The German Genius

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 300 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,