Nikolaus Pevsner’s reputation rests chiefly upon his passion for English architecture and upon the thirty-two (he co-authored a further ten) guides to England’s monuments that are today known simply by his name. It’s possible to imagine that, with such enthusiasm, Pevsner might have been among the few German Jews who were able to accommodate themselves to an enforced change of nationality. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The young Pevsner was not in love with Britain. On the contrary, despite having an Anglophile mother, he positively disliked England.
Born in 1902, Pevsner grew up in Leipzig’s elegant Music Quarter, where families such as his own lived in handsome apartment blocks (the Pevsner flat comprised well over twenty rooms). Visiting his mother’s parents in West Hampstead as a small boy, Nikolaus was oppressed by the confining spaces of their modest home in Sumatra Road. He left London with an enduring and horrific memory of an outing during which the family became trapped inside the lift – more like a mineshaft – that plunges deep into the earth at Hampstead tube station. Later in life, Pevsner showed scant interest either in talking about his late grandfather, a Talmudic scholar who spent most of his days at the British Museum, or – with the exception of an occasional brisk visit to a Victorian church – in visiting north London.
Pevsner’s detachment from his Jewish grandparents in England becomes more understandable when seen in the light of his later career. Aged nineteen in 1921, he found that the academic quota system restricted the number of Jews in Germany who were allowed to hold academic posts. Pevsner’s solution was a simple one: he converted to Lutheranism. Two years later, he married – taking a step up the social ladder – Lola Kurlbaum, the daughter of a charming, cultured, eminent Leipzig lawyer. (It did not, at the time, seem of any significance that the Lutheran Alfred Kurlbaum had married a Jew, since Lola had followed her father’s faith.) The devotion to scholarship that Pevsner would show throughout his life was already apparent from the fact that his honeymoon suitcase was neatly packed, not with clothes, but with art books.
An encounter with English art in 1926, when Pevsner was working as an intern at the Dresden Art Gallery during the city’s celebrated international show, did nothing to increase an opinionated and highly strung young man’s enthusiasm for his future homeland. Always intrigued by the idea of communal work, Pevsner was more excited by the brilliant palettes of the Dresden-based pre-war group Die Brücke (Ernst Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein) and their Bavarian contemporaries of Der Blaue Reiter (Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky) than by the muted tints of the English contributions. Duncan Grant’s paintings were conceded to be almost French in their colouring (which Pevsner intended as a compliment); the works of Gwen John and Stanley Spencer, when placed alongside the French and German entries, were dismissed as ‘no more than middling fare’. The best, in fact, that Nikolaus Pevsner could say about the English works on show at Dresden was that they were measured and correct.1
For a man whose name has become part of English art history, this was an unpromising start. The change began in 1929, when the tall, fair-haired and fiercely scholarly 27-year-old was given the post at Göttingen University of Privatdozent, an unsalaried tutor who was paid directly by his pupils.
Pevsner was not immediately thrilled by the prospect of teaching at a provincial university whose reputation – in terms of its art history course – stood far below those of universities in Munich and Berlin. But his revered teacher and mentor, Wilhelm Pinder, had recommended the move and the posting proved unexpectedly congenial. John Ratcliff, a cheerful young Welshman who was studying art as a pupil on Pevsner’s course in 1932, sent home delighted accounts of Göttingen, a friendly, broad-streeted town lapped by wooded hills that reminded him of north Wales; Pevsner, too, soon reconciled himself to – and even came to love – a university at which his students adored him, while his colleagues all offered him their enthusiastic support.2
Göttingen’s links with England, which were unusually strong, dated back to the founding of the university by King George II, Elector of Hanover. George III had presented the university with some 300 of the artefacts brought home by James Cook from his voyages in the South Pacific. The college library, founded with the inauguration of the university, was also committed to emphasising Hanover’s connections with Britain. With such a history, it was not surprising that the university required Pevsner to teach, as part of his curriculum, a course on the art and architecture of England. It was a subject on which Pevsner felt woefully underinformed. ‘I was supposed to give every semester a one-hour-a-week lecture on some aspect of English art and architecture,’ he told an interviewer, ‘but then found I couldn’t really do it.’3
Pevsner was being too modest about his early achievements. In December 1929, delivering his first Göttingen lecture, he chose for his topic ‘Community Ideals in Nineteenth-Century Art’. According to the reports that appeared in Dresden’s newspapers, Pevsner’s hour-long talk caused a sensation, while offering plenty to gratify an Anglophile community.
Proposing to chart out a moral chain in art, Pevsner established a line that closely linked England to Germany. Beginning with the group of German-speaking Nazarene artists who had lived in Rome back in the time of Charles de Bunsen, Pevsner reminded his audience of how that influence had come to England and then travelled (via Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites) to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. From there, it was an easy step to demonstrate how Hermann Muthesius, while visiting England in the 1890s, had become a devotee of the great Arts and Crafts’ architect Norman Shaw. A German audience was not displeased to learn that – thanks to Muthesius – the chain of influence had finally returned to Germany, to flourish afresh under the leadership of Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus.
To such a loyal son as Nikolaus Pevsner, Germany was the country in which this moral chain of art had to complete its circle. Nevertheless, wishing to pursue the subject and investigate it more deeply, Pevsner realised that he would have to go back to that unloved island across the sea and look with his own reluctant eyes for examples that would bear out his thesis. (He had, until giving his lecture, relied upon the opinions of Gustav Waagen – Waagen was a contemporary of the Nazarene painters, and one who had spent time in England – and, a little more recently, upon the opinions expressed by Hermann Muthesius in his monumental pre-war work Das englische Haus.)
Pevsner’s visit to Britain, paid in 1930, was successful both in enhancing the young art historian’s knowledge and in inspiring his enduring fascination with the guilds of anonymous woodworkers and stonemasons who had ornamented the precious treasury of abbeys, minsters and parish churches that he discovered for himself on his first journey through England. The tour achieved little, however, in warming Pevsner’s feelings about a country that he would have been horrified to envisage as his future home. Writing to Lola, his long-suffering wife, he complained about England’s poor-quality spa towns (something in which Germany excelled), the disgusting food, the insufficient heating and the garrulous guides. (Visiting English country houses as part of his tour, Pevsner was unimpressed to find himself being conducted around by owners who seemed less interested in the historic detail of their homes than in the milk yield of their cows.)
The German visitor’s temper was not improved by the fact that he suspected the English of laughing at him. ‘What is it?’ Pevsner asked his wife. ‘The hat? The socks? The horn-rimmed glasses?’ Pevsner – as one of his best biographers, Stephen Games, observes – seems not to have grasped just how much entertainment might be provided by a lanky, binocular-carrying German academic taking copious notes on public buildings, while arrestingly garbed in knickerbockers and patent leather pumps. (Pevsner, characteristically, had been more concerned about packing the right books for his tour than the appropriate clothes.)4
The visit to England was, despite strongly felt reservations about the nation’s backward state, a success. Home again at Göttingen, where Pevsner began restructuring his courses to increase the time devoted to English art history, he persuaded an English-based colleague to visit Germany and lecture (while unwittingly fascinating the students by cloaking himself in an English don’s black gown) on medieval painting. Delighted by the success of his expanded courses, the heads of department praised Pevsner as one of the most gifted art historians of his generation. He must, they said, be granted a salaried position for what he had achieved. Göttingen, thanks to Nikolaus Pevsner, could now boast that its English art history course was the best in Prussia.
Pevsner’s downfall as a young man with a brilliant future in German academia owed a little to the fact that the number of candidates greatly exceeded the number of professorial posts availableat a limited number of art history departments. It owed far more to the rise of a radical politician for whom Pevsner himself entertained a high regard.
With hindsight, Pevsner’s confidence about his prospects in a Nazi-run Germany appears to have been breathtakingly naïve. Talking to Pallister Barkas, an English Quaker colleague at Göttingen, during the run-up to Hitler’s election as chancellor, Pevsner dismissed Mein Kampf as empty propaganda: ‘It’s not to be taken seriously.’ Pressed further about the Nazis, Pevsner praised them for helping to rebuild Germany’s self-confidence. As a Lutheran convert who admired church architecture and who kept a three-foot-high porcelain crucifix in his home, it never occurred to Pevsner that any of the unpleasant constraints beginning to be applied to Germany’s Jews could affect his own career. Even on 7 April 1933, the day when a new law was introduced to exclude ‘non-Aryans’ from employment by government-funded bodies (including universities and schools), Pevsner did not object. Admiring the Reich and loyal to the Fatherland, he believed himself to be entirely safe.5
Göttingen had been among the first towns to embrace Nazism; the new edict was immediately enforced. The Quaker Barkases were dismayed when one of their closest academic friends, a man who had fought for Germany in the war, lost his job. Pevsner, too, had forfeited the right to teach. And yet, allowing himself to be interviewed anonymously by Barkas’s English sister-in-law, Francesca Wilson, for her home-town paper (the Birmingham Post), Pevsner continued to defend the policies of the Nazi Party. ‘I want this movement to succeed,’ Pevsner told Wilson. He added, for good measure, that he still honoured Nazi ideals, respected the party’s projects for curing unemployment and believed that Hitler ‘has the courage and will to do what he says’.6
The Nazi policy, nevertheless, had thrown a massive spanner into a career that had been moving smoothly upwards. Being a Lutheran was of no use if Nazi officialdom could track down Jewish ancestry. The university, while valuing Pevsner, dared not take the risk of offering assistance; Lola’s father, while sympathetic, was stymied by the fact that he himself had a Jewish wife. The Barkases had suggested that they might be able to find a clever young art historian some work in England; Pevsner, having vainly applied to Oxford’s newly established Academic Assistance Council on 5 July 1933 for an offer of work ‘at any university in the world’, received instead a generous £250 stipend towards finding employment in England, the country that he so disliked.
Reluctantly, Pevsner took up the offer. In October, he travelled to England. By December, he was back at Göttingen, ready to make a last attempt at gaining himself a place in the Germany that he profoundly loved, working for a party that he continued to revere. Having written an article about the future of art in a Nazi-governed country, he signed the piece off with an Aryan pseudonym and sent it to a magazine closely linked to Hitler’s new regime. Pevsner must have hoped that, following publication, he could disclose his identity and be welcomed back into the halls of German scholarship. This was again naïve. Identifying the true author and fearful of compromising himself, the editor of Kunst der Nation declared Pevsner’s article to be too long, and sent it back.
A final door had closed.
Nikolaus Pevsner’s uneasiness about restarting his career in England was understandable at a time when the history of art was still regarded as a superfluous discipline. The fact that Pevsner favoured modernism at a time when even the calm orderliness of the late Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s designs seemed avant garde to British eyes did not improve the German academic’s chances of success.
Nevertheless, largely due to the kindly intervention of Pevsner’s Quaker friends in Birmingham, an eighteen-month research fellowship was arranged, complete with lodgings, at the city’s university. Pevsner, a man who detested cats, cigarettes and – above all – untidiness, was to be given accommodation at the cosy refugee-filled home of Francesca Wilson (a woman who cheerfully pleaded guilty to all three of Pevsner’s aversions).
Quiet, merry and completely unfazed by her new lodger’s protests about the manner in which she chose to live, Francesca Wilson provided the home – and the company, while Pevsner’s family were still out in Germany – that helped a lonely, awkward man to settle down and reconcile himself to making the best of his drab and wretchedly uncultured new homeland. The university fellowship, meanwhile, provided the new exile with the time to write his first and highly significant book, while mastering a language in which, thanks to his usual perseverance (as well as the lightness of his Saxon accent), Pevsner was soon able to pass himself off as a rather comically precise Englishman.
It’s a mark of Pevsner’s eventual and resolute determination to embrace his new homeland that Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) was written in English. Swiftly recognised as a formidable – but accessible – work of brilliant scholarship, the book made Pevsner’s reputation in England. British critics, gratified by the author’s homage to their country’s continuing influence on European designers, managed to overlook the fact that Pevsner, always true to his German roots, had chosen for his final architectural example a house that Walter Gropius had created in Germany before the First World War.
Pioneers marked the point at which its author – joined by his family in 1937 – was granted a unique position among England’s academic elite. It’s possible, had Pevsner not stubbornly continued to visit his beloved Germany right up to the outbreak of war, that he might even have escaped the humiliation of being interned as an alien. As it was, Pevsner spent three uncomfortable months in a camp near Liverpool. Released in 1940 and set to work on bomb clearance and road sweeping, he was appointed the first professor of art history at London’s Birkbeck College in 1942.
The transformation of Nikolaus Pevsner into a cornerstone of Britain’s cultural establishment continued, after the war, as steadily as the creation of one of those English churches with which his name remains most enduringly linked.7 His classic work An Outline of European Architecture was published in 1942. Naturalised four years later as a British citizen, Pevsner became Slade professor at Cambridge for a record period of six years, and was subsequently – it was a remarkable honour to bestow upon a foreigner – appointed Slade professor at Oxford. Best known for his passionate, idiosyncratic – and, in their comprehensive nature, firmly Germanic – guides to the monuments of England, this most German of patriots also became a founding member (and later chairman) of that most English of organisations: the Victorian Society.
Such a magnificent contribution to England’s awareness of her past might seem to be the noblest of the endeavours for which Nikolaus Pevsner was deservingly knighted in 1969. And yet, misguided though his commitment to Nazi Germany appears with hindsight to have been, perhaps it was still more valiant of Pevsner to continue, until the eve of war, to defend the very regime that had deprived him of his livelihood, his academic status and – greatly against his will – his homeland. With nothing to gain (Pevsner’s dreams of being appointed as an artistic mediator in the Nazi state were, as he must always have known, hopelessly unrealistic), his fidelity to the Reich and to the leader he sincerely admired seems both foolish and heroic. Pevsner’s perverse and wrong-headed loyalty does not disgrace him. He did love Germany. He did believe that Adolf Hitler, perceived by Pevsner as a last bulwark against chaos, was restoring Germany to greatness. He did, long after the time when self-interest could be produced as a justification for his behaviour or his defensive statements, continue to put the welfare of his own beloved homeland before himself.