in a succession art, Bauhaus architecture, Schoenbergian Many of the émigrés were from Pink Rabbit, the girl asks her father when at Albion Mews, 1951; Dorrit Dekk’s poster for London of writings, introduced the ideas of Walter Modernism and Weimar-era cabaret began countries other than Germany: from on their way to exile in Britain: “Do you Transport, 1961; Portsmouth Square, Chinatown, Gropius and the Bauhaus to a generation to mix their labours with the arguably Austria (especially Vienna), Hungary, think we’ll ever really belong anywhere?” San Francisco by Dorothy Bohm, 1956 raised on the Tudorbethan revival and more genteel culture they found in Britain: Czechoslovakia, Poland and elsewhere. The father replies: “I suppose not… But the Garden City ideal, while Martin Esslin a world of Bloomsbury, Garden Cities, Nor were all the émigrés Jewish: the we’ll belong a little in lots of places, and I Central Europe, particularly communists at the BBC brought the work of Central the BBC and the olde-worlde revivalist director Carl Ebert and the conductor think that may be just as good.” who were attracted (like Bertolt Brecht) to European playwrights to British audiences. architecture of Edwin Lutyens or the Fritz Busch, for example, who were the Nor did all those we are considering East Germany. Some, such as the physicist The émigrés may have become ‘insiders’; musical pastoralism of Vaughan Williams? artistic founding fathers of Glyndebourne, come to Britain as refugees. Friedrich Max Born, felt it their duty to help build up but their special strength was the way This story is primarily about men, or the choreographer Rudolf Laban, all Hayek (the economist whose work a post-Hitlerian Germany. But many felt many were able, at the same time, to retain notwithstanding the elegant pottery of of whom initially tried to make some influenced Margaret Thatcher), or the film they could do this just as well from Britain. the vision of the ‘outsider’. Lucie Rie, the paintings of Marie-Louise accommodation with the Nazi regime but producer Alexander Korda, initially came Thus, George Weidenfeld made a point Today, most have passed away. von Motesiczky, the photography of soon found this impossible. to Britain to work and as the situation in of publishing English-language editions My children, now in mid-life, are not salt had to study in Germany. The story Dorothy Bohm, the outstanding designs Most of the refugees were, of course, Europe deteriorated, opted to stay. The of books by bright young Germans and interested in the legacy of Expressionist of these émigrés can be seen as another of Dorrit Dekk and the creative output of Jewish, but many only nominally so. “To Vienna-born biochemist Max Perutz first Austrians, and the Amadeus Quartet (three film or Modernist architecture or the chapter in that story of successive waves of numerous other women, many of whom my father, being German came first. He came as a student and the historian Eric of whom were refugees) for many years work of Oscar Kokoschka. Nor, frankly, immigrants from Europe to Britain. are now beginning to receive further thought of himself as Hobsbawm as an recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. was the contribution of the Hitler émigrés Fifty years ago, a project like Insiders/ recognition. It is also predominantly a German, and only “In Britain, many felt adolescent under the Many were from educated, middle- or the be-all and end-all of the rich cultural Outsiders would have been impossible (but not entirely) London-based: north- then as a Jew,” said care of an uncle who upper-middle class families: not, by and world of 1950s and 1960s Britain: a world to undertake: most of the individuals west London in particular, as many of the economist and it was time to build had work in the UK. large, your “huddled masses yearning to of Laurence Olivier and Peter Brook, of highlighted were in mid-career. Fifty the émigrés settled in Hampstead, Swiss former chairman of on the civilised Some were refugees breathe free”. Most wanted to do whatever Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten, years from now, the story will have slipped DOROTHY BOHM ARCHIVE DOROTHY Cottage and St John’s Wood. the Royal Opera House, elsewhere before © they could for their country of adoption Henry Moore and Bridget Riley, Fonteyn, into an ever-receding past, one historical In Britain, by the end of World War Claus Moser, talking values for which settling in Britain: the and they helped professionalise aspects Nureyev and Kingsley Amis. The refugees episode among many. Now is the perfect II, many felt it was time to build on the to me in the 1990s. they had fought” conductor Georg Solti of British cultural life. Art history, for from Nazism helped irrigate the cultural moment to take stock of its significance. n civilised values for which they had fought. The art historian Ernst and the philosopher example, previously a genteel pursuit current, immeasurably enriching it; but And the émigré community was among Gombrich denied that his Jewishness had Karl Popper. A handful arrived after the preoccupied with questions of aesthetics, they did not constitute the river itself. This is a shortened version of Daniel Snowman’s those to benefit. The Arts Council was anything to do with his scholarly interests. war, such as the musicians Rudolf Schwarz became a highly professionalised academic The traditional panorama of British introduction to the Insiders/Outsiders Festival established to provide public funds for the Who cares, Gombrich would ask, whether and Anita Lasker Wallfisch, designer subject as pioneered by Gombrich and his history tends to highlight the nation’s companion volume: Insiders/Outsiders: Refugees arts, and the BBC established the Third this or that historian or philosopher Romek Marber and Rabbi Hugo Gryn. colleagues at the Warburg Institute, while insular independence from the continent, from Nazi Europe and their Contribution Programme, a radio network devoted to happened to be Jewish? He added that Did they think of themselves as exiles? the somewhat amateur atmosphere at the how Britain has never been successfully to British Visual Culture, ed by Monica high-quality music and culture. Covent such questions were more the domain of One of those I interviewed told me: “an Covent Garden opera house that upset Solti invaded since 1066. But when it comes Bohm-Duchen, Lund Humphries, Garden reopened to opera and ballet Hitler. In the 1960s, Isaac Deutscher (the exile is someone who hangs his harp upon when he arrived as music director in 1961 to culture – well, the British have always 2019, £40. JR readers can (its first opera director Karl Rankl was a biographer of Leon Trotsky) wrote an essay the willow tree and yearns to return to his was transformed under his leadership to thought foreigners rather good at this. get a special offer of £10 former pupil of Arnold Schoenberg) and entitled The Non-Jewish Jew, in which homeland, his ‘heimat’. I may have spent become, by the time he left a decade later, In the 18th century, no gentleman was off the RRP. Visit www. audiences for classical music were boosted he considered those he called the great the first 15 years of my life in Germany. But one of the world’s finest. deemed fully educated unless he spoke lundhumphries.com and use by members of the refugee community Jewish ‘heretics’ (Heinrich Heine, Karl I’ve spent the next 65 in Britain. This is Furthermore, the émigrés helped French, while in the 19th and into the code JR10 at checkout. Offer TFL FROM THE LONDON TRANSPORT MUSEUM COLLECTION ; MUSEUM COLLECTION TRANSPORT TFL FROM THE LONDON eager to recapture something of the life Marx, Sigmund Freud et al) and wondered my homeland!” A few did go back to live in ARTS; THE CREATIVE CENTRE, UNIVERSITY FOR STUDY THE CRAFTS BY PROVIDED KINDLY IMAGE © cosmopolitanise the still insular culture of 20th any British musician worth his valid until 30 June.