Daniel Snowman
The Cultural Impact on Britain of the “Hitler Emigrés”, Part 2: Their Artistic and Intellectual Contributions

Daniel Snowman | The Cultural Impact on Britain of the ‘Hitler Emigrés’, Part 2: Their Artistic and Intellectual Contributions

- Well, I was about to say nice to see you all again, but I can’t see you and you’re all in different places and times. But from all I’ve heard, I got a lot of emails and contacts after the one I gave a week ago, many of you are old friends from least a week ago and sometimes from much longer. Last week I spoke about the, not the cultural impact of the refugees from Nazism, which is what my book was about many years ago, but about the world they had come from, all waves of migration going way, way back. The Romans were here for hundreds of years and the Normans and the Angles and the Saxons and the Irish and the famine, my forebears who came from pogrom-ridden tsarist Russia. All migration waves bring with them something of the culture that people were brought up in. I don’t just mean the arts. When I say culture, I include the arts, but I also mean attitudes, behaviour, food, drink, language, clothing, attitudes towards love and death and all the rest of it. So just for those of you who didn’t see the talk I gave last week, let me just give you a reminder of some of the things I spoke about. I took you back to the old Habsburg Vienna of Marlowe and Klimt, and young Freud to the Berlin after the Great War, the First World War as we now call it, largely based in or famous for being based in Berlin and the arts and culture in the broader cultural artistic sense that was included under labels. We all love labels, don’t we? Expressionism, marked contrast to the earlier impressionism that had been kind of outgrown by then. And I mentioned and showed a few pictures of an early post World War I film made in Berlin like Dr. Caligari “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

We talked about Modernism, capital M, modern, modern architecture, modern film, modern music, Schoenberg and so on. Very much a break from the kind of earlier, the pseudo, classical revival, romantic, whatever. I talked about the social and political conscience of this sort of pre-Nazi, early interwar period. Just remember, it’s very hard to envisage, because we all read history backwards and we all know all about the horrors and the barbarism of later Nazism and Auschwitz and so on. But if you go back a little bit earlier, Germany, the German world, the German-speaking world, particularly Germany itself, was suffering a great deal. It had lost the Great War. The German empire had been ended and destroyed. There was horrendous inflation. You could almost not buy a loaf of bread. And I mentioned Kathe Kollwitz, the artist. I mentioned, “Die Dreigroschenoper” through the opera with a text by Bertolt Brecht, music by Kurt Weill, going right back to “The Beggar’s Opera” in England, in London back in the 1700’s. And I also mentioned “Neue Sachlichkeit,” the new realism, the new objectivity. Artists who knew what horrors the world could experience, particularly during war or terrible inflation. People like I showed a painting by Otto Dix. I said a few words and probably simplified and exaggerated about the cultural world of Britain, to which these emigres and refugees, the lucky ones who got away, eventually came to. A sort of interwar, pseudo-rural England with garden cities and Tudor revival architecture. Architects like Lutyens, Vaughan Williams writing, you know, variations on a theme of “Greensleeves” and so on.

And finally, before we left the first lecture, we moved back to Germany because I wanted to emphasise that to Hitler and the National Socialist culture, art, traditional German, Germanic art was all important. He was a great lover of the works of Wagner, who wrote all about the “Nibelungenlied” and Nordic culture. Films by Leni Riefenstahl. You might not like the films she made about the Olympics of 1936 that took place in Berlin. I thought a lot about that recently during the Paris Olympics. Or indeed, she made a film, I mean it’s a wonderful film about horrendous subject, which was the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, the burning of books in the Bebelplatz right near the off in Linden. And right near the, what is the Opera Centre in Berlin right now. A horrific sort of period. Degenerate art later on. And I tried to cover all aspects of the cultural world, broadly defined in middle Europe in the years leading up to World War II. And what I want to do today is not detailed examination of those who got away, those who didn’t, who they were, what they did. We’ll have some of that. But I having tried to assess the world they came from, the cultural world, the previous Nazi world that so many of them were raised in, in this lecture, I want to go to the end of the story, which is to try and assess the overall impact of those who were lucky enough to get out of Nazi Central Europe in good time and settle mostly in Britain.

And how now, a long time later, we can look back and assess the overall impact that they made. A few words about, you know, these are the Kindertransport, of course, some of the kids, about 10,000 of them who were very lucky and generously treated and were able to get out from immediately pre-war Germany in 1938, ‘39. land probably at Harwich where there’s also now a statue of some of them. And they were people like three of the members of the Amadeus Quartet, who were teenagers at the time. Karel Reisz, the film director was on the Kindertransport. Hella Pick, whom I knew very well, died very recently, the journalist. And overall during mostly 1938, '39, but some had come earlier, there was something in the region of 50,000 emigres exiles, refugees. They weren’t all refugees, they weren’t all Jewish, mostly were, who managed to get out of Nazi Germany and settle in a new homeland, a new Heimat which was Great Britain. Not long after most of them had arrived on the 3rd of September, 1939, in England, as our dear prime minister announced on the BBC Radio was at war with Germany. No more migrants. No more immigrants. And in the early following year when Chamberlain had been taken over by Churchill, it looked as though the Germans who were doing very well might conquer Britain. And then what would happen? How would we ever defeat them? So all the emigrated, Churchill said, “Collar the lot, send them all away, don’t want any of them in the middle of London somewhere. Send them off to camps in Lancashire or Cheshire over over the water to the Isle of Man.”

And many of them had to settle, therefore in Douglas, Isle of Man, the capital and around the island. And among them were all sorts of people who later on, important physicists, political philosophers, writers, violinists, architects, a range of interesting German-speaking people who had to be locked up for fear that there might be some traitors, some quislings among them. Let me remind you that, and I’ve already mentioned that a number of the people we think of as emigres from Nazi Central Europe came quite a bit earlier, well before the late thirties. I mentioned, I think, the film director, Alexander Korda, born in Hungary, originally went off to Los Angeles for a bit, eventually came, settled in London in the early thirties and created a film company which he called London Film with Big Ben there as his, I was going to say his logo, his brand, I think in those days it would’ve been called a trademark. And he wanted to please his new homeland. And people said, “Oh, Mr. Korda, do you know, do you know about the Tudor monarchy?” And he didn’t, of course, so was told all about Henry VIII, who was a big, fat slob who had six wives, and why didn’t you make a lovely jolly film about him? And one of the early ones that he did make, and this was part of Korda’s gradually increased influence on British filmmaking, followed by, I mentioned people like Karel Reisz who came later on, and lovely old film of Henry VIII with Charles Laughton in the principal thing looking like a, if you’ve ever seen the film, he’s a big, fat slob, wants to chat up all the women.

They all fancy him, not because he’s a handsome fellow, but because he’s king. And he spends a lot of the time in that film eating, picking up huge chunks of just, he wants to grab another piece of chicken and just eats it with his fingers and then throws the bone away. I found this lovely picture, which I’ve added in the bottom right. Always reminds me, I shouldn’t say this, of Boris Johnson’s look. Very, very similar. Anyway, just to give you a quick run through of some of the arts and cultural figures who did come to this country and made it and had an influence and then we’ll move on beyond it. But let me give you an example. Art, ballet, dance. I remember my grandparents used to talk to me about, “Oh, we’ve got to take you one day, darling, to Swan Lake” or “The Nutcracker” or “Giselle” or whatever it was. But I mentioned last week and showed an illustration by Laban, the great notator of dance and choreographer. And one of his proteges was Kurt Jooss, J-double-O-double-S, And one of the ballets of Kurt Jooss, utterly different, from the sort of traditional Russian ballet, was called “The Green Table.” Modern design, Modern, very capital-M Modern choreography, modern music, and made a great impact on what became dance that we’ll talk about later on, and has had an impact on dance in Britain and the wider world, the German world among others, think Pina Bausch, ever since.

So these are some of the early influences which then take off and later on we’ll talk, look at them in retrospect. I mentioned last week, I think Bauhaus architecture, very modern, very modernist, brought to this country, to London, again in the 1930s. Think of the Lawn Road flats in, near Belsize Park, where in fact the Bauhaus director Gropius actually stayed for a while. And all this follows the Bauhaus cliche almost: form follows function. It doesn’t have to be beautiful in the jolly picturesque or picaresque kind of way, but it’s got to work for those who live there. I mentioned, of course, the Freuds. Sigmund Freud’s son Ernst Freud was among other things, an architect trained in interwar Berlin came here as part of the extended Freud family. And there’s a building in Frognal Close, not far from Belsize Park, which was designed by Ernst Freud. Very different from the sort of Tudorbethan revival that was going on in Britain at the time. This is still pre-war. Or take Berthold Lubetkin Russian-born emigre came to this country. I mentioned, I think I showed you the penguin pool, that sort of concrete DNA design that used to be at the London Zoo. And he also designed, among other things, the Finsbury Health Centre. Here too, this goes back to before the war. And when I look at a building like that, utterly different from any hospital or health centre that would’ve been built in the 1920s and 30s normally, in London or indeed in Britain.

And then you move on to the war not long afterwards, a year or two after this building was assembled and Abram Games was the artist, was designing posters for the troops during the war. And he did one for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, encouraging the British boys to keep fighting. It’s very difficult. You may not survive. Let’s hope you do. There was still the Battle of the Bulge to come, Ardennes and so on. But he designed a poster, which looked to me, so like this Finsbury Health Centre. It wasn’t, didn’t show that they’d all come home to thatched cottage, old Tudorbethan buildings, roses around the door. They would come home to something that almost looked like that Finsbury health centre. And of course, when you look at that and move on further, there we are at the Festival of Britain, after the War. Festival of Britain opens in 1951. I remember being taken to it and being amazed at the Royal Festival Hall. What concert hall had ever looked like that before? Absolutely modernist, central European design. In fact, the man who designed the details of it, with all that glass and steel and concrete and formality, was an architect called Peter Moro, M-O-R-O, who’s actually, in fact, I think born in Heidelberg. Festival of Britain was an extraordinary, it came at the end of the Attlee government and it was a celebration, a tonic to the nation that we’ve come out of the war and we’re now rebuilding a completely new, positive, new, optimistic Britain. It was an amazing festival to be able to attend, and it was nationwide, but most of it took place on the South Bank. And here’s a helicopter shot. On the left, the round top building was the Dome of Discovery, a science centre. The Skylon sticking straight up into the sky alongside it, bridge across the River Thames, the festival hall there with its slightly curved roof and the dome of the, and the shock tower on the right, an astonishing centre.

And the great thing, if you actually went into the Royal Festival Hall, what astonished me when I first went there was that the whole concert hall was cantilevered above the main building. It was a, it was the beginnings of a completely new immigrant from Central Europe approach to design and architecture and the arts. And the concert hall itself was, as I say, cantilevered above the main central building of the Royal Festival Hall. And that in itself was astonishing. When I first saw it in 1951, I was amazed! Every seat could see the stage. All the boxes were like a, like a drawer that was brought out from a cupboard, slightly tilted so that he could face the stage. And I thought, “Oh, do they put them all back in the cupboard after the show is over?” It was an astonishing new building. Everything seemed new at that time, and in the years and decades that followed. I won’t go through the detail, but a couple of other architectural examples. Next time you’re on the South Bank, near the Royal Festival Hall, just go up a few hundred yards, you’ll come to the National Theatre. National Theatre was created a dozen or 15 years after the Festival of Britain. And again, utterly unlike all the old Frank Matcham theatres that I had grown up learning that I should go to and learn Shakespeare from and all the rest of it. The architect, Denys Lasdun, was a member of the Tecton Group that had been involved in the pre-war architecture, a bit like the Isokon building in the Lawn Road. And again, form followed function. I remember also the, and you may remember the original design museum on the South Bank, Butler’s Wharf. And the man in charge, it was Terence Conran.

And it was, it stayed there right through until about a dozen years ago, when it was moved. But I remember Conran saying to me, he was hugely influenced as a young designer by what he learned about the Bauhaus. Form follows function. And this was going to be a design museum designed almost as though it was in Weimar, Berlin or Frankfurt or wherever. he actually wanted Prince Charles. Prince Charles of course, loved architecture and I’m sure as king, he still does. And Conran wrote, you know, asked if Prince Charles would be good enough to open the new design museum. So he took the designs on paper to see Prince Charles, and Charles was all very polite and said, “Oh, Terence. May I call you Terence? I’m so glad you are doing this. We’ve long needed a museum of design in this country. Are you, is it going to be as square as that? Not beautiful, you know, pointed roofs like they have in, I don’t know, Nuremberg or somewhere? Are those windows going to open? Forgive me, I don’t think it’s my kind of architect.” And he refused to open it and you can sort of see why. Things moved on. And another thing, if I may be slightly autobiographical, in the middle of my adult life, if I can put it like that, from the late sixties until well into the nineties, really, I worked for the BBC as a producer of radio features, documentaries, wrote books and so on. And many of my colleagues at the BBC throughout that period, some of the most culturally advanced and concerned with spreading the culture were refugees, emigres from Central Europe.

Some of them began before the war and during it to monitor German broadcasts. Eight hour shifts. And to tell the British government under Churchill secretly, without the Germans knowing, what the Germans were broadcasting. And they made a huge contribution to British understanding of what was going on in Nazi Central Europe. And also to the development of genuinely Reithian broadcastings. people like Ernst Gombrich, the artist historian, George Weidenfeld, later major publisher. These both with their perfect German agreed to work hour after hour after hour monitoring the German broadcast. And indeed it was Gombrich in April '45. Great music lover, both of these men were, many of the emigres were. And Gombrich happened a bit bored middle of the night but he thought he heard a bit of a symphony by Bruckner and being the bright guy he was, he was the one who wrote the famous history of art and later ran the Warburg Institute of Art there, which had come all the way bodily from Hamburg to London, art historian. But he knew his music and he knew a Bruckner symphony when he heard it. And he thought, that’s the symphony that Bruckner wrote on the death of Wagner in 1883. This must mean… So he pricked up his ears, listened, and obviously the Germans were broadcasting something very, very important. And soon afterwards, they did indeed announce that the Fuhrer was dead. And it was Gombrich that managed to transmit the message that Hitler was dead through the secret resources that they had to Churchill and the government who then knew that it was pretty much the end of the war. Amazing. I mentioned Reith just now, Reith was alive and well, and I remember him being interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge at great length.

He’s very young when he founded the BBC. And the BBC has recently had a centenary, of course. And after the war, immediately after the war, there was a new creation in the world of radio, that I knew particularly well, of what became eventually Radio One, Radio Two, Radio Three, Third Programme, and Radio Four. And it was in the years immediately after the war, that the BBC introduced what became known as the Reith lectures. And the Reith lectures, which were monologues, a series of four or five serious read out live on air programmes by great intellectuals of the time. Many of the earliest were people who had emigrated to Britain from multicultural Central Europe. People like Nikolaus Pevsner who, of course, got to know the buildings of England better than any English-born architectural historian that there were. But he presented the Reith lectures in 1955. Couple of years earlier, Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, had presented the Reith lectures in 1953. So Reith and the Reith lectures and the intellectual emigres to this country from Central Europe played a great part. And in the area where I was working, multicultural radio particularly, and there were so many. Radio Three/Third Programme had just begun. So in the top left hand corner, you see the Amadeus Quartet, three of whom were refugees from Central Europe. I got to know them very, very well. And they were frequently being invited to broadcast. Leonie Cohn there in the middle, born in Konigsberg, or Kaliningrad as it is now. Wonderful, creative art lover, got to Herbert Read and all the artists who went and spent their time in Hampstead and Swiss Cottage and St. John’s Wood.

And Leonie had a genius for putting on programmes about the arts and about artists, current artists of the time. And somehow you could listen to one of her programmes and almost see the artworks that she was talking about. Gombrich there in a painting by Kitaj. On the right, Hans Keller, the great music lover, tough, independent minded man would get up at meetings and know more about British culture than all the British-born people around the room at Radio Three meetings, for example. John Tusa, bottom left, great broadcaster later on becomes head of the BBC World Service in Bush House, but born in Czechoslovakia like Tom Stoppard. Martin Esslin, head of Drama, born in, I think, Budapest; brought up in Vienna, made sure that people like Brecht as well as, you know, clever, young, new playwrights like Harold Pinter were broadcast to the nation in a way that would never have happened before. And the controller of Radio Three when I was there, who previously worked in television arts programmes, was Stephen Hearst. A great range of contributions of different kinds to the cultural world of Britain. I mentioned John Tusa being head of Bush House just now, just down from Holborn, sort of Aldwych area. And it was there for many, many years. And John Tusa later on went and… And what versatility they all had. He went and ran the Barbican Centre later on. I worked for a while at the World Service in Bush House on an attachment, and the range of accents and foreigners and people who could broadcast not only in foreign languages, but talk brilliant English and knew so much about British culture as well as that from all the wider world. I remember one person who used to work there was George Mikes, do you remember him?

He was the one who wrote that book, “How to Be an Alien.” I mean, he made wonderful fun of the Brits. “An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.” “On the continent, people have good food; in England they have good table manners.” Oh, dear. “On the continent, people have sex; in Britain, they go to bed with hot water bottles.” Wonderful. I mean he was not just a brilliant comic. He loved to tell people how his name was Mikes. And back in his old country of Hungary, they called, they said they called him Mikes 'cause they assumed that’s what the British called him. Whereas the British got to know him as Mikes. But he also was a thoughtful broadcast to the Hungarian and was contributed to the international power and contribution in general to the culture of war internationally. So many, I’ll just mention one or two more then we’ll try to get towards a kind of generalisation, risky because they were so versatile. I don’t like to have to generalise about all these different abilities and cultures. And, but I mean, just think of one or two of the authors. I mean, George Mikes wrote articles and he wrote that book and one or two others, but there was serious novelists, political writers, people like Arthur Koestler wrote “Darkness at Noon,” a very powerful, very moving political novel.

I mean, Koestler had partly wanted to join Soviet communism, partly learned to hate it. Never quite at home anywhere. But I think one of the generalisations I will risk and may say more about this later on is that so many of them, they might have been from Berlin or Frankfurt or Munich or Vienna, might have been Austrian or German or Czechoslovakia or Hungary. And they came to Britain and settled down to their new homeland and were British. But so many of them, the very identity, and this was true of Koestler, was cross-cultural, cross-national. Spend a bit of time in this place. Move on to that one. Oh, might be useful to learn this or that particular language perhaps, and move on wherever. And indeed the late, much-loved David Cesarani, historian, particularly of matters Jewish, whom you may some of you will have known, wrote a biography of Koestler which he called “The Homeless Mind.” And I thought that was a wonderful title for a book about a creative, serious, internationally-minded political journalist, writer, novelist, biographer like Arthur Koestler. Another famous writer, if I may lighten the tone slightly, who died only very recently, very elderly she was, was Judith Kerr or Judith Kerr. Lovely woman, lovely writer, emigre. She wrote “The Tiger Who Came to Tea,” which any of you have got children, you may well have read that to her or found it for her. And even more famously, perhaps, “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.” She wrote wonderful children’s books. But there was a seriousness, an element of biography or autobiography to so many of them.

In “Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit,” you know, she was taken by her dad, her father was a theatre critic in the old days, and he simply had to get out and she wasn’t sure where they were going. And everywhere they went, they spoke a different language. And it wasn’t Judith who said this, but the character representing her in “Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit,” You know, “Where are we, where are we going to go? Why are we getting on another train or another boat? Where are we actually going to settle down?” And the father figure says to the little girl, “Well, we may go to a lot of different places, but I’m sure that we’ll feel that we belong everywhere that we go to.” Again, again, very much the Wandering Jew. Home everywhere and nowhere. The bags are always packed. And I remember another person I might mention, the musicians among you will certainly know of Carl Flesch the great violinist, the great violin teacher back in the early years, the young Amadeus got to know him a bit. This was his son Carl F. Flesch businessman, but son of the great Flesch. And he wrote a lovely book called “Where Do You Come From? Hitler Refugees in Great Britain Then and Now. Compromise.” And I remember him saying to me, you know, he’d come over quite young, learnt English, learnt to be in Britain, learnt to fold his umbrella and eat porridge and put milk in his tea rather than lemon. Wanted to be as British as they could and contribute to their new country. And every month he’d go as if they all used to have to do to the bank or the post office to pick up their monthly government payment, which they were all offered as a kind of offering to the elderly. And he’d go up and he’d ask if he could have it, his check, I suppose, in those days. And he said, you know, the nice girl behind the desk in the bank always said, “Oh, Mr. Flesch, where are you from?”

And he always used to say, “Where am I from? Oh, St. John’s Wood or Swiss Cottage.” And she got all embarrassed and thought she’d asked the wrong thing. He said, “No, no, no, no. I lived in Berlin or wherever it was for 15 years and have now lived in St. John’s Wood for 57 years ever since.” So there was a kind of, they were worldwide and they were also home at last here, many of them. And just think of the range of what they did. Think of popular magazines, something like “Picture Post”, edited by Stefan Lorant with a design photo montage by John Heartfield, Herzfeld, to warn their many, many hundreds of thousands of British readers of the threat that was coming from the old country that they had both come from. There was comedy, I mentioned photo montage. There was wit, there was use of the arts to make people laugh as well as be anxious. You may remember Gerard Hoffnung, whose centenary is coming up I think next year, artist, music lover. He’d go to Covent Garden and listen to a lovely Wagner opera, you know, “Valkyrie” or whatever it was, get the bus back to his little place in Hampstead and try to play on the tuba, which he played a bit, too much some people thought, the tune of this or that particular theme. And he’d draw a cartoon of himself playing a tuba with the sun above him. And there’s a photo of him in, in one of his comic modes on the right there with a tuba.

And he would pretend that there’s somebody playing some enormously long flute with all the washing hanging on it. Bells that you ring and one of them came and knocked him out. Very witty guy who died, sadly, very, very young, but also brought something of that central European ambivalence towards music and music making to people in Britain. Probably the most famous of the cartoonists when I was a kid was Vicky, Victor Weisz, who it took somebody probably not brought up in the British class system. An immigrant, a German immigrant witty brought up in the years of the that I mentioned before, or to make fun of the posh British politician. People like Harold McMillan, who’s determined to get to Number 10 one way or another. And on this Vicky says, with apologies to Stephen Potter. Stephen Potter, you know, famously wrote “How to Win Without Actually Cheating.” Gamesmanship. Remember all that? I was a great autograph collector. I think I showed you my letter from Vaughn Williams in my lecture last week. Vicky was one of the famous people of the time that I wrote and wanted his autograph. And he very kindly sent me not just to one of these, one of his pictures, but a cartoon of himself bottom there “To Daniel with best wishes from Vicky.” Very sadly, a decade or so later he committed suicide. I think many of them suffered and the suffering enabled them to get solace, in his case from being more witty than most of the Brits that he would ever have encountered. I mentioned the Freud family, Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, who came to Britain, died not long after he arrived.

His son, Ernst Freud, the architect, Anna Freud, the daughter and the younger generation, and particularly of course Lucian Freud, whose centenary we recently marked. Very… I mean Lucian Freud was brought up in the Berlin of modernism, expressionism, , the New Realism. And he brought all that. He came as a lad of whatever he was, 10 or 11, and retained something of that lineage and hugely influenced British art by what he was able to produce. I had long time thinking about what I could show you by Lucian Freud, 'cause most of them I wouldn’t dream of showing to a polite audience like your good selves. But I found one he drew of the Queen or painted of the Queen. And you can see all those interwar, Germanic art qualities in a painting like that. And he applied it to himself when he did a self-portrait. It’s still very much sort of Weimar modernist kind of artwork, which took over to ourselves. I mentioned film from time to time. And again, have a think about a film like “The Third Man,” Orson Welles, just after the war. He’s in the sewers beneath Vienna, we think. Oh, the story is by Graham Greene. Carol Reed was the director, Orson Welles there. But the film is produced by Korda and designed by Vincent Korda, his brother. And it is so German expressionist enclosed. Do you remember the tapering walls I showed you when discussing the Dr. Caligari and so on?

We had a lecture recently for Lockdown by Helen Fry, about the James Bond movies, so many of which were designed by another of the emigres who had a huge impact on the films of that time and later, Ken Adam, Klaus Adam. Somebody again, I was lucky enough to know and to interview. And he gave me a copy of that book with many of his James Bond designs in the book. And when you look at this particular one, it’s very tapered walls produced by Thames and Hudson, created by Walter and Eva Neurath one of those art publishers who came over and changed the world of British art and art history. This is the film “Moonraker.” And many of the emigres got to know each other. And two and two often made five. You get somebody like the philosopher Karl Popper on the left, from Vienna, spent the war not in exile here but in New Zealand and came here shortly afterwards with Gombrich there, the art historian on the right. Both of them born in Vienna around the same time. Utterly different professional expertise. But the two of them could engage in a way that only emigres of that generation were able to do. So let me bring things towards an end, if I may. I think one of the great art forms, which had a huge impact on Britain, was the musicians who came.

The music lovers, music performers. I’ve mentioned obviously the Amadeus Quartet several times. Georg Solti, Hungarian-born, managed to get away from the Nazis, came to be the director of Covent Garden, the Royal Opera, in the sixties, and was determined, said at the outset, “It’s all very nice. They’re all very polite and it’s all very amateur. I’m going to turn this opera house into the finest in the world.” And I think by the time he left a decade later, it was. He was a difficult person to work with. I sang with the London Philharmonic Choir and he was often our conductor and he would be quite sharp, quite ruthless, quite demanding. He’d go over to the piano to show you where he wanted you not to breathe. And the result was that the concerts, including those that the London Philharmonic performed at the Royal Festival Hall and his operas at Covent Gardens were brilliant. I admired him enormously and indeed as far as I knew him, and got to like him. Alexander Goehr there. Take a moment to think. Son of the conductor, Walter Goehr, brought to this country as a small child, grew up. Later became one of our leading composers. Worked as a youngster for the BBC on the music department because of the new Third Programme. Went on to become a Reith lecturer, professor of music at Cambridge. And very, very sadly, I have to tell you that Sandy Goehr died in his early nineties, I think yesterday. Lovely man, multi-talented. And I admired him and liked him very, very much.

On the right, Otto Klemperer, great opera conductor back in the days of Berlin. Powerful figure who later came to this country and was the principal conductor of the new Philharmonia Orchestra. There are the Amadeus Quartet again, drawn by Milein Cosman, wife of Hans Keller, whom I mentioned before. I got to know them very well, even wrote a book about them, which was great privilege going to all their homes, hearing them rehearse. I’d follow a score and I got to know all the beautiful, you know, Schubert and Hayden and Beethoven and Mozart, right up to modern times. I could follow the score, but I couldn’t play like they could. Greatly admired them. I think they all came to the book launch, which was nice. And just to end by giving you an example of how famous people like that were. Wouldn’t be true of any string quartet today. You might remember the oldies among you that one time back in the, I know, late '60s, '70s, there was suddenly a whole series of hijackings of planes from Florida to Cuba. Was the period of the whole Castro period. And one of the newspapers, I think the Evening Standard, had a wonderful cartoon of a Pan Am jet plane and people are boarding and the captain looks round and he’s got his associate pilot with him. And up the stairs are coming these four strange, dark men carrying things you wouldn’t expect them to be carrying. And the caption of the cartoon was, “Well it’s either another unscheduled stop in Cuba or ha-ha that’s the Amadeus String Quartet.” Do you imagine having a cartoon in the newspapers like that now? Let me try and sum up if I may, and then if we’ve got any time, I’ll look at questions if there are any.

Q&A and Comments:

What I most want to say is rather than spend a lot of time answering individual questions, what I’d really love would be, if any of you do have anything you’d like to say to me, ask me about, tell me about things I didn’t know, put me right about things I got wrong. Look me up, I’ve got a silly name, I’m easy to find. Email me or phone me. Maybe we can even meet and have a coffee rather than whiz through an awful lot of quick, brief questions, which I’ll try and do. But let me just sum up what this whole lecture or what this pair of lectures has been all about. Is it possible to sum up in retrospect the legacy of that particular group wave of migrants? Remember that all the waves of migrants we’ve had in this country, they’ve all brought something of their culture to Britain. I’m speaking in a language that partly goes back to the ancient Romans, the Angles and the Saxons, the Norman French. Our architecture, our painting, our designs, the very word refugee goes back to the Protestant Huguenots escaping from Catholic France, a . And just think of people with names like Laurence Olivier or Sam Courtauld, the Courtauld family. They’ve left their mark on British culture in all various ways.

I talked in the first lecture about Modernism with a capital M and modernist architecture, modernist dance of expressionism. When you look today around London, the most famous recent buildings, the Gherkin, the Shard, all those things, there’s an element of central European modernism to them that would’ve been unthinkable before the emigre architects came to this country. I was thinking about dance and I mentioned, you know, Laban, and Kurt Jooss. Look at the programme, the Covent Garden programme for the forthcoming autumn season and what is now called the Royal Ballet and Opera Company. And a great deal of it is reflected by the work of somebody like Wayne McGregor, very much modern modernist dance, which has a kind of root with Pina Bausch and Kurt Jooss and Labanism and so on in a way that nothing before those people came, or even when I was a kid, would possibly have been true. Did the Hitler emigres bring anything particularly Jewish to the culture they left?

Difficult one, depends what you mean. Most of them were not religious Jews in any way, but they were defined as Jewish if they were by blood Jewish by Hitler. I mean, Gombrich used to say, “I’m an art historian, I wanted to visit Italy and understand the Renaissance. I want to know about the pigments that somebody like Leonardo might have used or what led Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. Who paid him? Did anybody assist him?” Much more interested in the wider issues than the fact that by blood he could be defined as a Jew by people who wanted to kill him. I think what is an interesting article by Isaac Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew”. The Jew like Weidenfeld, always the bags are packed, always want… Weidenfeld was a great Zionist, but also felt that he wanted to know that he could be at home anywhere.

You need to know other languages if you have to land up in New York or in Paris or in Copenhagen or in Iceland. Get adjusted to be able to adjust in the warmest, friendliest, creative possible way wherever you appear. So I would like to conclude by saying if I had to generalise and I don’t like to, this wave of immigrants did overall, looking back two things in general that I think left their mark on British cultural life. One is the Cosmopolitanism Britain has been very Britocentric in its cultural life, in back between the wars. Anglocentric, traditional I mentioned, Tudor architecture being revived, rural, rus in urbe, and so on. Insofar as they brought something new, they made us very cosmopolitan, very aware of the wider cultural history of which little Britain is only part. Pevsner introducing Gropius and die Bauhaus to a generation who, for whom he also wrote a whole series of books on English architecture, Martin Esslin bringing people like Bertolt Brecht to BBC audiences and making sure that the kind of theatrical world that he was bringing was something he also wrote about, lectured about, made fun of and spread across the English world, the cosmopolitanized Britain.

Hans Keller, leading advocate of both Benjamin Britten, whom he admired, and also Schoenberg and brought Schoenbergian music to the attention of the British people. And Schoenberg and musicians. Weidenfeld, I remember him telling me that he always thought of himself as somebody who bridges and straddles different worlds, at home anywhere, but perhaps not completely rooted anywhere. I thought of Claus Moser. Again, we had a lovely lecture about him about a month ago on Lockdown. Claus Moser, one of the most cosmopolitan, multifaceted emigres to Britain I could ever imagine. And Claus Moser, also, if you think of the other thing I think they all brought, was a kind of European determined professionalism. They wanted to impose a professionalism, like Solti of Covent Garden, on cultural organisations that otherwise often relied on a sort of very British sense of, you know, good old fashioned mutual goodwill and moral idealism that wasn’t enough. Gombrich at the Warburg Institute, Solti, Claus Moser, these people wanted to impose professional standards everywhere they went. Whether they were in charge of several of them, like Claus Moser was at one time in charge of an Oxford College, as well as Covent Garden, as well as being chief statistician for the Harold Wilson government. They were multi-talented and everything they did had to have a professional base system.

Turn up on time, be as professional as you can, achieve the highest standards you possibly can. So I hope that makes some kind of overall sense. Thank you very much for having me here at Lockdown. I’ve got several other Lockdown lectures coming up in September and beyond. One, the first of them on the 11th of September, you won’t be surprised, is I’ve been asked to give an overall history of opera, not just the composers and their works and famous singers, but both the supply and the demand, the production and the consumption. What did it cost? Who paid for it? Where did it begin? What does the word include and what doesn’t it include? Is “South Pacific” an example? If not, why not? Trade unions? Is it elitist? And when did it get that name? Why have the prima donnas always been supposedly difficult to work with? And how do I know about what the, what Covent Gardens putting on this coming autumn? So a complex history of the politics, the economics, the social, the scientific, and designs of opera.

I’m giving a lecture on the 11th of September, another one I’d like to combine history with the arts. They’re part of history. They’re not just imitations of it or abbreviations or little things that can be used to illustrate. And the history is really all about war and peace and popes and grandees and emperors. Not at all. I like to have them all combined. And I’ve got another book coming out in the autumn which raises some of the issues about what we think of as history and how it should be absolutely omni coverage. Exactly as I’ve tried to make these two lectures about the achievements of the Hitler emigres. I didn’t want just to give a list of wonderful artists and architects and musicians and writers. I wanted to incorporate all this with a general conclusion into a broader all-encompassing history of the world of Central Europe and its impact on the Britain in which I’ve been lucky enough to grow up in. So let’s end the lecture there and I will thank you for all you have said and done. I’ll have a quick look at the Q and A. Oh, the whole history of Jews and Israel. The Holocaust course. Actually like the by Boris Johnson comment. Oh, the modern at the Festival Hall. It was part of the general design that wanted do kindly things to everybody and didn’t actually last very long.

How many Central European Jews came to Britain in the thirties? Many of them were not Jewish, of course. The artistic founders of Glyndebourne, for example, people who simply couldn’t bear the Nazi regime, some of the painters. How many went to Israel? How many went to the United States? Not sure I can easily answer all that. Again, something I’d like to think more about. Shelly, send me an email and let’s maybe talk more in each case. I mean, I’ve ended the book about the cultural impact in Britain and the United States and argued that the cultural impact on Britain was greater. A, because America is absolutely full of migration from all over the world. B, the emigres who went there from Central Europe and many did, like many of the, Gropius’s architect friends went there and they were in New York, they were in Chicago, they were in Los Angeles. Many of the musicians went to Hollywood, but they were more spread out. And I think they had less solid influence on American cultural life than those who came to Britain, most of whom stayed in a small area around London, most of whom who had an impact were men for reasons I can’t go into now, but I would love to be able to do so. Interesting about colour and so on. Yes, I mean they did.

They did make Britain a lively a place and many of them were involved after having been locked up during the war in helping create the Festival of Britain. As I, as I mentioned. BBC wasn’t. I think that’s much too much of a generalisation. The BBC wasn’t inaugurated by Jews, Reith wasn’t Jewish and so on. And to define it, it’s always run into political complexities, has always tried to be objective about almost everything. And I think it’s too simplistic to say that the BBC is antisemitic or anti-Israel. It tries to do an almost impossible job at a terribly complex and emotionally packed era like the present I must say. But again, it’s worth discussing in more detail than I could easily do. Glad you’ve got the book, Susan. I’m whizzing through because what I’d really like is not to hold you all up any longer. Good luck Anna Freud. As it happened, my mother was very interested in psychology, psychiatry, had a psychoanalysis and had a nice long exchange of letters with Anna Freud, whom she got to know quite well and was, my mother was also very interested in child psychiatry. I’m afraid I’m witting through. Email me, look me up. I’ve got a website. As I say, you are. And if you can’t find my email address, and many people have just by looking me up at the, on the website, email Lockdown and I’m sure they, and I hope they would forward any email to me. Dad, most of you liked it. Hoffman. Oh, could have gone on and on about Hoffman played some of his wit. I didn’t want to play lots of recordings or music. That would’ve taken up too much time.

And I think what I’m doing right now is… Shoes brought the ability to laugh at everybody and anybody. I like that. I do and I’m glad you do. Costume history. Oh, a long one from Nan at the end. Yes. Laban. Good. I think I’m going to stop now because I’ve gone on much too long. So thank you all. Thank you all for watching me, listening to me. Do get in touch. And if you’re interested in the wider social, political, economic league history of opera, I hope we can all meet again on the 11th of September. But do get in touch with me before that if you’d like. Thanks so much and goodbye.