In the 1930s, tens of thousands of people fled fascism in continental Europe for the safety of the British Isles. These refugees - many of them Jewish - brought with them a set of revolutionary ideas and practices about art, politics and architecture which were to change the face of modern Britain.
Exiles is the little-known story of their lives and work. In its teeming pages we meet artists from Weimar Germany, psychoanalysts from Freud's Vienna, communists from Russia and Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, all trying to make their way in a cold and foreign land. Some were enchanted by the quaintness and eccentricity of traditional England; others were repelled by its rigid class hierarchy, repressed national character and resistance to change.
In all of these encounters, cultural conflict gave rise to new artistic and political movements, from Brutalism to neoliberalism, as the exiled Europeans took the cornerstones of British culture and reimagined them. In doing so, this refugee generation created the world we live in today, and achieved that most British of feats: a quiet revolution.
Britain. Made in Europe.
A Guardian Best History and Politics Book of the Year 2025
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 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.
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.
