HITLER'S LOSS: What Britain and America Gained from Europe's Cultural Exiles

In the years just before and during Hitler's regime, numerous European intellectuals fled Nazi-controlled countries into exile in Britain and the United States. Nobel Prize winners, scientists, filmmakers, artists, novelists, architects and musicians packed their academic or cultural bags, carrying them into their new homelands and unpacking them to enrich considerably the cultural landscape in which they found themselves. In brief biographical sketches, Ambrose, a British writer and former director of television documentaries, records the stories of many of the more famous of these cultural exiles, observing in detail the contributions they made to British and American culture. For example, he argues that filmmaker Fritz Lang, whose 1927 silent classic Metropolis foretold a grim mechanistic future and who was later condemned by the Nazis, brought to Hollywood the genre that later developed into film noir. In literature, Arthur Koestler developed the political novel of ideas in England, while Thomas Mann's sprawling novels of ideas, especially Doctor Faustus, pointedly criticized the excesses of the Nazi regime. Ambrose ambles breezily through music (Schoenberg, Hindemith), architecture (Gropius) and art (Chagall, Dalí). But why bring these stories together at all? What are we supposed to learn from them—that British and American culture would have been poorer without the ascent of Hitler and the contributions of these exiles? Ambrose's book lacks a substantive thesis that clearly and coherently sets the context for the stories he narrates, so this is little more than a scrapbook of the lives of famous European cultural exiles. (Oct.)