Are we – the so-called “west” – no more than the baby Germany threw out with the bathwater? Any history of the industrialised world’s culture – scientific, technical, literary, military, philosophical, global-entertainment – has to accept the multiple creative impact of German emigration over the two previous centuries. But its best known and most spectacular source has been forced emigration, as David Blackbourn confirms. The whole world, not only America and Britain, was fertilised by the torrent of intellectual brilliance that fled Germany and Austria in the 1930s. Less well known is the earlier outflow of refugee liberals and socialists,...