Gifts from abroad

What would our cultural life have been like over the past half-century if there had been no "Hitler émigrés" in the 1930s? Maybe the pastoral idyll would continue to hold British composers and architects in its thrall, while the cult of the amateur persisted among our publishers and broadcasters. In every sphere, from musical performance to art history, the presence of the refugees from Nazism helped instil a new level of disciplined professionalism. Above all, the Hitler émigrés helped to make our culture cosmopolitan, linking it more closely with the Continental mainstream.

Right now, when all the fuss about European union and asylum seekers appears to have the immediacy of a hot new issue, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that we are what we are because of cross-fertilisation between peoples. Our most cherished institutions, even the culture that some people believe to be under threat, would not be as robust or as worth preserving if Britain had not opened its borders to foreign artists and arts administrators 60 years ago.

Then, as now, there was ample scope for suspicion and misunderstanding. Picture, for example, the first meeting between the quintessential eccentric Englishman, John Christie of Glyndebourne, and the producer Carl Ebert, a leading figure in Germany's operatic life until the advent of Hitler.

Christie showed Ebert his country estate and explained that he wanted to put on performances of opera in the tiny theatre alongside the house. "Such as what?" asked Ebert. Christie wondered about Wagner's Parsifal. "Maybe - if you put the singers and the orchestra in the auditorium and the audience on the stage," replied Ebert cuttingly, adding that Mozart would be more appropriate.

"English audiences don't like Mozart very much," said Christie.

"Then we must try to help them to like Mozart," was Ebert's unanswerable riposte.

Such encounters would have occurred throughout the 1930s and beyond as men and women, many of them steeled in the harsh modernism of Mitteleuropa, struggled to adjust to an alien world of kippers and milky tea, where cricket was regarded as a model for the good life and muddling through deemed a virtue.

Yet the friction generated sparked great art. Within a few months, Ebert and the conductor Fritz Busch (who had left Germany at around the same time as Ebert) had inaugurated the first Glyndebourne season with Mozart s Marriage of Figaro. Christie s company director was another refugee from Nazism, Rudolf Bing, who later created the Edinburgh Festival and went on to run New York s Metropolitan Opera.

The Britain that the émigrés came to was not a land without culture. But there was something insular about it, a class-ridden society living off elegiac memories and fading imperial grandeur. Or so it seemed to many of the new arrivals - especially those whose intellectual baggage bore the imprint of Expressionist art, Bauhaus architecture, Brechtian satire or Schoenbergian atonalism. It was the interaction between these two very different traditions that prepared the ground for the cultural history of post-war Britain.

Three-quarters of the Amadeus Quartet found refuge here from Nazism, as did the biochemist Max Perutz and the art historian Ernst Gombrich, both of whom came to Britain from Vienna shortly before Hitler annexed Austria and made their return unthinkable. The composer Egon Wellesz, the painter Oskar Kokoschka and the founding director of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, were among many who came to Britain seeking a temporary or permanent home.

Equally important, but less recognised, was the impact of the "enablers". Art lovers may know the work of Lucian Freud or Frank Auerbach and their contemporaries, but few remember the early visibility provided for émigré artists by the galleries of Jack Bilbo (born Hugo Baruch), Hans Hess or Harry Fischer. Even fewer realise that the leading art-book publishers Phaidon and Thames & Hudson were the creation of refugees.

Thousands went to their first performance at the Royal Opera House courtesy of a cheap- seat scheme financed by another publisher, Paul Hamlyn, a close friend of the ROH chairman, Claus Moser - both of them Berlin-born (and both subsequently life peers).