The Exiles by Daria Santini (Bloomsbury Academic, £20)
Many of the refugees who fled to Britain from Hitler’s Mitteleuropa went on to make an important contribution to the cultural and intellectual life of their new homeland: artists and architects, musicians, photographers, film-makers, choreographers, writers, publishers, historians, scientists and many another.
Most came in the later 1930s, by which time the true ambitions of Nazism were impossible to miss.
Then, in September 1939, with the outbreak of war, things came to an abrupt halt.
In her new book, Daria Santini reminds us that this epic migration — and its cultural impact upon Britain — had in fact begun earlier than many realise.
Born and raised in Italy, Santini became a historian of German literature and lived in Munich and Berlin before settling in London in the mid-1990s.
Drawing upon this richly multicultural and multi-linguistic background, she trains her scholarly focus on a single year, 1934 (the year that saw the opening of Glyndebourne opera under its émigré artistic director Carl Ebert and conductor Fritz Busch).
The book has a broadly chronological structure as Santini recounts a small, carefully selected number of revealing case studies.
Thus, she tells of the actress and film star Elisabeth Bergner who, having moved to London in 1932, was by January 1934 enjoying great success in the West End theatre, while later we read of others in the movie business such as the actors Fritz Kortner and Conrad Veidt (star of Jew Süss) and the director Berthold Viertel.
Santini writes of the photographer Wolf Suschitzsky who left Vienna in 1934 for London where his sister, fellow photographer and political activist Edith Tudor-Hart had moved the previous year, and of Stefan Lorant, co-founder of Picture Post, and another recent arrival, the photographer Bill Brandt.
She recounts the complex and detailed story of the transfer to London of the Warburg Library from Hamburg and its development into what became, under the leadership of a plethora of émigré scholars, Britain’s leading institute for the study of art history.
She ends with a vivid portrait of two utterly contrasting writers both of whom found themselves in London in the late autumn of 1934: the elegant, uptight Stefan Zweig and the self-consciously rebellious Bertolt Brecht.
Santini is careful not to generalise about the impact of the people she writes about. Some made Britain their home while others (Viertel, Lorant, Brecht, Zweig) moved on elsewhere.
Many were Jewish, though their Jewishness was often of secondary significance (Ernst Gombrich, later director of the Warburg Institute, said that whether a historian or philosopher happened to be Jewish was more the domain of Hitler or Goebbels).
The Exiles is a timely reminder of the major impact such a migration can provide: an impeccably researched yet eminently readable book packed with fascinating and often intimate portraits of once-celebrated figures whose contribution to the artistic life of Britain and beyond deserves to be better remembered.
Daniel Snowman is author of ‘The Hitler Émigrés: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism’, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London)
