A pervasive distrust also prevented many from continuing previous professions. The local branch of the British Medical Association insisted that, from 1940, no further refugee doctors should be registered. The New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) was reluctant to accept recently arrived continental architects.

Writing a reference for Plischke in 1948, Timaru architect Percy Watts Rule said, “With his impressive list of qualifications, it would appear to me to be as absurd to ask him to sit an exam as to ask [Dame Nellie] Melba to undergo a voice test for admission to a village choir.”

Even the Ruapehu Ski Club weighed in, agreeing that “enemy aliens” should be allowed to join only with “extreme care”. Literary historian and linguist Paul Binswanger and his wife, writer Otti, faced suspicion and at times harassment. Philologist, musician and art collector Ernst Reizenstein was unable to find professional work – instead, he founded a continental bakery, now a chapter in the Vogel’s bread story.

Even New Zealand writers and artists attentive to changing arts practice in Europe were often perplexed by these new cultural emissaries. How to respond to Dutch immigrant artist Jan Michels’ bleak woodcuts depicting death camps and Jewish ghettoes? Or Schoon’s extraordinary photography, deep passion for Māori rock art and acerbic critiques of provincial Pākehā culture? “New Zealand is neither a country nor a culture,” he snarled, “it’s a branch of the Salvation Army.”

Or, later still, to the sophisticated, absurdist “visual ephemera” of Tom Kreisler, born in Argentina to Austrian-Jewish refugee parents? Although Kreisler’s reputation has grown since his death in 2002, says Bell, during his life in New Zealand, “most of the public was not ready for Kreisler’s work, and didn’t know what to make of it”.

In the 1930s, too, many New Zealand artists and writers were trying to shake off the weighty legacy of European culture, applying their skills instead to the development of a distinctly New Zealand identity. As poet ARD Fairburn wrote in 1932, “New Zealanders had no right to be monkeying about with European culture.” Such overt nationalism was anathema to those fleeing Hitler’s Europe.

“Lonely exile”

Some of the new arrivals acculturated quickly, but others lived out their lives in New Zealand “like people waiting to leave the next day”. In a letter from Auckland in 1947, included in an insightful new book of translations by Nelson Wattie, Wolfskehl described his years of “lonely exile”: “There are as many flowers as one could wish for too, most of them the familiar ones from Europe. But all in all and in spite of all that: everything is different, completely different, and the feeling of being in a foreign land has never left me for as much as a day throughout these 10 years.”

Others, including Popper, Schwimmer, Hayman and Plischke, left New Zealand for new jobs or more receptive cultures. As did those New Zealand-born writers and artists who felt alienated in their own country. Bell includes in his list of “virtual strangers” Hokitika-born James Boswell, an artist, draughtsman and “astute and nuanced thinker”; and “bohemian roustabout” artist and photographer Douglas Glass. Both forged remarkable careers in England and the Continent; both disappeared from our art-history canon.

But regardless of whether they left or lived out their lives here, their legacy remains in their work. The remarkable nature photography of Sharell, who came to New Zealand with his wife, Lily, as a refugee from Austria in 1939, populated the School Journal and classic nature texts The Tuatara, Lizards and Frogs of New Zealand (1966) and New Zealand Insects and Their Story (1971).

The bronze statues of Tangaroa in Tauranga and Young Nick in Gisborne are testimony to the work of Frank Szirmay, who fled the Warsaw Pact invasion of Hungary with his family in 1956. The hand of his stepdaughter Marté Szirmay, a child refugee from Hungary, is still seen in the large abstract works Yantra for Mahana at Woollaston Estate Winery, near Nelson, and Smirnoff Sculpture in Newmarket, the first large abstract work commissioned in Auckland.

Our urban architecture similarly holds testaments to the modernist-informed aesthetic introduced by these mid-century arrivals. There’s Auckland’s apartment block at 44 Symonds St, designed by Vienna-born Newman; the Parnell Baths, designed by a team led by Auckland City Council chief architect Tibor Donnor, a forced émigré from Romania; Wellington’s Adelphi apartment block on The Terrace (Ost); the modernist 1ZB Radio Studio in Auckland (Porsolt); and a number of hydroelectric power stations designed by German architect, engineer, town planner and environmentalist Einhorn.

Alongside a number of private houses and apartment blocks, these buildings stand as evidence of the extraordinary architectural vision arriving on these shores in the wake of World War II. Finding initial reluctance by the NZIA, many found work as draughtsmen in state housing and institutional projects, including Kulka, who played an important role in designing Government state houses (as well as the house of émigré and prolific photographer Marti Friedlander) and Max Rosenfeld, author of the hugely popular book The New Zealand House.

Fletcher Construction also employed a number of émigrés, including Georg Haydn, a Jewish refugee from Hungary, founding partner of Haydn & Rollett Construction.

Influential teachers

For many young artists, these European immigrants provided patronage, guidance and stimulation. Ost’s lectures on European modernism inspired a young Gordon Walters; artist Mervyn Williams was enthused by Viennese musician and intellectual Ernst Specht; and Colin McCahon was influenced by Hungarian-Jewish refugee artist Desiderius Orban in Australia and Hayman in New Zealand.

Rudi Gopas, the influential teacher at the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts, was a primary catalyst for neo-expressionism in New Zealand, galvanising a generation of young artists, including Fomison, Philip Clairmont, Allen Maddox and Philippa Blair.

Gopas entered New Zealand as a Lithuanian displaced person in 1949, but was, in fact, an ethnic German, surname Hopp, who served in the German Army during World War II. Had this been known, he would never have been allowed into this country.

Descendants of this cohort of “Aliens”, or those who came to New Zealand as small children, continue to make their mark on New Zealand arts and writing. Bell lists director/actor Danny Mulheron, film-maker Vincent Ward, cinematographer Michael Seresin, curator Aaron Kreisler, artists Saskia Leek and Ronnie van Hout and Mr Lee Grant (born Bogdan Kominowski in a German concentration camp in 1945), among others.

Strangers Arrive is a timely text. As we encounter the greatest refugee outflow the world has ever experienced, we can learn much from the influx of mid-20th century refugees and émigrés, says Bell. “What is strikingly clear now,” he writes, “is how much the host countries – the US, Great Britain, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand, for instance – gained; how much their cultural and intellectual capital was enhanced.”

STRANGERS ARRIVE: émigrés and the Arts in New Zealand 1930-1980, by Leonard Bell (AUP, $75)

POETRY AND EXILE: LETTERS FROM NEW ZEALAND 1938-1948, by Karl Wolfskehl, translated by Nelson Wattie (Cold Hub Press, $45)

This article was first published in the November 25, 2017 issue of the New Zealand Listener.