The Alienation Effect
How Central European Emigres Transformed the British Twentieth Century
Published on 27. March 2025
Book
Hardback
608 pages
978-0-241-37820-5 (ISBN)
Description
Britain. Made in Europe.
A Guardian Best History and Politics Book of the Year 2025
In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the emigres had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.
Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an 'alienation effect', on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.
Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the emigres all around us - many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash - and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.
A Guardian Best History and Politics Book of the Year 2025
In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the emigres had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.
Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an 'alienation effect', on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.
Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the emigres all around us - many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash - and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.
Reviews / Votes
Owen Hatherley turns to a gentler kind of insurgency in The Alienation Effect - a group biography of the architects, designers and directors from Mitteleuropa who washed up on Britain's shores in the middle of the last century. We already know the assimilated conservatives - Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper - but Hatherley gives us the forgotten radicals who put concrete into our skyline and shook us out of our complacency -- Pratinav Anil * Guardian, Best History and Politics Books 2025 * Impassioned and erudite, Hatherley writes with panache and never becomes flat-footedly ideological... In drawing attention to a hugely important yet neglected phenomenon that has shaped our culture for better and worse, this is a genuinely important study that deserves to win prizes -- Rupert Christiansen * Telegraph * Meticulously researched... Hatherley is an exhilarating guide -- Jackie Wullschlaeger * Financial Times * Hatherley writes with wit throughout as he charts the tragic and comic turns of the lives of emigres with a warm familiarity and affection. With his sharp eye for what lies beneath the mundane, he reveals how Central Europeans influenced the everyday apparatus of British cultural life... The Alienation Effect reveals just how tightly the foreign is woven into the fabric of the familiar -- Anna Parker * Times Literary Supplement * The radicalism of the emigres, Hatherley convincingly shows, has been concealed by the manipulations of national memory... Aby Warburg's credo was Kulturwissenschaft, a scientific approach to cultural studies that turned on connections and juxtapositions. Hatherley is a worthy heir to that tradition, and he has a canny eye for lineages. His potted genealogies are dazzling performances in concision, effortlessly gliding from the new brutalism of his home patch of Camberwell, London, through the works of art historian Rudolf Wittkower to the 15th-century Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti - all in a single page -- Pratinav Anil * Guardian * Hatherley, whose background is in writing about architecture, moves with confidence through the fields of film, typography and art. The book is thick with information, sometimes resembling the gazetteers or guides he has previously written... It's often acute, informative, passionate and witty, a sometimes moving tribute to achievements in the face of adversity, and an essential antidote to crude theories of national identity -- Rowan Moore * Observer * Hatherley offers a set of vivid and consistently stimulating portraits of individual artists and thinkers... This is an admirable book, ambitious in its scope and very readable... Hatherley proves himself a fair-minded historian, capable of intellectual generosity even towards people and traditions he deplores... This book will stimulate readers -- Nikhil Krishnan * New Statesman * Encyclopaedic... Fascinating -- David Honigmann * Spectator * A combination of jewel-like detail and panoramic sweep... Arresting... This monumental work secures for Hatherley his place in the tradition of English writers who have moralized about architecture, a lineage stretching from John Ruskin to Ian Nairn and, yes, Pevsner... A passionate, erudite book -- Michael Ledger-Lomas * Jacobin * The book I've been waiting for. A masterpiece -- James FoxMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 169 mm
Thickness: 40 mm
Weight
1005 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-241-37820-5 (9780241378205)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Owen Hatherley
The Alienation Effect
How Central European Emigres Transformed the British Twentieth Century
Book
03/2026
Penguin Books Ltd
€21.50
Available immediately
Owen Hatherley
The Alienation Effect
How Central European Emigres Transformed the British Twentieth Century
E-Book
03/2025
Penguin Books Ltd
€12.99
Available for download
Person
Owen Hatherley is the author of many books on aesthetics and politics, including Landscapes of Communism, Trans-Europe Express and Modern Buildings in Britain. He is a commissioning editor at Jacobin.