The German Genius

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