The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Britain had not been overwhelmed with immigrants. During the first year of the Hitler regime, about 2,000 refugees arrived, rather less than those who chose France (21,000), Poland (8,000), and Palestine (10,000). But, as the 1930s darkened, Britain—with the United States—became the preferred destination, the more so when, in 1938, the British agreed to accept “shiploads” of minors from Germany-Austria. Daniel Snowman says that the Kindertransport (Children’s Transport), as it was known, began in December 1938 and continued until the outbreak of war the following September, during which time 10,000 young people, three-quarters of them Jewish, found sanctuary in the United Kingdom.

  For academics, the Academic Assistance Council was set up (later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning), the brainchild of Leo Szilard, William Beveridge, director of the London School of Economics, and Lionel Robbins, a colleague there. This organization, which found rooms above the Royal Society in Burlington Gardens, helped people such as Karl Mannheim, Max Born, Hans Krebs, and Rudolf Peierls.5 By 1992, no fewer than seventy-four refugees, or children of refugees, had become Fellows of the Royal Society and a further thirty-four were Fellows of the British Academy. Sixteen had won Nobel Prizes and eighteen had been knighted.6

  The Jewish refugees tended not to settle in the traditional East End areas of London—instead a new synagogue was established in Swiss Cottage (the Belsize Square Synagogue). Many of the refugees, once they had obtained employment, naturally tried to help their fellows. They ran into a problem collectively when, in the spring of 1940, with invasion imminent, thousands of refugees were interned on the Isle of Man. Among those interned were Max Perutz, Stephen Hearst, Hans Schidlof, Hans Keller, Kurt Jooss, Sebastian Haffner, Kurt Schwitters, and Claus Moser.7 The only piece of good news was that the talent on the Isle of Man ran so deep that excellent courses in everything from Chinese theater to the Etruscan language were available. The exiles joked that they were “His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens.”8

  Some of the refugees were let out after only a few weeks (Claus Moser, for example), and the boards that were set up (staffed by such figures as Ralph Vaughan Williams, who headed a committee for assessing refugee musicians) mostly looked kindly on the internees. Lucie Rie, the potter, was let out to do fire-watching, Nikolaus Pevsner helped clear bomb damage, and Hans Schidlof trained as a dental mechanic. But not all worked on menial tasks. Rudolf Peierls, Klaus Fuchs, and Joseph Rotblatt went to America to be part of the Manhattan Project, while Ernst Gombrich, Martin Esslin, and George Weidenfeld worked for the BBC monitoring services. Stephen Hearst and Charles Spencer were given the chance to use their linguistic skills, interrogating prisoners of war.9

  Alex Korda came into his own during the war, producing anti-Nazi films, such as The Lion Has Wings, about the invincibility of the RAF, begun even before war was declared, and Pressburger produced 49th Parallel.10 Martin Miller polished his (subsequently famous) impersonations of Hitler and founded the Laterndl, an Austrian theater-in-exile specializing in cabaret (then hardly known in Britain) and located in Westbourne Terrace, off Notting Hill. There was also the Blue Danube Club and the FDKB, or Freier Deutscher Kulturbund, the Free German League of Culture, an umbrella organization to support writers, actors, musicians. and scientists, and whose founding members included Stefan Zweig (who was never happy in Britain), Berthold Viertel, Fred Uhlman, and Oskar Kokoschka.11

  As people and institutions were evacuated from London, Oxford became a center of refugee life: Rudolf Bing lived there, as did the composer (and Schoenberg pupil) Egon Wellesz (who had an honorary degree from Oxford), the poet Michael Hamburger, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, and Nicolai Rubinstein, who lectured on Renaissance history. Paul Weindling, in his study of German academics in Oxford in World War II, identified more than fifty refugees, a large proportion of whom were medical men: a Berlin-Oxford axis had existed before the war and personal contacts were good. Cambridge had its share of émigré scientists—Hermann Blaschko, Hans Krebs, Rudolf Peierls, Max Perutz; it was also home to the LSE in exile, where Friedrich von Hayek was now ensconced. Hayek was by now identified as the chief rival to John Maynard Keynes, also a Cambridge man. Despite their differences, the two men became firm friends. After the war, the LSE became a distinguished home for distinguished refugee scholars: Claus Moser, John Burgh, Ralph Milliband, Ernest Gellner, Peter Bauer, Hilde Himmelweit (Hans Eysenck’s assistant), Bram Oppenheim, and Michael Zander.

  One can’t ignore the problems. The painters Ludwig Meidner and Kurt Schwitters admitted that they never felt fully appreciated in Britain, Elias Canetti never got over how philistine he thought Britain was (though C. V. Wedgwood translated him and Iris Murdoch hailed his brilliance).* Claus Moser told Daniel Snowman that his parents “never recovered the élan of their earlier lives,” living stoically in a semi-detached in Putney, very different from the dazzling world of Berlin in the Weimar Republic.12

  As the fortunes of war turned, and in the wake of war, opportunities did begin to appear. Walter Goehr, a musician who had performed all manner of jobbing roles, formed his own orchestra, the London Philharmonic, and asked Richard Tauber, a conductor as well as a tenor, to take the baton, which he did to great success. Kurt Jooss was asked to produce a new version of The Magic Flute for the New Theatre, and he choreographed a new ballet, Pandora, in 1944.

  The story of Ernst Gombrich underlines the fact that one of the greatest émigré influences on British cultural life (together with science and music) was in publishing. Gombrich’s writing career had begun back in 1934–35, in Vienna, when Walter Neurath had asked him to prepare a history of the world for children. This led to an idea for a history of art, which appeared as The Story of Art in 1950, by which time author and publisher had both relocated to Britain. The book was a sensation, still in print fifty years—and 6 million copies—later, probably the most successful art book of all time. Gombrich became Slade Professor of Art at Oxford and published two other seminal books, Art and Illusion, about the psychology of art, and one on decoration, The Sense of Order. In 1959 he became director of the Warburg Institute, a post he held until he retired in 1976, by which time he had been knighted.13

  The following list of names reinforces the point about the émigré impact on publishing: George Weidenfeld, Tom Maschler, Walter Neurath, Paul Hamlyn, Peter Owen, Andre Deutsch, Paul Elek, Robert Maxwell. Stanley Unwin was partly responsible for ensuring that the Phaidon Press moved safely to Britain after he bought all the Phaidon stock, technically “Aryanizing” the company, which became a “subsidiary” of the British firm.

  Probably the biggest publishing success story is that of George Weidenfeld. After the war, Weidenfeld’s first aim was to start a magazine, a combination as he saw it of the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New Statesman, to be called Contact. He commissioned articles from Bertrand Russell, Ernst Gombrich, and Benedetto Croce, but Contact was not the success it might have been, and the turning point in his fortunes occurred when he was having lunch with Israel Sieff, one of the directors of Marks & Spencer. After lunch Sieff took Weidenfeld to his firm’s Marble Arch store, where he showed his guest a counter where children’s classics, produced in America, were “flying off the shelves.” He invited Weidenfeld to do the same and sell direct to Marks & Spencer.

  Weidenfeld quickly produced a series of such familiar out-of-copyright titles as Treasure Island, Black Beauty, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales; books took over from magazines and in 1949 Weidenfeld & Nicolson was born. Among Weidenfeld’s other notable publishing coups were Nabokov’s Lolita (after much controversy), Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, and the memoirs of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Abba Eban, Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres, not to mention several of the books covered here, such as Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism and Ralf Dahrendorf’s Democracy in Germany (see Chapter 41). His ninetieth birthday, in September 2009, hosted in Geneva for him by the internationally acclaimed architect, Lord (Norman) Foster, was attended by 3
00 distinguished friends, including the deputy prime minister of Israel, 10 ambassadors, assorted celebrities from the media and publishing and, in Weidenfeld’s own words, “some Hapsburgs.”

  Almost as impressive as Weidenfeld’s achievement in publishing was that of Nikolaus Pevsner. He arrived in Britain in 1936 and worked for a furniture designer. During the war he took over as (stand-in) editor of the Architectural Review, taught part-time at Birkbeck College at the University of London and published a book on European architecture. In 1955 he gave the Reith Lectures on the BBC and chose as his theme “The Englishness of English Art.” But two other projects probably had more impact. One was the result of a conversation with Allen Lane, the man who conceived Penguin Books, for a “Pelican History of Art,” a mammoth multi-volume series surveying the development of art across the world; and a second series, which Pevsner researched and wrote himself, about the most important and beautiful buildings in Britain.14 It took thirty years, but his survey is still a monument. The Neuraths were at the center of a circle that included Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson.

  A later achievement was that of historian Eric Hobsbawm, who grew up in Vienna, moving to Berlin in his early teens. He was attracted to communism not only as an alternative to capitalism but as an alternative to Zionism, for which he had little sympathy. In Britain he became an impressive teacher of history at Birkbeck College, helped to found what became a very influential journal, Past and Present, wrote a number of books about the underclasses (Primitive Rebels, 1959, Labouring Men, 1964) and a very popular, synthesizing tetralogy, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capitalism, The Age of Industry, and, most recently, The Age of Extremes.15

  Both Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek had continued their attacks on socialism and historicism begun in the 1940s. In 1959 Popper published The Logic of Scientific Discovery, in which he set out his view that the scientist encounters the world—nature—as a stranger, and that what sets the scientific enterprise apart from anything else is that it only entertains knowledge or experience that is capable of falsification. For Popper this is what distinguishes science from religion or metaphysics; it is the very embodiment of an “open” society. Hayek left Britain for the University of Chicago in 1950 and could have been considered just as easily in the chapter on emigrants to the United States, though later still he went back to German-speaking Europe, to Salzburg and then Freiburg. In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, he published The Constitution of Liberty in which he extended his argument beyond planning—the focus of his earlier book—to the moral sphere. His argument now was that our values have evolved just as our intelligence has and that the evolved rules of justice are liberty. The concept of “social justice,” which would become so popular in the 1960s, and “the Great Society” was and is a myth. Being evolved, law is “part of the natural history of mankind” it is coeval with society and, therefore and crucially, it antedates the emergence of the state. The imposition of “social justice” is an unwarranted (and unworkable) interference with natural processes. Neither Popper nor Hayek were cultural pessimists in the traditional German fashion, but they were recognizably Darwinian in their approach. In 1974, Hayek won the Nobel Prize for Economics and in 1984 he was made a Companion of Honour in Britain. Popper was knighted in 1965.

  A publishing-literary-historical venture of a different kind was the Holocaust Library put together in London by Alfred Wiener. A Berliner by birth, he fought in World War I and won the Iron Cross. Always mindful of the threat of National Socialism, from as early as 1928 he set about documenting its activities but in 1933 he was forced to flee, first to Amsterdam, then to London. After the war he established the Wiener Library, one of the major resources in documenting the Holocaust.16

  Leo Baeck (1873–1956) was a similar figure, even more impressive in some ways. Born in Lissa, now in Poland but then in Germany, he studied philosophy in Berlin with Wilhelm Dilthey and became a rabbi. In 1905, in response to Adolf von Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity, he published The Essence of Judaism, which mixed neo-Kantianism with Jewish ideas and the success of which made him something of a hero to his fellow Jews in Germany.17 He acted as an army rabbi during World War I and thereafter performed in one capacity or another as a guardian of the Jewish community, remaining in Germany, serving on committees and bodies designed to protect Jewish interests. Eventually, in 1943, he was deported to Theresienstadt, where he became a member of the Council of Elders; he was still there when the camp was liberated by the Russians in May 1945. After the war he transferred to London where he published a second book, This People Israel, which further enhanced his standing. In recognition of his role during catastrophic times, the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of German-speaking Jewry was established in 1955. He died a year later. There are now Leo Baeck centers in Melbourne and Toronto and Leo Baeck Institutes in London, Jerusalem, and New York.

  Émigré journalists in Britain crowded most around the BBC and, in print, David Astor’s Observer, which published Sebastian Haffner, Arthur Koestler, Richard Löwenthal, Ernst (“Fritz”) Schumacher, and Isaac Deutscher. The other strength of the BBC, besides journalism and plays, was, of course, music, and here the impact of émigrés was as substantial as it was in science, publishing, and social/political theory. In the postwar years, up to the 1970s, three Viennese émigrés had a disproportionate effect on the output of the broadcasting corporation: Hans Keller, Martin Esslin, and Stephen Hearst.

  Born in Vienna just after the Great War had ended, Keller escaped from Austria after the Anschluss and made his way to Britain, where he had a sister. An admirer of George Gershwin as much as Claude Debussy, and deeply influenced by Freudian psychology, he began to make a name as a music critic and was an early admirer of Benjamin Britten. In 1959 William Glock was made controller of music at the BBC, and he soon afterward recruited Keller; both men shared a love of Haydn and Mozart (the latter not universally admired at that stage) but were also intent on promoting modern and contemporary music.18 Through them musical appreciation in Britain achieved a sophistication it had never had before. His biographer described Keller as the “musical conscience” of British broadcasting.19

  Esslin was doing much the same in BBC drama. Born in Budapest but raised in Vienna, he received a typically German education aimed at Bildung (Latin at eleven, Greek at twelve, philosophy not long after). The woman his father married after his own mother died gave Esslin an exposure to—and a passion for—Wagner, but she also gave him a puppet theater. Indirectly, this introduced him to Hauptmann, Schnitzler, and Brecht, about whom he was to write several well-received books and on the strength of which he was taken on by the BBC, becoming head of drama in 1963.20

  As controller of BBC 2, Stephen Hearst was in charge of Britain’s most far-reaching cultural institution. An Anglophile, while at school in Vienna he had staged a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest in English. He fled Austria the day after the Anschluss, joining the BBC after Oxford and always regarded himself as lucky, in the sense that the 1960s and early 1970s were the “heroic age” of arts and culture on British television, the time of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Alistair Cooke’s America.21

  Still in the realm of music, we have already encountered Rudolf Bing, starting the Edinburgh Festival in 1947 (he would later go on to be director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York). In that same year, 1947, Karl Rankl was appointed musical director of the Royal Opera in London. He was not the first choice—the post had been discussed with Eugene Goossens and Bruno Walter, but they were too demanding. Though Rankl was not as well known as the others, he was not without experience, having studied with Schoenberg and Klemperer in Berlin and held positions in Graz and Prague. He escaped to Britain in 1939 and was interned. It was a while before Rankl hit his stride. During the war, the opera house in Covent Garden had been let to the Mecca Café Ltd. as a palais de danse for troops home on leave, while the ballet had toured the country to great su
ccess. Rankl built the opera company solidly, and although it did not overtake the ballet in the public mind during his tenure, it would eventually do so.

  For many people, for many years, the most obvious German presence on the British musical scene were four men known to initiates as the “Wolf Gang” and, more formally, as the Amadeus String Quartet. Their first concert was given at the Wigmore Hall on January 10, 1948, appropriately with Mozart’s D Minor Concerto, K. 421. Three members of the quartet had become friendly only in exile in Britain. Norbert Brainin and Siegmund Nissel were violinists, and Hans Schidlof was a violist; all were of a similar age, and all had been students of Max Rostal; and it was another Rostal pupil who introduced them to the fourth member of the quartet, the cellist Martin Lovett. Their first performance, as the “Brainin String Quartet,” was given at Dartington, at Imogen Holst’s invitation in the summer of 1947.22 Holst was impressed by the performance, and they eventually decided to use Mozart’s middle name; that first London concert, at the Wigmore Hall, was so well received that offers from the BBC were soon followed by others, including a tour of Germany itself, in 1950, followed by a contract with Deutsche Grammophon not long after.

  Claus Moser originally wanted to be a pianist but it didn’t work out. Born in Berlin in 1922, he moved with his family to Britain (to Putney) in 1936, where he attended the LSE. After internment on the Isle of Man, he returned to the LSE, eventually becoming professor of social statistics (1961–70). Prime Minister Harold Wilson made him director of Britain’s Central Statistical Office, an institution that had earlier turned him down because he was an enemy alien. This most loyal of all enemy aliens was knighted in 1973 and made a life peer in 2001, but this wasn’t all: in his time Moser has been president of the Royal Statistical Society, warden of Wadham College, Oxford, pro-vice chancellor of Oxford, chairman of the British Museum Development Trust, and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a governor of the Royal Academy of Music, a member of the BBC Music Advisory Committee, a trustee of the London Philharmonia Orchestra, and chairman of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. He became, in effect, a one-man establishment.