The rise of Nazism and its aftermath led to a wave of Central European intellectuals, many of them Jewish, seeking escape abroad during the 1930s and 1940s due to persecution at home. It has been claimed that nearly 70 composers came to the UK to escape Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945, though many of them subsequently moved on elsewhere. [1] This list details those composers, performers, publishers and musicologists who ended up living and working in Britain, where they had a significant and lasting influence on musical culture and development - though often at considerable personal and professional cost, with much of their legacies lost. [2]
Primarily composers
Other composers stayed for a short time in Britain before moving on elsewhere. They included Hanns Eisler, Ernst Krenek, Karol Rathaus, Kurt Roger, Ernst Toch and Kurt Weill [5]
Primarily conductors, performers, teachers
Pianist Artur Schnabel and cellists Fritz Ball and Emanuel Feuermann stayed for a short time in Britain before moving on [5]
Primarily critics or musicologists
Primarily publishers
Karl Amadeus Hartmann was a German composer. A major figure of the musical life of post-war Germany, he has been described as the greatest German symphonist of the 20th century.
Heinrich Wilhelm "Heinz" Rühmann was a German film actor who appeared in over 100 films between 1926 and 1993. He is one of the most famous and popular German actors of the 20th century, and is considered a German film legend. Rühmann is best known for playing the part of a comic ordinary citizen in film comedies such as Three from the Filling Station and The Punch Bowl. During his later years, he was also a respected character actor in films such as The Captain from Köpenick and It Happened in Broad Daylight. His only English-speaking movie was the 1965 Ship of Fools.
Leopold Spinner was an Austrian-born, British-domiciled composer and editor.
Ernst Hermann Ludimar Meyer was a German composer and musicologist, noted for his expertise on seventeenth-century English chamber music.
Siegfried Carl Alban Rumann, billed as Sig Ruman and Sig Rumann, was a German-American character actor known for his portrayals of pompous and often stereotypically Teutonic officials or villains in more than 100 films.
Paul Abraham was a Jewish-Hungarian composer of operettas, who scored major successes in the German-speaking world. His specialty – and own innovation – was the insertion of jazz interludes into operettas.
Nicholas "Slug" Brodszky was a composer of popular songs for the theatre and for films.
Józef Żmigrod, better known by his stage name Allan Gray, was a Polish composer active in the UK film industry from the late 1930s until the mid 1950s.
Fritz F. Billig (1902–1986) was a Viennese philatelist and stamp dealer who fled to the United States after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and continued his career from Jamaica, New York. There he published a successful and long-running series of philatelic handbooks that are still regularly referred to by philatelists today.
German Exilliteratur is the name for works of German literature written in the German diaspora by refugee authors who fled from Nazi Germany, Nazi Austria, and the occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. These dissident writers, poets and artists, many of whom were of Jewish ancestry or held anti-Nazi beliefs, fled into exile in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany and after Nazi Germany annexed Austria by the Anschluss in 1938, abolished the freedom of press, and started to prosecute authors and ban works.
Hans-Otto Borgmann was a German film music composer during the Third Reich.
Hans May was an Austrian-born composer who went into exile in Britain in 1936 after the Nazis came to power in his homeland, being of Jewish descent.
Operetta films are a genre of musical films associated with, but not exclusive to, German language cinema. The genre began in the late 1920s, but its roots stretch back into the tradition of nineteenth century Viennese operettas.
Karol Rathaus was a German-Austrian Jewish composer who immigrated to the United States via Berlin, Paris, and London, escaping the rise of Nazism in Germany.
Alois Melichar was an Austrian composer, conductor, arranger, and music critic. He was a student of Joseph Marx at the Vienna Academy of Music, then of Franz Schreker at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, but later became increasingly culturally conservative.
Hans Wilhelm was a German screenwriter. Wilhelm was of Jewish heritage, and was forced to emigrate following the Nazi takeover in 1933. After going into exile he worked in a variety of countries including Britain, France, and Turkey before eventually settling in the United States. He later returned to work in West Germany following the Second World War.
The Johannes Brahms Medal of Hamburg is a music award established in 1928, named after the composer Johannes Brahms who was born in Hamburg.