The German Genius

assistant he became at the University of Frankfurt. In 1933, when Mannheim’s institute was closed by the Nazis, Elias moved to Paris where he began his most well-known book, The Civilising Process . In 1935 he immigrated to Britain and met up with Mannheim, again becoming his assistant, this time at the LSE. By the outbreak of war, he had finished his magnum opus but was interned on the Isle of Man. The big break in his career did not come until much later, in 1969, with the republication of The Civilising Process . 29 This traces the development in Europe of various forms of behavior—sexual behavior, table manners, bodily functions, forms of speech, and the relations between servants and their masters. Elias used documents, memoirs, and paintings as sources to show how etiquette at court spread out, how shame and repugnance developed and widened, and how self-restraint began to be praised as an aspect of democracy. His approach—once ignored—was now welcomed as central to the way psychology and the social sciences were developing, and the book was described by Richard Sennett as “Without doubt the most important piece of historical sociology since Max Weber.” 30
    Like Elias, Ernest Gellner (1925–95) taught at the LSE and at Cambridge. He grew up in what Kafka called tri-cultural Prague, where he attended the English-language grammar school, a prescient move on the part of his father, for the family moved to Britain in 1939, and Ernest won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. Before taking his degree he went to serve with the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade, taking part in the siege of Dunkirk. After Balliol, he moved to the LSE, subsequently becoming professor of philosophy, logic, and scientific method.
    He made his name with Words and Things (1959), a clever critique of Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, and other linguistic philosophers who, he thought, had been sloppy about their own methods. Ryle was so incensed he refused to have the book reviewed in Mind , the journal he edited. Bertrand Russell wrote to the London Times to complain, and the row went on for weeks. Among Gellner’s other books were Plough, Sword and Book (1988), in which he argued that there have been three great phases in history—hunting and gathering, agrarian production, and industrial production—and that these fit with the three great classes of human activity: production, coercion, and cognition. Probably his most important work after Words and Things was Nations and Nationalism (1983). Gellner had moved to Cambridge, and into social anthropology, in the 1960s, and he made it his business to study societies other than those in the West. 31 After his retirement in 1993, he returned to Prague to head up a new Centre for the Study of Nationalism, funded by George Soros as part of the new Central European University. A mountaineer and enthusiastic beer drinker, his writing style was inimitable: “Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.”
    Although Kokoschka and Schwitters were the most famous mature painters to seek exile in Britain, Frank Auerbach, who was only eight when war broke out, has probably become the most well-known contemporary painter among émigrés, and one whose scumbling and heavy impasto technique is closest to the German Expressionist tradition. Born in Berlin, he was sent to Britain in 1939 by his parents, both of whom died in a concentration camp. 32 In England he was sent to Bunce Court, a school for refugees in Kent run by Anna Essinger, a Quaker with a Jewish heritage (the school had itself transferred from Herrlingen in the Swabian Jura district). Auerbach was sponsored by the writer Iris Origo.
    Since his parents were dead, Auerbach stayed in Britain after the war, studying under David Bomberg, and becoming known for his scenes of industrial—or at least urban—inner London. Regarded as the most exciting “British” talent since Francis Bacon, Auerbach was given an Arts Council retrospective in 1978 and a major retrospective at the Royal Academy in 2001; he represented Britain in 1986 at the Venice Biennale, where he shared the Golden Lion prize with Sigmar Polke. 33 It was reported in 2003 that he had turned down a knighthood.
    While none of the German émigrés in Britain earned the worldwide fame