Next week Frank Auerbach will be honoured by the British art establishment with a one-man show at Tate Britain. It’s a fitting tribute for an artist who’s widely (and quite rightly) regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter. Yet although Auerbach has spent almost all his life in Britain, what’s striking about his paintings is how Germanic they seem.
Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was only seven when he came to England (his parents subsequently perished in the Holocaust). By rights, he should stand alongside British artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney, yet his work feels far closer to German painters like Georg Baselitz or Anselm Kiefer. Auerbach is a one-off, a unique painter with a unique vision. However he’s also part of a vast wave of Germanic immigration that has transformed British cultural life — mainly for the better, but at a price.
During the 1930s, 100,000 refugees fled to Britain from the Third Reich. Britain had weathered other migrations, but this one was entirely different. Nazism had transformed a liberal democracy into a violent, superstitious tyranny. These refugees weren’t only fleeing from anti-Semitism. They were fleeing from a pogrom against western civilisation. This wave of immigrants wasn’t just another huddled mass — it was the cultural élite of Central Europe, the best and brightest from every avenue of academia and the arts.
Arriving with nothing, starting from nothing, the achievements of these refugees were staggering. Every artistic genre was invigorated by their arrival, from music (Fritz Busch, Hans Keller) to literature (Stefan Zweig), from fine art (Kurt Schwitters, Oskar Kokoschka) to cinema (Emeric Pressburger, Karel Reisz). Gerard Hoffnung and Victor Weisz (aka Vicky) delighted Britain with their cartoons. Kurt Jooss and Rudolf Laban revolutionised British dance. Like Auerbach, Lucian Freud came to Britain from Berlin. Three of the Amadeus Quartet came from Vienna, and met in an internment camp on the Isle of Man.
German-speaking émigrés enlivened every academic discipline: economics (Friedrich Hayek), mathematics (Max Born), philosophy (Karl Popper), psychology (Hans Eysenck), history (Eric Hobsbawm, Geoffrey Elton)… The list goes on and on.
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