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”.

It was home sickness, and there wasn’t a pill for that. I was already many miles from home and about to be ‘dropped off’ — as the phrase goes — at boarding school. Even today, nearly half a century on, that passage of road makes me feel physically ill.

Within the school gates, home sickness was generally regarded as a sign of weakness; a sickly condition that affected boys of a more delicate constitution. So, as a child, I learnt to hide it. It would upset my mother too much if she knew how much I missed my bedroom, my toys, my little comforts, my family. And it would mark me out as weedy and fragile. I think all the boys hid it one way or another. Better just get on and make the best of it. Man up!

My wife left her home, Israel, after the army, to go to university in the UK. And she stayed. She found a job, got married, had children, and made a life for herself a long way from her home. Like many immigrants, she learnt not to speak too much of homesickness. It was regarded by some as a sign of disloyalty to the place in which she chose to settle. “If you miss it so much, why don’t you go back?” Migrants are told to integrate, to put the old behind them. Get on and make the best of it. Homesickness is a condition that dare not speak its name.

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But it wasn’t always thus. Not that I made the connection back then, but the classical texts we were reading at school often articulated precisely the sort of longing that we were all being trained to supress. Odysseus’s ten-year journey back to Ithaca, Ovid’s poems from exile, they all carry a deep yearning for the familiar patterns of home. And the Bible itself, the core text of my pathologically Christian school, is saturated with the same desire. “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.” Such sentiments stayed with the Jewish people throughout nearly two thousand years of exile.

For the past two months, I have been living in Tel Aviv, learning a new language, learning new ways. And perhaps because of the evident joy and pride of so many here, living once again in their historic homeland, my own yearning for home has started to bubble up. Tea, bath, a proper bacon sandwich, irony, church spires, soft grass — the list is my own, but one that may not be wholly unfamiliar to those who have gone to live abroad. I love Israel. But I have started to miss my home.

So when and why did homesickness become a feeling that is now ever so slightly looked down upon, suspected, discredited? Consider the way in which the word “nostalgia” is used in current political debates around Brexit. Brexit is driven by nostalgia, argues Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, and “nostalgia serves no purpose.” Likewise the historian Max Hastings argues that Brexit is motivated by a “crazy nostalgia”. There are hundreds of examples like these. As Freddie Sayers puts it in his latest Post “Nostalgia has become one of the taboos of our political age.”

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Ok, the word nostalgia has developed a slightly different nuance to that of homesickness, but they are strongly connected — the word being a combination of the Greek word “nostos” meaning “homecoming”, and “algos” signifying suffering or grief. And the term nostalgia was coined in the late 17th century by the physician Johannes Hofer to describe a condition that was said to have particularly affected Swiss soldiers on manoeuvres abroad. As Krystine Batcho writes in her study of nostalgia for the American Psychological Association: “Much of the early interest in nostalgia was motivated by the concern for optimal performance of military resources during European conflicts.”

How, though, could a feeling that was so valued by ancient texts as something noble have come to be so delegitimised — and with Hofer, medicalised — at the advent of modernity.

Susan Matt, in her fascinating history, Homesickness: An American History, recounts the story of the journalist Katherine Lanpher, who in 2004 moved from Minnesota to New York City. Feeling homesick, she decided to cheer herself up with a manicure. Lanpher tells the Korean woman who is working on her nails how she is feeling. The manicurist, though herself far from home, is totally unsympathetic: “Don’t be big baby!” she responded.

Now you could read this as the nail bar woman challenging a wealthy white woman to check her privilege. Nonetheless, “Don’t be big baby!” has become the characteristic attitude of modern life to the feeling of homesickness. It developed, according to Matt, because homesickness was regarded as a threat to the well-being of those who travelled far from home, especially those who left home in search of work or in order to fight for their country.

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Homesickness was re-described as something backward looking. It didn’t cohere with the philosophy of rugged individualism characteristic of the pioneer and the forward-looking entrepreneur — it was un-American. Matt sees the rise of international corporations in the 20th century as largely responsible for the disparagement of homesickness, seeing it, as they did, as an obstacle to a mobile workforce. Homesickness indicated a lack of ambition, it was the very hallmark of a loser.

As Matt recounts, child psychologists began to tell parents that they should prepare their children for a life of mobility. The behaviourist psychologist John B Watson advised parents not to hug their children, as this would create emotional attachments that would be difficult to break when their child left home. Matt tells of one doctor who understood overly affectionate parents to be “America’s gravest menace” because they kept their sons from fighting the Communists. Homesickness was infantile dependence.

All of which illuminates something of what is behind the charge of ‘nostalgia’ so commonly levelled as an insult against Brexiters. Part of what I have against the Remain campaign is that it regards as inadmissible any sense of a yearning for lost home. It demands of Brexiters that they explain the advantage of leaving the EU, of the reclamation of national sovereignty, in exclusively economic terms.

Like the cod psychologists of the 20th century, they warn against attachments. In the borderless, globalised future they fondly imagine, home will be everywhere and nowhere. In order to keep up, people will need to be as fluid as capital. What they are saying to us is basically: “Don’t be big baby!” I remember this damaging line from my prep schools days. I didn’t like it then. And I don’t like it now.

Some months ago, UnHerd tasked its columnists with the invention of a new political party. I called my party Home. Perhaps only now, as I remind myself of the feelings I had on that miserable road to school, do I really begin to understand what that was all about. Homesickness is as legitimate a political instinct as any other.

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