The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century

Reviewed by Melanie Selfe

Owen Hatherley  (Allen Lane, Penguin Books: 2025)

Owen Hatherley’s The Alienation Effect tells the stories of intellectuals and artists who migrated to Britain during the 1930s from the countries in Central and Eastern Europe that were over-run by fascism. He opens his account with the moment he emerges from treatment in the eye clinic of St. Thomas’s Hospital in London to notice the Palace of Westminster across the river, a ‘quintessentially, insufferably English’ building covered in flamboyant Gothic detail. This now seems alien in contrast to the classical modernism of St. Thomas’s Hospital, a clean, efficient public building that has helped him see clearly and was designed by the avant-garde architect Eugene Rosenberg. On the left and of Jewish ancestry, Rosenberg fled to Britain in 1939 from the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia and became architect to the British Welfare State and designer of hospitals. This is just the first of many such stories. 

The term ‘alienation effect’ refers to Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, a device which estranges what we thought we knew and makes us look again with a critical eye. The migrants and refugees discussed by Hatherley were often interned or even deported as enemy aliens. The culture they brought with them was seen as strange but equally they encountered Britain as strange. We are now prompted to look again at what we take to be familiar as Hatherley spells out how Britain was transformed by the proudly urban, modernist and serious culture of Central Europe. 

The book focuses on the visual arts. We learn about Stefan Lorant and the founding of Picture Post, photographers Gerti Deutsch, Bill Brandt, and Dorothy Bohm, founder of London’s Photographers Gallery. The influence of Soviet and Weimar filmmaking was brought to Britain by Alexander Korda and Karel Reisz. Émigré publishers, designers and typographers gave us familiar books, Walter and Eva Neurath of Thames and Hudson, designers Jan Tschichold and Hans Schmoller at Penguin Books, Berthold Wolpe at Faber and Faber. Hampstead became a heartland of the London intelligentsia, an émigré artists’ quarter along ‘Finchleystrasse’ and home to Camden Arts Centre, the Isokon Building in Belsize Park and Cosmo Restaurant at Swiss Cottage. The area drew artists such as Oskar Kokoschka, Piet Mondrian and Naum Gabo. In the field of architecture, émigré influence could be seen in the design of the Royal Festival Hall for the Festival of Britain, in housing estates built for London County Council and in their vision of post war modern cities rebuilt for a welfare state. Familiar names might be Nikolaus Pevsner, Berthold Lubetkin and Erno Goldfinger. 

Many of the names and stories will be unfamiliar but Hatherley’s erudite, entertaining and at times provocative account forms a compendium to keep returning to, a prompt to go and check out those things you may have overlooked and a reminder of what we owe refugees.

Owen Hatherley will be talking to Suffolk Book League with Melanie Selfe at an event on Wednesday the 11th of November 2026.

You can buy tickets on the website here: Owen Hatherley|Suffolk Book League