Creativity in captivity
DavidHerman welcome books that throw light on two contrasting experiences of internment during the Second World War
Internment in Britain in 1940: Life and Art Behind the Wire
Ines Newman with Charmian Brinson and Rachel Dickson
Vallentine Mitchell, £18.99
In June 2016, the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum acquired a portrait at an auction; a striking picture of a white-haired man with piercing blue eyes, painted on newspaper. The curators at the Ben Uri recognised it as one of a series of portraits of refugees who had been interned during the panic that followed the fall of France 80 years ago.
The artist was an Austrian refugee called Hugo Dachinger, who fled to Britain after the Anschluss. He was one of nearly 30,000 German-speaking refugees interned here, ending up at Huyton Camp near Liverpool, along with other leading refugee artists including Martin Bloch, Alfred Lomnitz and Ludwig Meidner. But who was the man in the painting?
In 2018, Ines Newman recognised a portrait — that portrait — being shown on her local television news. It was of her grandfather, Wilhelm Hollitscher, also an Austrian refugee. She had never met him. He died in exile in 1943 and she didn’t come to Britain until 1949. Before that, she lived in Egypt with her refugee parents, Hans Oppenheimer and his wife Lisbeth (née Hollitscher), Wilhelm’s daughter, and her brother and sisters, including the Labour politician, Dame Margaret Hodge (née Oppenheimer).
Newman met the Ben Uri curators and the mystery of the man in the portrait was solved. Internment in Britain tells the story of the painter, Hugo Dachinger and the sitter, Wilhelm Hollitscher — how they met at Huyton and became good friends — as well as the larger story of internment. It is made up of three essays. The first, by Charmian Brinson, one of the leading authorities on German and Austrian exiles between 1933 and 1945, is about the internment of so-called “aliens” in Britain during the Second World War.
The second essay, by Rachel Dickson from the Ben Uri, is about the two men and the painting and some of the other refugee artists who were interned. The third, by Ines Newman herself, tells the story of the grandfather she never knew, and his Jewish background in Vienna. Finally, the book ends with Hollitscher’s diary describing his internment at Huyton from June 25 to September 1.
Beautifully illustrated with photographs and ten colour reproductions of paintings by Dachinger, the book is a fascinating mix of the personal and the scholarly. Dickson and Brinson are leading experts in their field and Newman’s account and the diary bring the story of the man in the painting to life. It is a compelling story, superbly told.