None of us had the faintest idea where we were going [but] during 1938–39 . . . thetown [Christchurch] was made strangely interesting for anyone like myself, [withthe] scattered arrival of ‘the refugees’. All at once there were people among us
who were actually from Vienna, or Chemnitz, or Berlin . . . who knew the work of
Schoenberg and Gropius.
– Anthony Alpers, 1985

From the 1930s through the 1950s, a substantial number of forced migrants – refugees
from Nazism, displaced people after World War II and escapees from Communist
countries – arrived in New Zealand from Europe. Among them were an extraordinarygroup of artists and writers, photographers and architects whose European modernismradically reshaped the arts in this country.
In words and pictures, Strangers Arrive tells their story. Ranging across the arts
from photographer Irene Koppel to art dealer Kees Hos, architect Imric Porsolt towriter Antigone Kefala, Leonard Bell takes us inside New Zealand’s bookstores andcoffeehouses, studios and galleries to introduce us to a remarkable body of artistic workand to ask key questions. How were migrants received by New Zealanders? How did
displacement and settlement in New Zealand transform their work? How did the arrivalof European modernists intersect with the burgeoning nationalist movement in the arts
in New Zealand?
Strangers Arrive introduces us to a talented group of ‘aliens’ who were critical catalysts
for change in New Zealand culture.

LEONARD BELL is associate professor of art history at the University of Auckland.
His writings on cross-cultural interactions and representations and the work of travelling,
migrant and refugee artists and photographers have been published in New Zealand,
Britain, the United States, Australia, Germany and the Czech Republic. He is author ofMarti Friedlander (Auckland University Press, 2009), Colonial Constructs: European
Images of Maori 1840–1914 (AUP, 1992) and In Transit: Questions of Home and Belonging in
New Zealand Art (2007). He is co-editor of Jewish Lives in New Zealand (2012).

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements
1. Alien Registrations
2. Taking pictures
3. New visions
4. Words
5. Architectural Episodes
6. Virtual Strangers
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index

CHAPTER ONE

Alien Registration

None of us had the faintest idea where we were going [but] during
1938–39 . . . the town [Christchurch] was made strangely interesting foranyone like myself, [with the] scattered arrival of ‘the refugees’. All at
once there were people among us who were actually from Vienna,
or Chemnitz, or Berlin . . . who knew the work of Schoenberg and
Gropius.
— Antony Alpers (1985)

OPPOSITE Frederick Ost,
A Stranger Arrives, 1944,
pen and ink on paper,
285 x 210 mm.

Tikis: Impressions in black and white was published in Wellington in 1946. Its author, Frederick
Ost (1905–85), a Prague-trained polymath, and his wife, Greta Ostova, a professional cellist,
had landed in New Zealand via Poland and England as refugees from Nazism in 1940.1
Tikis reproduced seven of Ost’s large black pen-and-ink drawings. One is titled A Stranger
Arrives (1944). There are several intersecting pictures within the composition, at the centreof which is a statuesque tiki figure; a small manikin sits at its base. Otherwise we see aninternally framed harbourscape (recognisably Wellington, the site of arrival), parts of otherpictures (abstract, constructivist and cubist), a guitar, bits of a vase, and other objects,
such as a suitcase labelled New York, Praha (Prague), Lisbon, Paris. They signal where thestranger came from. The various parts abut one another obliquely; their borders indistinct or
broken. They make up an assemblage of spatial dislocations; an image marked by fractures.
A Stranger Arrives stands as a visual metaphor of the experiences, travel and travail of ‘aliens’,
as refugees from Nazism and people from non–English-speaking countries were officiallyclassified in New Zealand. Ost’s picture also exemplifies how displacement produces new
configurations.
The Palestinian-American academic Edward Said claimed that ‘[m]odern Westernculture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés and refugees’.2 Creative ‘aliens’ in the
mid-twentieth century contributed to cultural and social developments in Britain andAmerica out of all proportion to their numbers.3 Strangers Arrive explores the cultural impactof forced migrants in New Zealand – those refugees from Nazism and the threat of war

1

who arrived in the 1930s, and the survivors and displaced people (DPs) who arrived afterWorld War II.
What impacts did these ‘strangers’ have on New Zealand’s culture and society?
How prominent were they as agents of change? Which of their ideas and practices were
influential, which were not, and why? How were the ‘aliens’ received by the locals? Whatroles did they play in the far-reaching cultural transformations and artistic developmentsthat occurred in New Zealand from the 1940s to the 1970s and beyond?
Even in a small country a comprehensive coverage of refugee impacts
in all spheres of activity would require
several volumes. Strangers Arrive is partial.
It focuses mainly, but not exclusively,on the visual arts and on writing aboutvisual culture: photography, painting,sculpture, graphic art, crafts, architecture
and planning. I focus on some key characters: photographers Frank Hofmann,
Irene Koppel and Richard Sharell; artists
Ost, Patrick Hayman, Jan Michels andKees Hos; Continental film distributor andtheatrical impresario Natan Scheinwald;
arts writers Imric Porsolt and Gerda
Eichbaum (later Bell); architects Helmut
Einhorn, Henry Kulka, Frederick Newman(Neumann), Tibor Donner, Porsolt and
Vladimir Čačala. Others, more difficult toplace, have important roles, too: town planner and writer Gerhard Rosenberg; print collector
and advocate Walter Auburn; artist and teacher Rudi Gopas; writer Antigone Kefala; photographers Bettina (Lily Inge Byttiner), Maja Blumenfeld and Franz Barta; craftsmen anddesigners Edzer (Bob) Roukema and Felix Schwimmer; architect Ernst Gerson; bookseller
and writer Robert Goodman; collector and musician Ernst Specht. Probably the best-known
creative ‘aliens’ who were active in New Zealand in the mid-twentieth century are artist,
craftsman and polemicist Theo Schoon, architect and planner Ernst Plischke and poet Karl
Wolfskehl. Because they have now been written about extensively it would be redundant
to foreground them; nevertheless, they make periodic appearances.
The work and careers of these individuals exemplify not just the impacts of émigrés
and the problems they faced, but also the tensions and complexities of their encounterswith locals. A few of these ‘aliens’ are well known, even if little written about, but most are
relatively obscure. Some might be regarded as minor. Yet close scrutiny shows that they
played key roles in cultural change: as seminal triggers, as innovators in particular fields,
or as inspirational figures.

k2

Unknown photographer,Frederick Ost andGreta Ostova, 1950.

LEFT Photograph ofErnst Plischke, New
Zealand Listener,
5 January 1945.

RIGHT Bettina (Lily Inge
Byttiner), Karl Wolfskehl
writing at his desk,c. 1945.

After World War I and the Russian Revolution the poet Osip Mandelstam observed, ‘In ourday Europeans have been hurled out of their biographies, likes balls from the pockets ofbilliard tables.’4 With the Nazi accession to power in 1933, the Anschluss in Austria and Munich
Settlement in 1938, and then the invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the numbers ofpeople fleeing their countries became a flood.
About 1100 refugees f rom the Nazis reached New Zealand before and during WorldWar II.5 They were predominantly Jewish, or of Jewish descent, and had been forced out ofEurope – from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia mainly, but also from Hungary, Poland
and the Netherlands. After the war and into the 1950s several thousand more survivors ofNazism, relatives of earlier refugees, and DPs from Central and Eastern Europe and theBaltic States fleeing communist totalitarianism landed up in New Zealand.6 New Zealandgovernments in the 1950s also supported immigration from the Netherlands. Many of those
Dutch migrants were getting as far away as possible from the trauma and devastations of
the war and they, too, were registered as ‘aliens’.7
The arrival of refugees, DPs and forced migrants, mostly from Continental Europe,changed the visual arts in New Zealand in two primary ways. The new arrivals transmitted
European modernist and metropolitan ideas and practices, offering alternatives to the traditional Anglo-oriented visual arts and prevalent preoccupation with national identity. They
also played crucial roles in introducing and enhancing the standing of traditional European
cultural practices. Refugees and DPs’ cultural baggage included a strong belief in the essential social roles of the arts and the need to balance the traditional and the modern. They
were either ahead of dominant local thinking or stimulated nascent cultural developments.
‘Aliens’ were critical catalysts for change and innovation in New Zealand culture. Fred
Turnovsky, a refugee from Czechoslovakia, a major benefactor of the arts and long-timeQueen Elizabeth II Arts Council member, succinctly characterised the Central European
refugees from multilingual and multi-ethnic societies as ‘hybrids’, the ‘yeast that makes asociety interesting’.8

3

Frank Hofmann, Caducity, 1955.

CHAPTER TWO

Taking Pictures

Just as one particular sound or smell can stand, in our minds, as a whole
episode in our lives, so one pictorial detail can serve to represent acomplex experience.
—Frank Hofmann, Photographics New Zealand (1961)

Georg Simmel argued that ‘strangers’ who come to a society from elsewhere often favour the‘intermediary trades’, such as photography.1 Enhanced by the ease with which the medium
crossed geographical and cultural boundaries, camera work attracted many émigrés andrefugees.2 If you were German-speaking with Central European qualifications in 1930s–40s
New Zealand, it was much easier to set yourself up as a photographer than as a lawyer or
doctor. Refugees who either were professional photographers in Europe or became soin New Zealand include Frank Hofmann, Lily Inge Byttiner, Maja Blumenfeld, Hans andNina (Annemarie) Golding, Irene Koppel, Richard Sharell, Theo Schoon, Carlotta Munz,
Marianne Haiselden (née Opel), Hannah Easterbrook-Smith (née Henkel) and Franz Barta.3
Hofmann, Koppel and Sharell, in particular, were key figures in the transmission of ideas
and practices from Continental European ‘New Photography’ into New Zealand during
a period when most photography here was traditional or pictorialist. Photo-historian Bill
Main, for example, called Sharell a ‘pioneering photographer . . . in this country, who brought
European approaches to photography’ that were otherwise unknown among most local
practitioners.4 Main added that his work (and this applies to Hofmann’s and Koppel’s also)‘will serve to remind us how insular we were in the period between the two World Wars,
when the “Modern Movement” in photography held sway’: ‘Professional portrait photographers and photo-journalists’ here, in contrast, ‘were ‘hogtied to tradition’, resistantto new methods.5 Luminaries of New Photography, such as László Moholy-Nagy, André
Kertész, Herbert Bayer, Man Ray, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Karl Blossfeldt and Werner Mantz
meant nothing in New Zealand.6 Interwar New Photography embraced several kinds ofinnovative work, notably ‘street’ photography and constructivist formalism. Advances incamera technology, especially the invention in Germany of the small Leica, enabled candid,25

rapid, informal, socially realistic street photography, which revolutionised photojournalism
and portraiture in Central Europe from the mid-1920s, and in Britain and the USA fromthe 1930s. Constructivist formalism involved explorations of the medium’s ‘language’:
structure, striking graphic design, pattern, the play of light and shadow, unusual angles.7
Refugee photographers, informed by New Photography, had a profound impact, especiallyon photojournalism, architectural photography, portraiture and art photography, indeed
the very recognition that art could be made with a camera.
In late 1936, Alfred Eisenstadt, a German-Jewish photojournalist and founding photographer for Life magazine, wrote to Irmgard Koppel (1911–2004) in London.8 He invited
her to send genre pictures and newsworthy images to his Pix Publishing Inc., the New York
photo agency that he and two other refugees, Leon Daniel and Cecile Kutschuk, had started.
Eisenstadt spelt out terms of payment and assumed that Koppel’s work met his publishingstandards on the basis of reports from London.9
Koppel did not send any photographs to Eisenstadt, since she may well have just left for
New Zealand. Irmgard became Irene in Wellington, and her surname changed (except forher photography) after marriage to local journalist Leslie Verry in 1943. Koppel was an active
professional photographer from 1937 until the early 1960s. Her portraiture, architectural
photographs and photo-journalism appeared in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers. From the mid-1950s, with changing family circumstances, Koppel restricted her work
to portraiture. Soon her photographs were forgotten – surprisingly, given their high quality.

26

Irmgard Koppel (Irene
Koppel), glassware,c. 1932.

LEFT Irene Koppel,

Naples, 1935.

RIGHT Irene Koppel,
Otto Fein (London),1934.

Koppel, her father a doctor and mother a painter, had trained in the studios of two
professional women photographers in Hamburg.10 State-sponsored anti-Semitism forced
her emigration to Britain in 1934, sponsored by the Quakers, with a visa for domestic service.
Initially she worked for the Warburg Institute, the prestigious art-historical research centre
founded by Aby Warburg, which had shifted from Hamburg to London in 1933 along withsix of its personnel and library.11 There she photographed book-plates and mediaeval manuscripts. This was part of the project of another refugee, Walter Gernsheim (brother of thecelebrated photographer, historian and collector of photographs, Helmut) to document
manuscripts and prints in public collections. What became the Gernsheim PhotographicalCorpus of Drawings was a seminal tool for art-historical research.12
At the Warburg Institute, Koppel and her mother, Katarina, knew Fritz Saxl, the director,
and Gertrud Bing, the assistant director. Bing advised Irmgard about job possibilities in New
Zealand. Interestingly, Bing herself was strongly attracted to the idea of a New Zealand‘as far away as possible’.13 The institute incorporated photographs into its work much morecomprehensively than did other academic institutions. Consequently, photographs were a
primary means of connecting scholars, disseminating research findings, enhancing fine arts
appreciation generally, and educating students. Koppel played a small part in this importantdevelopment. She trained further with Otto Fein, the institute’s photographer and bookbinder. Koppel’s picture of Fein in extreme close-up, face cropped, viewpoint oblique, is aclassic Central European New Photography portrait. The works of modernists such as Man

27

Ray, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull and, especially, Lucia Moholy come to mind, while
Koppel’s work overall manifests close knowledge of several kinds of innovative modernist
work.14
László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), the Bauhaus multidisciplinary artist and theorist of
New Vision (see Chapter 3), observed that ‘[t]he Photographer can scarcely find a more
fascinating task than that of providing a pictorial record of modern city life’.15 Many leading
photojournalists in London were Central and Eastern European refugees from Nazism –Kurt Hübschmann (later Hutton), Hans Baumann (later Felix H. Man), Wolfgang Suschitzky,
Cyril Arapoff, Bill Brandt, to name a few. Moholy-Nagy also worked in this mode in London– for instance, in his Street Markets of London (1936). Picture Post, the most important British
pictorial periodical of its day, was founded in 1938 by Stefan Lorant, the ‘godfather’ of photojournalism, and yet another refugee from Nazism. He had previously started the Weekly
Illustrated in London in 1934.16
Imgard Koppel’s work exemplified street photography. Her photo-narratives of street
and park life, in London’s Caledonian Market, Trafalgar Square and Hampstead Heath,show all sorts of people in these places in the manner of Weimar
Republic pictorial journalism. From a 1935 trip to Italy, her photographs of buildings, squares and streets, as well as close-ups ofordinary people in streets, markets and harboursides in Naples,
Capri and Sicily, exemplify New Photography. Her work was also
informed by constructivist formalism. That her photographs weremodern was often signalled by the very choice of objects – as inher photographs of Bauhaus-like glassware, in which simple, light,
modernist forms, rather like laboratory glass, are set, or float,
against a dark ground.
Koppel brought the practice of street photography to New
Zealand. She landed in Wellington in January 1937, her motherfollowing in 1938. Given New Zealand’s restrictive refugee policy,
she was fortunate that Lawrence Nathan f rom Auckland’s
well-known Jewish family and business sponsored her, on Gertrud
Bing’s recommendation.17 Koppel photographed the outstanding
Nathan collection of Chinese ceramics. Hers is the sole surviving
documentation of the collection, which was later dispersed, with
only one piece remaining in New Zealand.18 Otherwise Koppel
worked initially at Kodak, then with Spencer Digby, who ran theleading commercial studio in Wellington. She remained there
until late 1939, producing studio portraits and assignment workfor periodicals such as Freelance, Weekly News, NZ Truth, Evening
Post and Sports Post. Much of her work was credited to Digby (shecalled him a hard taskmaster).19 That rankled, and many of her later photographs weremarked ‘Please acknowledge’. She shifted to a Mr Blake’s studio, where she did everything, before setting up her own studio at 351A The Terrace in 1941. While there wereother professional women photographers – Amy Harper in Auckland, Thelma Kent in
Christchurch and Eileen Deste in Wellington, for instance – they were generally secondary

28

Irene Koppel,
Caledonian Market,
London, c. 1935.

TOP Irene Koppel,
Sunbather (Italy), 1935.
ABOVE Irene Koppel,
Members of theOrder of St John
demonstrating first aid,
1939–45.

players in a male-dominated profession.
Setting up her own studio made Koppel
unusual in New Zealand. By contrast,
in pre-Nazi Germany and Austria there
were numerous independent womenphotographers; this was a measure of
the social mobility photographic work
enabled, especially when coupled withthe strong feminist currents that advanced
professional career opportunities for
women in the Weimar Republic and‘Red Vienna’ (the city under Socialist
government during 1920–34).20
For her periodical assignment work
Koppel photographed wedding groups,
people at race meetings and government functions for the Social Page,
as well as newsworthy events and social
phenomena. The Karitane Hospital andits manufactory in Berhampore, evacuee
children, earthquake-damaged buildings
in Wellington and Masterton in 1942,
the Home Guard in training, and womenat work – operating trams, for example– were among her subjects. Koppel photographed parades and eminent visitors to
Wellington, such as US first lady Eleanor
Roosevelt and the English playwright,
actor and (as is now known) British intelligence operative Noël Coward, who shocked Wellington’s mayoress with his racy anecdotes.
Koppel shot Coward, close to the front plane, from below, so that he stands, a tad imperious,
holding forth above us. Whether acting or himself, whoever that was, is impossible to know.
Otherwise Koppel’s bread-and-butter work lay in wedding photographs and portraits, suchas her reverberant image of a woman caught at the races. She looks directly back at us,
her slight smile a touch enigmatic, as if she has a secret. The names of many fellow refugees
and their children, members of Wellington’s Jewish community and American servicemenfeature in her records.21 She pictures Maurice Gottlieb, the prominent Zionist advocate andhelper of refugees, in an intimate and tender moment with his child; a key to his nature.
An astute portraitist, Koppel got a vivid sense of an individual’s being or predicament.
One of the first professionals in New Zealand equipped with a Leica, she was at the forefront of developments in photojournalism, in particular the creation of photo essays madeup of spreads of multiple images, with short captions, over a page or two of the magazine,
from the late 1930s into the war years. Besides Digby’s, her work appeared most frequently
in the Freelance and Weekly News until 1945. Not much photo essay work was practised here

29

OPPOSITE Irene Koppel produced several photo essays for the New Zealand Free Lance of women

working in formerly men’s jobs such as tram drivers and postmen during the war, 1942.
TOP LEFT Irene Koppel, Noël Coward in Wellington, 1941.

TOP RIGHT Irene Koppel, Marcus Gottlieb, Wellington, 1940. Gottlieb, a leader of the New Zealand

Zionist Federation in Wellington, was notable for assisting refugees from Nazism.
ABOVE LEFT Irene Koppel, Woman at races, Trentham, c. 1942.
ABOVE RIGHT Irene Koppel, Shop-window, Wellington, c. 1941.

$75.00
265 x 215 mm, 320pp, hardback
ISBN: 9781869408732
Published: November 2017