A cultural melding pot
Daniel Snowman explores the cultural legacy of the refugees from Nazism.
DESPITE my strange surname, I am not a German “Schneemann”; my forebears came from various parts of the “Pale of Jewish settlement”, the borderlands of imperial Russia in which Jews were permitted to live in Tsarist times.
But I was raised in north-west London and, gradually learning about the horrors of the Holocaust and of the refugees lucky enough to avoid it, I learned to respect, almost revere, all who had Germanic-sounding names and accents. When my parents took me to a concert the conductor might be a jolly good all-English chap with a name like Boult, Beecham or Sargent; but I knew it would be something special if he was called Klemperer, Goehr, Susskind or Schwarz.
All migrations bring “culture” with them, as much of British history testifies; consider the legacy of the Roman occupation, the Angles and Saxons, the Normans or the Huguenots. In many ways people like Nikolaus Pevsner, George Weidenfeld or the Freuds were simply part of the latest wave.