Born Mikes György in a small Hungarian town in 1912, he had been too young to experience the staid but stable Habsburg world eulogized in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. He instead came of age in a very different kind of Central Europe. One in which old certainties had disappeared, and new ones had yet to crystallize. Where radically “modern” cultural and political forces vied for attention in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, and beyond, feeding off the new culture of uncertainty.

With fascism and Stalinism ascendant in the Thirties, hundreds of thousands of Central Europeans fled their homes. Mikes was one of them, the product of a great migration that, if not quite entirely forgotten, is certainly inadequately remembered in Britain. As Owen Hatherley argues in his masterful new book, The Alienation Effect, those Central Europeans like Mikes were part of the first modern mass migration that “had a really decisive, transformative and positive effect on British culture”.

Though Hatherley’s focus is on the arts — the émigrés often came as bearers of a continental modernism fiercely resisted before (and even after) their arrival — their influence on the course of British politics, economics, philosophy, and more was often equally consequential. Of course, even if their influence had been negligible, the fact that hundreds of thousands of Britons today can trace their ancestry back to this migration is itself cause for interest. In the early 21st century, both of Britain’s major parties were briefly led by such descendants (Michael Howard and Ed Miliband).

But unlike the postwar imperial migration since mythologized as the founding act of modern, multicultural Britain, the place of these Central European exiles in the national story (or stories) has been left much more ambiguous. When London’s Overground lines were given names for the first time in 2024, the one running through areas settled by immigrants from the “West Indies” was christened the Windrush line. No Finchleystraße or Freud line appeared, however, in those parts of northwest London favored by Central Europeans to commemorate their role in the making of modern Britain.

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The two cases are not of course strictly comparable. The Windrush story is a fundamentally British one, carrying British citizens (or those that were soon to be such) to the mother country that had ruled over them and their ancestors for centuries. They were not, as the Mikes, Freuds, and others were, “aliens” from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland. This status condemned tens of thousands bearing German or Austrian citizenship, many of whom were Jewish, to mass internment in 1940/41. Even though many chose to remain in Britain after this experience, it offered the starkest example of what it meant to be an “alien”.

Some Central European migrants came in passing, spending a few years in Britain before moving on, like the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Others, like Sigmund Freud, arrived just in time to die, gifting little to their country of refuge except for a stage replica of the life they left behind. But tens of thousands — including Freud’s grandson Lucian — made the United Kingdom their permanent home.

They were overwhelmingly educated and middle class and — excepting the 250,000 Poles of Anders’ Army, unable to return home due to the Communist takeover of Poland, who were offered citizenship in 1947 — mostly of Jewish descent. They were not necessarily people who saw themselves as Jews or considered it an important part of their identity, however, but rather highly assimilated urbanites from modern and cosmopolitan cities like Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest who shared and had taken pride in the national and urban cultures they were raised in.

By the time they arrived in Britain many of them had thus experienced a double alienation. First from their homelands that had turned on them, and only then as “aliens” forced to adapt to the peculiar non-continental ways of the British. If the various émigré accounts recorded by Hatherley are anything to go by, the new migrants and refugees viewed their new home with a mixture of bemusement, confusion, and admiration.

Compared with the ferment and upheaval on the continent they had left, Britain appeared to these Central European exiles as an aloof and parochial haven of good manners, peace, and stability. The socialist psychiatrist Charlotte Wolff described “a sense of enchanted unreality” taking hold of her as she disembarked at Dover in 1935. The comfort and quietness of the subsequent train to London “acted like a tranquilizer”. The Marxist intellectual Perry Anderson lamented this tranquilizing effect that he thought had caused Central European exiles to leave their continental radicalism behind, instead adjusting to “the mediocre and inert” culture that defined “the most conservative major society in Europe”.

Hatherley’s book is a belated riposte to Anderson’s thesis. He explores all the ways in which these exiles did indeed bring their radical continental ideas with them: how they helped to write the cultural code of the “modern Britain” created out of a crumbling post-Victorian empire in the mid-20th century. Often with an explicitly Left-wing conviction that the mock Tudor houses and tenement slums were symbols of the capitalist rot of Thirties Britain that had to be swept away and reinvigorated with new artistic, social, and economic ideas fit for the “modern world”.

There was, for example, the Hungarian-born Stefan Lorant, who had a successful career as a filmmaker and photojournalist in Germany before being forced to flee on account of his Jewish heritage. In 1938 he co-founded the Picture Post in London, modeling it on the Münchner Illustrierte Press he had edited in Germany. It became wildly successful and influential thanks to its pioneering photojournalism and its anti-fascist political stance, both of which long outlived Lorant’s own stay in Britain which lasted only until 1940.

British publishing too was revolutionized by Central European encounters. The London-based publishers Phaidon Press and Thames & Hudson, known for their high-quality and visually striking illustrations, are both the products of Viennese exiles, while Penguin Books effectively copied its modernist book design from the pioneering German publisher Albatross Books.

Then there were the countless producers, cinematographers, set designers, composers, and costume designers that formed the invisible backbone of the British film industry. Or photographers like Bill Brandt, who used their lens to make permanent their own “alien” perspective on British life. Sculptors who brought monumental and abstract forms onto British streets and art historians like Ernst Gombrich and Nikolaus Pevsner who introduced German systematization to the British study of art and architecture. And, most notoriously of all, the architects and planners that helped to transform the ruins and slums of the Forties into the cities Britons know today.

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Depending on one’s perspective, these architects are either the greatest prophets or the greatest scoundrels of modern British history. The continental utopianism undergirding their embrace of sleek modernist architecture is either an “un-British” abomination or a welcome, if imperfect, contribution to British architectural traditionalism. Indeed, Ian Fleming hated Ernő Goldfinger so much for blighting Hampstead with a row of modernist houses that he turned him into a Bond villain. (With a suitably evil modernist lair, naturally, itself designed in the film adaptation by a Central European exile.)

Much of the influence of Central European immigrants was, however, unseen. The 1942 Beveridge Report that laid the intellectual foundations of the postwar welfare state was ghostwritten by four economists, two of whom were born on the continent — Nicholas Kaldor and E.F. Schumacher. Many of their achievements were eventually repudiated, if not quite undone, by the Thatcher government, whose émigré Central European economist of choice was the Austrian Hayek. “This is what we believe!” Margaret Thatcher reportedly proclaimed at a Conservative Party meeting in the Seventies as she slammed a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty down on the table.

In the 19th century the notion that the birthplace of industrial capitalism should take economic cues from Austria would have read as a bad joke, like taking lessons on empire-building from the Germans. Yet, as Hatherley’s panoramic portrait of Central Europe-on-Thames shows, by the late 20th century it was difficult to find any aspect of British life that had not been touched by some sort of Central European intervention. It would be absurd to attribute any development solely to their influence, but it would be equally absurd to dismiss them entirely.

What makes it hard to tell as a distinctly British story, however, is that Britain’s Central European migration was small compared to the much greater numbers who made their way to the United States, USSR, and newly founded state of Israel. The waves of post-imperial migration from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, by contrast, were distinctly rooted in British history, something that makes Windrush an attractive metaphor for modern Britain’s transition to post-imperial multiculturalism.

The “aliens” from Central Europe who chose to make Britain their home in the Thirties and Forties do not fit comfortably into this narrative. Yet as Hatherley convincingly demonstrates, they helped Britain forge its own vision of 20th-century modernity, not as a facsimile of the world they left behind, but as a new synthesis of old and new, of continent and isles, of Britain and Central Europe. They brought ideas and experiences with them but naturally formed new ones as they adjusted to their new home, working hand-in-hand with British counterparts. As the “aliens” slowly became British, so too did Britain become a little “alien”.

Since the start of the Russian invasion, more than one Ukrainian official has described his nation’s struggle with reference to The Lord of the Rings.

It is perhaps peculiar that Tolkien’s trilogy resonates in this part of the world, given its troubled publication history in the Soviet Union. The first (unsuccessful) attempt saw it rewritten as a sci-fi book, in which the ring is a scientific instrument. Subsequent attempts were marginally more successful, but still only abridged versions. A full, authorised Russian translation appeared only in 1992, after the Soviet Union had collapsed. A Ukrainian one followed in 1993.

Why was the USSR so suspicious of Tolkien? From a Western perspective, his fantasy seems innocuous. But to Soviet eyes, it seemed dangerously close to a Cold War allegory: the good, individualistic, “free peoples” of the West versus the evil, industrial totalitarianism of the East. Tolkien certainly didn’t intend his novels to be interpreted this way, famously denouncing allegory “in all its manifestations”. But as those Ukrainian officials are showing today, finding allegories in familiar material can be used to powerful effect.

And they are not the only ones. In the late Nineties, years after the Soviet Union had collapsed, a Russian palaeontologist called Kirill Yeskov self-published a book that enshrines the Soviet interpretation of The Lord of the Rings. The Last Ringbearer assumes that Tolkien’s story is indeed a Cold War allegory, but tells it from the other side. “Lord of the Rings is the historiography of the victors,” Yeskov’s narrator reminds us towards the book’s end. He offers the Kremlin’s version of events.

In the face of a looming climate catastrophe, the peaceful eastern realm of Mordor, under His Majesty Sauron VIII, harnesses modern technology to embark upon an industrial revolution, aided by its elite class of scientists, the Nazgûl. A universal literacy law is passed, and thanks to an experienced diplomatic corps and powerful intelligence apparatus, the standing army is drastically reduced.

But the “bone-headed aggressive West”, led by the war-mongering imperialist Gandalf, feels threatened by Mordor’s achievements. Gandalf concocts a “final solution to the Mordorian problem”, in collusion with the racist elves from across the Western ocean. Using the puppet Aragorn, the elves have dominated the men of Middle Earth, leaving only Mordor a free country. But then Mordor is conquered, and in its place a “bad copy” of the West is erected.

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In sum: a great civilisation attempting to build a rational society based on science and technology (the Soviet Union) is met with irrational hatred from the so-called “free peoples” (the West) led by elves from across the sea (Americans). These elves conspire to destroy Mordor and divide the race of men (Europeans), who constantly push their influence eastwards (Nato expansion). It is left to heroic spies (Putin?) to save Mordor.

Yeskov’s retelling is unauthorised by the Tolkien estate and not considered a masterpiece. But it is popular with Tolkien fans — especially in Russia. The Last Ringbearer is more than just a simple Cold War allegory, however. It is also a window into the mind of the Soviet baby boomer generation (to which both Putin and Yeskov belong) — and how the end of the Cold War informs their view of international relations. The best example is the fate of the Elven ally, the nation of Umbar.

Umbar, a republic to the south of Middle Earth, used to balance relations between Mordor and the elves. But when it decided to abandon Mordor and team up with the West, disaster struck. “A fad for all things Elvish swept the Umbrian youth. The simpler ones made do with Elven music and symbols, whereas the more sophisticated were offered a comprehensive ideology” — a “concoction” of what sounds like Zen Buddhism, “anarchism” and environmentalism. Aimless Western individualism, in other words.

It gets worse. “It transpired that not sharing those views was unseemly and even dangerous, all persons who had the ill grace of expressing anything other than admiration and support for them were ostracised and persecuted.” Umbar’s folly was its naivete. The nation allowed itself to be turned into a “bad copy” of the West. It failed to notice that the elves’ interest in an alliance sprang from nothing more than cold national interest.

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When the USSR collapsed and Russia, under Yeltsin, embarked on a Westernising, capitalist course, the old Soviet certainties were thrown out. A fashion for all things Western swept the nation. For the older generation, this was difficult to come to terms with. Putin’s reign has seen a revival of Soviet nostalgia and neo-Soviet aesthetics for this very reason: Russian baby boomers have a deep and residing respect for the USSR, and a suspicion of all things Western.

Yeskov’s novel subverts the incredibly simplistic Western notion of the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil, by upending Tolkien’s tale of incredibly clear-cut morality and purely unsympathetic villains. In his version of Middle Earth, ideas such as “good” and “evil” are just ideological cloaks for the pursuit of national interests; they are the invention of the victors, like Tolkien, who chronicle events. Yeskov is not suggesting that Mordor and the orcs of Lord of the Rings are the good guys; he is suggesting that there are no good guys. Incidentally, the fact that we in the West can’t seem to understand this — that we apparently parrot idealism, while acting on realism — is one of Putin’s biggest gripes.

Yeskov’s playful reinterpretation of Tolkien’s work is not, however, the result of a nefarious Russian desire to identify with Mordor, as some commentators seem to suggest, and the Cold War parallels shouldn’t be stretched beyond their limits. Like The Lord of the Rings, The Last Ringbearer was not written as a straightforward allegory. Ultimately, it is a meditation on the nature of history written by the victors, and how it feels to be on the other side.

The question that drove Yeskov’s book is: what if Tolkien’s trilogy really were a historical chronicle? “One has to note that the public’s knowledge of these events is mostly derived from the adapted Western epos, The Lord of the Rings,” Yeskov’s narrator reminds us. It would make sense to wonder if the account is an exaggerated, romantic, simplified tale.

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That Yeskov’s retelling gives us some insight into Putin’s perspective on international relations is incidental rather than intentional. But it is nonetheless an important insight. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the fears and desires that drove it, and the justifications claimed by the Russian side, all bear the hallmarks of an intergenerational conflict as much as a national one. The Russian attempt to portray the war in Ukraine as a war with the US and Nato — a war defending the memory of the Soviet victory in Second World War — is an attempt, by a Soviet baby boomer, to avenge the defeat of the Cold War.

“After all, that’s what memoirs are for: to let veterans recast their losses as victories after the fact,” Yeskov’s narrator pointedly tells us at the end of The Last Ringbearer. In a sense, this is Putin’s ultimate goal in Ukraine: to recast the confrontation of East and West as a victory for the East, not the West. For Mordor to persist as its own civilisation, free of elven values. For most Ukrainians, Tolkien’s original provides a preferable framework. It’s not yet clear which history will turn out to be that of the victors.