Daniel Snowman
The Cultural Impact on Britain of the ‘Hitler Emigrés’, Part 1: Pre-Nazi Mitteleuropa

Daniel Snowman | The Cultural Impact on Britain of the ‘Hitler Emigrés’, Part 1: Pre-Nazi Mitteleuropa

- Well, hello. I was going to say, it’s lovely seeing you all. I can’t see anybody, but I hope there’s somebody there. And I’m delighted to have been asked to give a couple of lectures. One today and another a week from today about a subject that I researched in some detail some years ago. This was the front cover of a book that came out 20 odd years ago on the cultural impact on Britain of refugees from Nazis. We called it “The Hitler Emigres.” And everybody, of course, given the fact that I have the silly surnames. Snowman, they all thought, “Oh, well, you must be a German Schneemann.” But in fact, so far as I know, all my great, great grandparents were emigres refugees from Darius, Russia way back in the 1870s, 80s, 90s. Fleeing from the pogroms. And they probably had a name that wasn’t Schneemann, but, or something like that, which somebody on the British borders thought they heard as Snowman. German-Jewish refugees. When I wrote that book, I traveled quite widely, not only around Britain, but around the States and Australia, and well, and everybody went there, they were interviewing me, said, “Daniel, you are the one who’s written this book about the German-Jewish refugees from Nazism.” And many of them, of course, were. But as I’ll go on and explain in the course of these lectures, many of them were not necessarily German, obviously many of them were Austrian, from Vienna, but they may have come from German speaking edges of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, wherever. They weren’t all Jewish. Depends what you mean by Jewish. Very few of them were religiously Jewish, although many of them were of Jewish background.

And certainly defined as Jewish in a sort of ethnic, racial, and possibly religious way by the Nazis later on. And they weren’t all refugees. Many of the celebrities that will come across in the course of these two lectures came to Britain from areas that subsequently became increasingly antisemitic or Nazi or whatever. People like the filmmaker, Alexander Corder, Ernst Gombrich, the art historian. Max Perutz, the scientist. Kokoschka, the painter. The artistic creators of Glyndebourne and so on. So, what I want to do in these two lectures, on the first one today. I want to talk about the cultural world that so many of these Emigres. I can’t think of any other one word that will cover them all. Came from the Vienna of Marlowe and Freud and Klimt, sort of late Habsburg and post Habsburg Vienna. The Berlin after The Great War, what we now call the First World War, the Berlin of the Weimar period. The kind of 1920s and so on. Very, very varied range of people. Many of them reasonably wealthy, reasonably cultured. They had an uncle who knew somebody in Cambridge who, you know, you might want to go and work with for a bit, and you’ll learn some English, which would do you no harm. And the range of what they achieved is extraordinary. Top left, you may know the famous film, “The Red Shoes,” with Moira Shearer. There’s a kind of Diaghilev figure in it. The ruler of the ballet, quite harsh and brilliant, played by Anton Walbrook, Adolf Wohlbruck, as he had been. The designer who won the Oscar for design that year, that shortly after the war. It was Hein Heckroth. And it was filmed and produced by Powell and Pressburger, Emeric Pressburger.

So, in that one film, many different Central European emigre talents were all combined. On the right there is the Bexhill Pavilion. The De La Warr or De La Warr. Extraordinary building to have right in the middle of sort of old Victorian South Coast England. One of the architects, Erich Mendelsohn, for example. Bottom left of is a drawing of the Amadeus Quartet. Three of whom were refugees from Nazi Vienna and who built up their wonderful quartet, which lasted for many, many decades in England. And the person who’s drawn it, you can just see her name on the right there, is Milein Cosman. The artist who was the wife of Hans Keller. Get onto that. I mentioned just now Gombrich, the art historian. That book in the bottom center, “The Story Of Art,” is by Gombrich, who was an emigre to Britain. And you might just be able to see it was published by Phaidon Press. And bottom right, T and H, Thames and Hudson. Two of the great art publishers in Britain, in a country that didn’t really have much of that before. I’m going to show you very briefly in the course of this lecture, one or two sort of blank pictures with no slides, just so I can just talk to you a little bit about what’s coming up. So, don’t switch off. The next one is intentionally blank for a moment or two, except I see the picture of me on it, I think. So, let’s generalize. They were not all refugees. Some came after the war.

People like the conductor, Georg Solti or Kyle Popper, the philosopher who’d spent the war away from Central Europe, which would’ve been dangerous in, I think, New Zealand, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Some of them had been through the camps and somehow survived. Amazingly, like Anis Laskawalvisch, the musician. Rudolf Schwarz, the conductor. And as I say, they were not all from Germany and they were not all Jewish. So, what I want to do in this opening lecture. That’s a pre-1933. Is to talk about the world that all these people and the great many others who soon or later migrated from Central Europe to Britain, the cultural world they came from. And there are many things to say about it. As I say, we’re going back in part to pre-century Vienna. Pre-war Vienna, post-war Vienna, after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Weimar, the Berlin in particular of the 1920s. And I want to focus, and forgive me, I’m going to be very much oversimplifying and overgeneralizing, but I want to focus in this lecture on three particular categories of culture and the arts, which I think were quite predominant in the world that the later emigres were brought up in. The first is what came to be. We all like labels, don’t we? The Renaissance, the Middle Ages, classicism, and the labels that I’m going to talk about briefly in each case are expressionism. Just think of the contrast between that and impressionism, which had preceded it. Expressionism. Not, you know, Renoir and Monet and Monet and lovely and gardens, and a pretty girl serving you a drink at the pub. But the expression of the deep inner, sometimes shocking feelings that we all have. Sex and death, birth, murder, the beginnings and the ends of life expressed openly in the arts in different ways. Expressionism. And then something about Modernism. Capital M.

Every time I say modern or modernist or modernism, and we’re talking about Central Europe, we are talking about a form of art no longer, you know, pretty, pretty old, classical revival or pseudo gothic or anything like that. But modernism, modernism, and we’ll talk about that. And also something about the social and political conscience of the Central European middle Europe world that had lost a war, The Great War of wars, the whole German empire had been disbanded, defeated. Russian communists, one side of it now who wanted to get rid of it. Desperate inflation and so on. And all of these things express themselves. Expressionism in art and cultural forms. I remember there was a lecture the other day on lockdown about Claus Moser, chairman of Covent Garden, statistician, et cetera. I knew Klaus very well, and I remember him saying to me, born in Berlin, he said, “You know, in Britain, Daniel. I thought this when I arrived, I thought, people here in Britain, they think of culture and the arts as the called of icing on the cake. Something that makes it pretty and tasteful and lovely, bit of artsy stuff.” In Europe, we thought of the arts and culture as the cake. That was what we were, and that’s what what we cared about. So, I’m going to talk about the period pre-1933 to start with, and later on we go post-1933. And the world that so many of these people came from. Let’s start with expressionism. And I thought I’d start with a bit of a shock, so, be prepared to be shocked or amused. But I mentioned sex and death. Expressionism of these desperate, powerful, dangerous feelings that we all have. The art form of the early 1900s in middle Europe.

You may know about Die Brucke, The Bridge, or Blaue Reiter, painters like Kandinsky and so on. Here is a painting by the young Egon Schiele. Young man, didn’t live very long. He died, I think he’s not even 30 in 1918. Not because of the war, but at the time of the beginnings of what became known as the whole Spanish flu. And this is what he painted, you know, it’s probably his girlfriend. And he knew her and her body better than anybody else. Egon Schiele. I mentioned Kokoschka just now. Kokoschka portraits, sort of dream world, had a long affair, or not a very long affair, but an affair with Mahler’s widow. Mahler died in 1911. In 1912, Kokoschka was having an affair with Alma Mahler, the widow of Mahler, who later on went and had an affair with the architect, Walter Gropius, whom will come on to later on. And here is Kokoschka’s wonderful image really of… Him with Alma Mahler floating, dreaming together, whether it’s in water or a dream or all the elements. It’s an erotic expression of a passion that a sort of formal old fashioned formality could never really have expressed. All the arts, I’m going to mention so many of them. I mean, another art form that’s just developing after the first war, The Great War, and particularly in Berlin, was film. Film in the 1920s was the Hollywood of its day. It was the central area where film was being developed, and it was often scary expressionist film. You know, you won’t be surprised to know that some of the great filmmakers of later on, like Hitchcock, young Hitchcock, went to Berlin in the 1920s to study film. Take a film that many of you will know. “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” which was produced in I think 1920, shortly after the war. The story, need and concern is, it’s about this strange odd man, Caligari and dreams.

And he’s got this strange mystic figure he takes from one local German fairground to another. And if you pay something, the mystic figure will tell you your future, predict your future. And virtually always, it’s your death, of course. And at the end of the film, Caligari seems to appear to be the boss of the lunatic asylum. Story isn’t the point. But look at the design. That was produced again and again in that film. The walls are tapered. Everything looks insecure, scary. You almost, by definition, just by looking at the imagery, can’t trust the person you are looking at. And as for the kind of mad somnambulist, he is grabbing girls, doing who knows what with them. But the imagery almost looks though he’s going to fall down those curved walls of the building or get impaled upon the chimney pots or something. And, of course, all those old films, early, early silent black and white films are all the more expressive by the use of the angles, the tapering walls, the use of light, the shadow effects. Again and again, like this. Whenever I see a film like Caligari or the early maquette of a new play by Bertolt Brecht. With again the lights from the side, shadow effects, scary. You make it you feel insecure. I always feel now someone’s going to grab me off the chair I’m sitting on and take over the lecture and reduce me to who knows what. Fritz Lang, one of the great film directors of that time and place, you may know his film, “M.” Murder or Murderer.

This is a sound film made just thought after it in 1931, pre-Nazi starring Peter Lorre as a kind of serial killer. You don’t actually see him that much, but what you see most memorably is an image, a shadow effect. There is a screen or an ad or something in the streets, presumably of Berlin. And this, whoever he is, is chatting up a young girl. I mean, so much we see. We read about stories like this to this day, grooming this young girl for sex, for murder. And there’s a huge offer of a reward for anybody who can give the police any information about him. So, expressionism, scary expressionism of deep, powerful emotions that arts hadn’t expressed as overtly until this period. I mentioned modernism as another example of the arts of that period. And as I say, Modern, Modernist, Modernism, capital M for Modern. Take the Bauhaus. I mentioned Gropius earlier on, who had a relationship with Alma Mahler. Gropius, the architect. The man who ran the Bauhaus for many years. It’s not just the school of architecture, it’s trying to combine arts and crafts, practicalities. Producing beautifully designed but inexpensive mass products of use to ordinary people. At a time when there’s high inflation, the German world has lost a terrible war. And if you want to buy or get access to inexpensive, practical armchairs and beds and spoons and forks and the rest of it, the Bauhaus is the place. Form follows function. You don’t just do pretty little things with lovely kind of gorgeous curly cues all over them. And it began in Weimar, where else, just after the war. Moved on to Dessau, where the building, you can still see that building.

Dessau is kind of south'ish east dish in Old East Germany, not that far southeast of Berlin. And you know, the walls are all formal straight, new Nuremberg type, you know, beautiful pointed roofs or anything like curvy windows or anything. If our students want to be able to design things, they need light. So, a complete wall of glass, if you like. Modernism, I mean, the very name of one of the most famous of the films by Fritz Lang. “Metropolis.” Urban, “Metropolis.” Great film. Made in 1920, late 1920s, I think. And again, it’s formal, modern. No little curvy kind of buildings or anything of the kind. And it’s a sort of pseudo Marxist film, I suppose, in a way where this giant building, all the grandees and the wealthy people live at the very top of the skyscraper like they were going to do in New York or San Francisco. And they look out over modernism, at airplanes, which you see over there. Very early on, this is 1920s, and all the poor people live at the bottom. There’s a kind of Marxist confrontation between the desperate people, low down, and those wealthier in an impoverished society living near the top. Modernism. Modernism, Modern music. I mentioned music and will certainly want to come back more again and again. But somebody like Schoenberg. This, by the way, is a self-portrait by Schoenberg. They were all crossing the arts and different disciplines. He not only was the great pioneer of atonality, dissonance, the twelve-tone system.

We’ve done Brahms and harmony and Mahler, gifted though he was, we need to move on to things that will shock and dismay and make you listen more carefully, perhaps. And that was true of his followers. The Second Viennese school, people like Anton Webern. Alban Berg. Alban Berg was one of the great followers and proteges of Schoenberg. Painting of Alban Berg by his master, Schoenberg. And what you may know most about Alban Berg is his opera, “Lulu.” Talk about sex and death. It’s a modernist. It’s almost a palindromic score be, you know, the beginning and the end. You could play it backwards. There’s an interlude in the middle of the opera which plays all the themes, which are very Schoenberg again. And you won’t pick them up the first time you see the opera. But if you do see it several times, you’ll begin to recognize how one mood or mode moves into another. And if you play that whole interlude backwards, the score is identical. And it’s based on the old influence plays by Wedekind. Erdgeist, earth spirit, very shocking. And Pandora, Pandora’s box. And very much as about sex, murder, a brilliant show which requires a quite shocking production for it to work properly. She may be prepared to buy sex and she’s prepared to have sex in the weirdest opportunities, but she may also decide she wants to kill. And why shouldn’t she in an art world where death and murder is as common as sex. And, of course, there was also the sort of parodic artworks of Weimar Berlin where you get a bit of sex and a bit of murder all at once.

Now I also mentioned the social political conscience. Social satire. Remember, the real world in post-war, Central Europe, middle Europe was very, very scary, very shocking. Vast poverty. Extremes of wealth. And a kind of degree of inflation that you and I, I hope have never experienced. So, you get an artist like Kathe Kollwitz, she was a socialist, rather sympathetic to the attempt at a socialist or communist revolution in post-war Germany. After all, it had been happening in Russia, although there was a lot of killing back and forth. And when the inflation was at its worst in 1923. She did a very deeply moving drawing of a mother desperate to get out to buy a loaf of bread to feed her kids, to prevent them from dying of starvation. A bit like, you know, South Sudan today to this point. And she had to get out because by the afternoon, the loaf of bread would probably cost double. It was as bad as that. I mentioned the Wedekind plays, particularly Pandora just before. The sex, the death, the murder, the shock, horror. And one of the great films of this period, late 1920s, was the film by Pabst. Do you know his work? P-A-B-S-T. I think his name will come up here. Yeah, there he is. Based on the Pandora story with the famous or infamous, astonishing… Louise Brooks with her flapper haircut, flapper culture playing the part of Pandora. You open Pandora’s box and who knows what might come out of it. On the subject of the films and the social concern and political concern of the films of this period as gradually film moves from silent to talkies. ‘28, '29, '30, '31. In 1931, one of the great German films is the “Die Dreigroschenoper.”

“The Threepenny Opera,” if you like, in English. Again, filmed by Pabst and based on “The Beggar’s Opera,” which goes way, way back. 1720s in England. Of, you know, Macheath, the highwaymen, and shock, horror, sex. Murder, stealing, making money by stealing from people. And the great thing about this particular film, “Die Dreigroschenoper.” It’s not an opera film. Its got music and it’s based on a play with music by Bertolt Brecht. Talk about one of the great left wingers of that time and the music is by Kurt Weill. Another of the people who got out of Nazi Germany and went either to America or in the case of… Brecht came back to Communist Germany and so on. And it contained Lotte Lenya who was Kurt Weill’s wife as Jenny, who’s a rather glamorous person. She sings the famous song, which I’m sure you know. And so on. The central male figure is Macheath, the highwaymen as he was way back. Now he’s Mackie Messer, Mack the Knife. And I just have to show you a photo of a production in Cambridge in 1958. Just up the road from Jesus College. In English, a stable. There’s Jenny and Mack the Knife on the left, and some of Mack the Knife’s colleagues and supporters are on the right there. And the second one from the right, the taller one happens to be me playing on stage, having a few lines to say and quite a lot to sing in Cambridge in 1958 with an English revival of the Brecht, Kurt Weill’s “Beggars Opera.” I should mention Neue Sachlichkeit.

I wonder whether that’s a phrase you all know. The new objectivity. Let’s get away from the expression of things that are always a bit artificial and get on to new reality, new objectivity. It was cynical, it was satirical, it was sardonic, it was younger artists who perhaps fought in the war. George Grosz, Otto Dix, for example. And it was satirical, cartoonish artworks like this one by Otto Dix. It’s called, “To Beauty.” “To Beauty.” Have a good look at that face in the middle. That cynical, “I’m rich, I can have whatever I like. I’ve got my hand in my pocket. So, you can’t nick my money. If I want the latest phone, telephone.” I think this is 1920s. You know, the equivalent of the latest mobile or something. “I can have it 'cause I can buy it. If I want a girl, I can buy her. If I want music that I happen to like, even though people think I shouldn’t like it or have it. I can have a black or negro person playing the music. It could be jazz, there can be an American Red Indian on the drum. I can break all the rules and nobody dared get me 'cause I’m rich.” I mean, that, if you’ve ever seen anything like that, is about as a sort of cynical and cruel and smug as anything in the all the arts. And remember above all, ladies and gents, this is the period when in Vienna, Freud, Sigmund Freud is beginning to understand and explain the subconscious. And while he’s looking at you and he’s looking at every one of you individually, think about the ego, the super ego, and most shocking of all, the id, the subconscious, or maybe not subconscious. Urges and desires and the shocking things that only you really know about yourself and only when you’ve been analyzed by Freud.

Let me say a little bit now about the world that people brought up in these expressionist, modernist, political concern worlds of not just Germany, but Central Europe, including, of course, after the Anschluss, the whole of the Austrian world, where those who managed to get away from Nazism, the world they came to, nice insular, Imperial Britain, England, between the wars. And again, ladies and gents, forgive me, I’m oversimplifying, but the contrast between the modernism and the kind of rus in urbe, the idea of creating a new kind of rurality, Tudorbethan architectural revival and so on, couldn’t have been greater. And many of them, like Claus Moser, whom I quoted before, said they couldn’t believe the contrast between the cultural world of middle Europe that they had all come from, and the cultural world of Britain, particularly London, very London dominated, that they managed to get to. I mentioned Tudorbethan revival architecture. I was brought up, I was born in November '38, just shortly before the horrors of Kristallnacht. And so, I remember the latter years of the war and I was brought up in Edgware in northwest London in a house built in the 1930s with sort of not like that, but a bit Tudor imitation, think Hampstead Garden Suburb. Think of the architecture of Lutheon, old world revivalism, garden cities. We wanted to teach the world about oldie Englandy and English language and Shakespeare and the world, didn’t we? not the kind of modern urban urbanity of Central Europe.

By any means, think of Vaughan Williams or Holst. You know, rural revival, “Scott of the Antarctic.” Beautiful. I’m a great, great fan of Vaughan Williams. Saw him once at a concert. My dad took to me playing some of his music. and Vaughan Williams was then in his late 70s, I guess. An example, I mean, he worked in the First World War, he was driving ambulances. Look at some of the music he composed. You know, “In the Fen Country.” “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” Tudor composer. “The Lark Ascending.” Beautiful. Rural. Greensleeves, “Fantasia on Greensleeves.” Again, lovely Tudor music. “Scott of Antarctica.” And the “Antarctic Symphony.” I used to collect autographs when I was 10, 11, 12 kind of thing, after the war, 1950 thereabout. And Vaughan Williams was one of the great people I wrote to. I wrote to all the celebrities of that time and Sir Anthony Eden and Harry Truman and Vaughan Williams and everybody else around the world. And most of them just, you know, signed it. Burton Russell, you know, signed autograph, put it back in the letterbox for me, Vaughan Williams. Can you believe he wrote me an actual handwritten lecture. “Dear Daniel,” from his home in Dorking. “Dear Daniel Snowman, don’t get into the habit of collecting autographs. It is worse than collecting stamps. The only value of an autograph is a memory of having met someone. However, here is my signature. Yours sincerely, R Vaughan Williams.” I mean, a lovely man and quite opinionated in the nicest possible way.

But the contrast between the kind of music that he was creating alongside the same time as that of somebody like Schoenberg or Alban Berg, is absolutely astonishing. Utterly, utterly different. As was the architecture from Central Europe and the Bauhaus and that of Lutheon’s, Tudorbethan revival, or Hampstead Garden Suburb. Same is true in the visual arts. Take painters between the walls, English painters, that’s Gwen John on the left there, a self-portrait. That’s her brother, Augustus John, on the right. Lovely painter of the cellist, Madame Suggia. Or this is a 19, late 1920s painting of Canterbury Cathedral by the artist, Quinton. Beautiful, oldie worldy, elegant artistry and painting. The kind of equivalent of a Vaughan Williams Symphony. Cross back to Central Europe and the people who were working alongside Gropius and the Bauhaus. And this is a painting of a church by Lyonel Feininger, sort of American, German based painter, of exactly the same period. And when you look at that, it’s similar in a way to the Canterbury Cathedral. It’s aspiring upwards towards God. And he’s got all the same kind of angularity that you saw beforehand at the beginning of my lecture when we were thinking about Dr. Caligari and the tapering walls and all that. But very, very different. In the same way, if you think of dance. Dance in England, you know, my grandparents used to tell me all about Giselle in “Swan Lake,” and “The Nutcracker,” and all those lovely old ballets. But in Central Europe, there was a new kind of dance ballet. Somebody like Laban, the first person really to notate dance steps. And if he wanted to draw, he later on became a refugee to this country. He couldn’t work with the Nazis. If you wanted to draw dance movement, he didn’t do a pretty little girl in a tutu on point like Durga. The decade before.

He would do, I don’t know what the German word would be, movement nurse. And he was one of those who tried to work with the Nazis, found he couldn’t and got out. So, let’s move on. Time is passing. And I want now to focus a little bit briefly on the period from 1933 after the Nazis came to power. To 1939, the war, and so on. Remember, don’t judge history from what we know came later. Many, many groupings, national groupings were wanting during the late 19th and early 20th century, to come together, create a unity of their new nation. The Italians, the Germans, Hungarians, Irish, with Yeats, you know, they were all looking for, the Jewish people under Herzl. Wanted a new homeland where we could revive our culture, our history, the Hebrew language, and so on. And in the Central European German world, Hitler, early on, thought he loved architecture, he liked music, he liked the work of Wagner. In fact, he would quite often go to the musical, Wagner, in Bayreuth which he loved. Don’t confuse Wagner and Hitler. They were in their different ways anti-Semitic. Wagner was part of a world that generally was trying to be increasingly Nordic, Germanic historical. Think of the ring or the earlier opera, “Meistersinger,” and so on. He wasn’t recommending mass murder, whereas Hitler was going on to do precisely that. And Hitler came to power half a century after the death of Wagner. But he loved the music of Wagner and he would go to Bayreuth.

There he is with Wagner’s daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner on the left there, with her two sons. And he loved visiting Bayreuth and Wagner and the Wagner operas. Winifred Wagner on the left there. I spent a week with her in Bayreuth in 1969. And she was one of the very, very few of that generation of Germans who talked intelligently, not only about Wagner, but about Hitler and about the barbarity of Auschwitz and so on. But also about the cultural origins of what led to national socialism, which is a whole 'nother subject. Perhaps. Hitler was a bit nuts about it all. He actually paid for the young troops to go to Wagner operas. In Bayreuth. The start, “The Richard Wagner town welcomes the guests of the Fuhrer.” Poor buggers probably wanted to go off to a pub and have a stein of beer, but they didn’t dare disobey what was advertised. And, of course, the art of the early Nazi years. Excuse me. Was very pro-traditional, Germanic revival, cultural revival. The great bodies of the Aryan people in times gone past. This is a statue by Arno Breker. Can you judge art by artists you don’t like? Or can you only admire artworks by artists you approve of? I don’t like Breker and his Nazism, but there’s a kind of old fashioned Michelangelo, David kind of cultural revival of a statue like that. Or take the filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. She died only about 20 years ago, and, of course, she made very pro-Nazi, but beautifully executed films about the Nazi rally in Nuremberg. In 1934. Or the Olympics. We’ve just had another set of Olympic games recently in Paris and she made the film about the Olympics when they took place in Berlin in 1936. And again, the emphasis is on the values of the new national socialist government.

The beautiful white Aryan bodies of the men and the women and how the new national socialist government would bring them all honor internationally and food and drink and jobs for the men and all the rest of it. Architecture. Hitler fancied himself as a bit of architecture and got Albert Speer to design the basis of what might one day become a completely new Berlin, a kind of ancient Rome in modern times. The sort of thing that Mussolini was imagining in fascist Germany. But, of course, they were also being horrendously destructive of all the art and artists and creativity of anybody they disapproved of, particularly, of course, the Jews. But also, anybody who had a Marxist element to them was a Slavic artist who’d moved in from Poland or Russia or Lavia or Belarus or somewhere in Russia or whatever. And there was horrendous, increasingly brutal censorship. Starting right at the beginning in 1933 with the mass burning of books of anybody who the Nazis disapproved of. And that took place right in the center of Berlin, in Bebelplatz, which you might notice right there then, Humboldt University, just alongside the state opera on into old England. Horrific.

And if you go there now, you’ll find there’s a little plaque nearby with a quote from Heinrich Hein, the Jewish born, German poet of the 19th century. A quote from Hein in which he says, “Where people burn books, they will go on and also burn people.” That’s from one of the books by or the poet, poems by Heinrich Hein. And that did in fact,, of course, happen. Entartete Kunst, degenerate art, an exhibition of it. Can you imagine? Which toured the country of all the artworks, not just paintings, but the kind of artwork by all the people who were condemned by the Nazis, increasingly during the '30s as degenerate in touch. And, of course, the exhibition, you could visit it if you were Hitler or whoever and observe how disgusting all the artwork by non-Aryan/Germans continue to be. Meanwhile, coming back again to music. Here are some of the great, great worldwide Greek conductors of that kind of period, meeting just before the Nazis took over. Bruno Walter on the left. Toscanini, who couldn’t stand Mussolini. Erich Kleiber in the middle. Klemperer on the right who later on came and was the principal conductor in his old age of the new Philharmonia Orchestra here. Furtwangler, who you know, stayed for a while, performed for the Nazis. He wanted to maintain the virtues of German music. You know, Beethoven and all the rest, but finally had to get out. And music itself was condemned if it wasn’t by white Aryan/Germans of the old days and of now. And it was horrendously Entartete. If you want to read more about the brilliant book, I should mention by Michael Haas. H-A-A-S. Called “Forbidden Music.” So, let’s begin to draw all this to an end.

Some of the people we’ve been talking about, well, not refugees, they didn’t desperately get out of Germany in the 19, late '30s, '38, '39. Most of them did, many of them did, or they’d have been killed. But a number of them were here, not just from Germany, but from all around different parts of Central Europe as early as the late '20s, early 1930s. Just give you a few example and then we’ll draw this talk to an end. Some of you will remember the penguin pool at London Zoo there for many, many years. I speak with special authority on this, ladies and gents, because I’ve actually been to the Arctic and the Antarctic. Polar bears are only in the North. Penguins are only in the South. I wrote a big book about the polar regions. Everybody made fun of it because of my silly name, Snowman. But, of course, it helps sell copies of the book. And I can assure you, they did not in the Antarctic waddle around on the kind of reinforce concrete DNA design. But it was a tremendously creative piece of architecture by Berthold Lubetkin, actually born in the Soviet Union. You’ll know his High Point flats in Highgate or the Finsbury Health Center. We get onto some of those in the next lecture. Central European modernist kinds of architecture. The long road flats in Belsize Park, very sort of Art Deco. Pre, the war. The Isokon building. I mentioned Glyndebourne at the beginning.

Glyndebourne, artistically was created, not by John Christie. John Christie, who owned the house. And his wife was a quite a good singer apparently. And he adored German culture. He used to wear lederhosen and go down the Rhine for a holiday. But the people who actually created it artistically were the conductor, Fritz Bush, the artistic director, Carl Ebert. And it was run administrably by a Viennese refugee called Rudolph Bing. And Rudolph Bing later on was the person who founded the Edinburgh Festival, which we’ve also just been living through. He looked up and thought, “God, this is like Salzburg.” A beautiful city with all these lovely hills all around. And the Edinburgh Festival began just after the war in 1947, created by Rudolph Bing, who then went on for many years to run the Metropolitan Opera in New York. So, so much for the world that the Emigres came from, and a few examples of their early influence are upon British art, culture, literature, music, painting, and all the other things that we have touched on today. I just want to give you an idea of the range of some of the people we’ll be encountering next week, because what I want to talk about next week is their achievements here in Britain, mostly after the war. And look back over the long term and try to assess their overall impact upon the previously very, very different culture of the United Kingdom. I sort of overemphasize the rural, idyllic, Tudorbethan British culture earlier on a little bit.

But when you look back from our perspective now, and we’re lecturing today in the middle of 2024, look back over the last 50, 60 years or whatever, and again and again, in all the arts we’ve mentioned, you see the impact of some of the people who are emigres to this country. The economist, Hayek, top left. Gombrich in the middle, who I’ve mentioned several times. Bottom left, that’s Alexander Korda, the filmmaker. Hungarian by origin. Talking there. To Orson Welles and Vivian Leigh. Max Perutz, bottom middle. Very gentle, thoughtful, Nobel prize winning, Cambridge scientist. Crossed biology and chemistry in a brilliant way. And on the right, the historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who crossed boundaries in all sorts of ways, born in Alexandria, Vienna. Berlin, came to this country not as a refugee, as a teenager. And we’ll hear more about him later on. Now, for many years, I worked both in the academic world and then also for the BBC. And one of the things I’ll try and bring in to the lecture next week is some of the other emigres, the cultural achievements of so many of them. Karl Popper, I mentioned. The philosopher. Claus Moser, top right whom we heard about the other day. Georg Solti. Tom Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia, the playwright. And so many of them who actually did work for the BBC. The third program was just created after the war. So, our dear Amadeus Quartet were frequently on the third program, or Radio 3. Leonie Cohn there, who colleague of mine, who used to make wonderful programs for radio about the arts with all the great artists. Painting of Gombrich there by Kitaj. Hans Keller on the right, drawn by his wife, Milein Cosman.

John Tusa on the left, great television, presenter of news programs who later on ran the World Service in Bush House. Martin Esslin, born in, I think, Budapest, and brought up in Vienna. The great figure of drama put on plays by people like Brecht, invented the whole idea of Theater Of The Absurd. Stephen Hearst, bottom right was in arts program, born in Vienna, raised in Vienna, became controller of Radio 3 when I was there. So, I’ll also want to talk about the BBC right through the '60s, '70s, '80s, into the '90s, and the impact there. And what I want to do at the end of the lecture next week on the 27th is to try and sum up overall, if I can, if there’s a generalization that weaves anything of the overall impact on British cultural life over the course of half a century or more of the many varied emigres from middle Europe who got out of the Nazi world and survived and contributed to the cultural world of the country I’m speaking to you from, United Kingdom in England. So, thank you very much and I hope to see you all in a week’s time. And we might, I’m not sure whether we’ve got any time for, but we might have a question or two. But don’t forget, this was a generalization and there are many, many people you might want to talk about whom I haven’t mentioned. Do, by the way, because I’ve got a strange name. I’m easy to look up. Look me up, email me, maybe phone me, read the book, tell me what you think about the lectures rather than hold people up more than they want to be held up right now. If you want to leave, feel free to do so.

Q&A and Comments:

I don’t know about the descendants of Moses Mendelssohn by the 1930s, I’m afraid I can’t tell you, but couldn’t have been easy for any of them. Yes, I realize you meant 1929 and not 129.

Thanks, Shelly. I guess the book, don’t expect to get the book from a bookshop, but I think it’s on Amazon like all the other books these days. Just to order it and then send it to Israel. Rather, I mean, it came out long ago in hardback and paperback and it’s gone into various languages. But I think the answer is probably, as you suggest, Amazon. Whether Waterstones could obtain a book these days and send it to Israel, I simply don’t know. I’m glad you enjoyed it. Professor of Law in Rhodesia, as it was, came from Cambridge.

Did I know Christie? Not that I remember, but by the time you are my age, so much that I used to know, I’ve forgotten. Or people ask me, “Do you remember Alan this or Susan that?” And I’ve met so many with almost identical names, including quite a lot of Christies, but thank you, Barry, for getting in touch.

“The Threepenny Opera.” Yes. It was indeed Laban who did that drawing of movement, nurse. And he, of course, came to this country, lived, I think in Manchester for a while and has had a huge influence subsequently on dance and ballet and so on. One of the things I’ll talk about in the next lecture a week from today is the longer term influence of some of those refugees, some of whom have died. And I think Laban is one of them. Modern dance nowadays is a kind of grandchild of the kind of things that people like Laban were doing in pre-Nazi Central Europe. Decadence.

Yes, we mustn’t be eclipsed by what? By Nazism. You cannot simply categorize the Nazis and Hitler by what happened at Auschwitz and during the war. It was horrendous. The most grotesque barbarism in the history of humanity. But you have to try and attempt to understand by going back in time what the early attractions of a new cultural nationalism would’ve been to people in Central Europe who had suffered so much.

I’ve written a little book about Verdi, one of my heroes. And again, you know, Italian unification didn’t just come out of political aspiration. It was a long term desire to bring the language and the culture of a related area together. So, with German unification under Bismarck, and I mentioned Irish attempts to revive their own language. Jewish attempts under Zionism to revive the language and find a homeland that was once ours. And I think the same was true early on with the development, something called national socialism in Germany that just might have achieved something more positive than it did. What it actually achieved was the most grotesque barbarism in history.

And I agree with you. I’d love to tell you in more detail about Winifred Wagner. She was a friend of Hitler and had been very early on when he was imprisoned after the Beer Hall Putsch. But she was a much more subtle, intelligent woman than simply being antisemitic, and talked about things. When I met her and spent a week with her for the BBC. Thoughtfully, intelligently, she was appalled by the barbarism of the war, but understood why the gradual development of national socialism wanted to exclude Jews. They were not Aryan/Germans. Maybe if they wanted to go to Palestine, we could help 'em get out that way. It’s one way of getting rid of them all. It didn’t mean that she was somebody who from early on desired a mass murder of all Jews. She was much more, you know, like her father-in-Law, Wagner. Antisemitic, as many, many people were or Eugenesis as many people, including some of the people in Britain had been around that turn of the century and the early years of it. She was actually married. She was not married to an English anti. She was married. Winifred Wagner was married to son of Wagner and, of course, she’s a Wagner, you know.

Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it. Thank you, Betty. Thank you enjoyed it. I should have mentioned the Insiders Outsiders Project. Absolutely. It’s a creative by Monica Bohm-Duchen who, a good friend of mine, I’m the consultant to it. And it’s a recent new cultural project that has regular lectures and talks and so on, about mostly some of the great individual figures, particularly in the visual arts, which I didn’t mention sufficiently, but I’ll certainly mention some of the visual artists next week when I get onto some of the more details of those who actually did come to this country. The Olympic flame. The Olympics. The Olympic, well, yes, I mean, the French recently got off to an awkward start, although it ended fairly spectacularly. Yes. The concerts of Kenwood.

Again, I remember Claus Moser saying, “You know, we weren’t all great musicians.” There certainly weren’t many opera singers or something, but we were the audiences when the Amadeus Quartet began their first concert ever at the Wigmore Hall. Two-thirds of the audiences would’ve been made up of musically loving figures recently having escaped from Nazi Germany.

Yeah. So, it goes on and on. Come and see me, email me, phone me, listen next week, and then get in touch again. I think I got to let you go, otherwise we’ll lose some of our people. Oh, not that many women. They’re very, very good and important reasons for that. Of course, there was some. Lucie Rie, the potter, for example, or Monica’s late mother, great photographer. But there are very good reasons why so many of the figures I mentioned were male. Because in pre-Second World. Between the wars in Central Europe, the job of the woman was to look after the household, prepare the meals, bring up the children. They weren’t going to go to a music college and write an opera or a symphony. They might occasionally, as it happened in Britain and elsewhere, do something that an individual woman could do in her spare time. Write a book, write a novel, make a painting. But by and large, by far, the majority of the people who were to make an impact in conducting and architecture and design and you know, writing the great works of music, directing theater, filmmaking, were going to be men because it was a very male dominated, urban dominated society.

Well, I say urban. Great majority of them tended to come and stay in near each other in northwest London, in Hamptons, St. Johns Wood, Swiss Cottage. There was a kind of community of these people. I don’t think I can go on. I mean, I’m really being told to that time is up and we need to stop.

Shelly, I like hearing the things you’ve said. You know, get in touch with me if you want, or maybe we can meet again next week. The Amadeus Quartet didn’t. They used to joke that they all met in the Isle of Man or in a camp. They’re actually sent to different camps. One met this one at one time, one met another one at that time, but they didn’t really come together as they used to joke that they did in a prisoner war camp in the Isle of Man.

Wendy Rose. “Maybe we all knew each other in Stanmore.” Remind me. Yes, the Great Mole, the juniper, as we used to joke. He was my great uncle, uncle Jack. Lovely man. And I have all. I have in common what you and King Charles and Jonathan Miller and lots of other people have. It goes on and on. Yes, Amazon, not a by now. Lota Linear. Oh, yes, gosh. We’re nearly at the end. Don’t know if anybody’s left. Only world culture in the UK. Oh! Antarctica. I must tell you about, there’s a concept called nominative determinism, a scientific concept that suggests that people get subconsciously led to their adult jobs when they’re still children because of their name. And if you’re called Snowman, you are bound to grow up and go to the polar regions and write a book about it. Edgware.

Yes. All that. I’d love to talk to you all individually as those the real live lecture. I wish I could. Get in touch. Let’s look at each other across the screen again, a week from today. And until then, many, many thanks. Bye.

• [Host] Thank you so much.