Nikolaus Pevsner was born in
Leipzig,
Saxony, into a Russian-Jewish family, the son of Anna (née Perlmann) and her husband Hugo Pevsner. He attended
St. Thomas School, Leipzig, and went on to study at several universities, the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the
Humboldt University of Berlin and
Goethe University Frankfurt, before being awarded a
doctorate at
Leipzig University in 1924 for a thesis on the
Baroque architecture of Leipzig. In 1923, he married Carola ("Lola") Kurlbaum, the half-Jewish daughter of distinguished Leipzig lawyer Alfred Kurlbaum. He worked as an assistant keeper at the
Dresden Gallery between 1924 and 1928. He converted from
Judaism to
Lutheranism in young adulthood. During this period he became interested in establishing the supremacy of German modernist architecture after becoming aware of
Le Corbusier's
Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at the
Paris Exhibition of 1925. In 1928, he contributed the volume on
Italian baroque painting to the
Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft, a multi-volume series providing an overview of the history of European art. He taught at the
University of Göttingen between 1929 and 1933, offering a specialist course on
English art and
architecture.
Rise of Nazism Pevsner was fully Jewish on his mother and father's side. In spite of this, he was originally a German nationalist and described as "
more German than the Germans" to the extent that he supported, in the early days of the Nazi movement, "
Goebbels in his drive for 'pure' non-decadent German art". In 1933 he was reported as saying of the
Nazis: "I want this movement to succeed. There is no alternative but chaos... There are things worse than
Hitlerism." Pevsner's political leanings following Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 are clearly revealed in several extracts from his diaries and letters that Suzie Harries includes in her 2011 book
Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life. For example, the following observation is made by Pevsner on the boat to
Dover in October 1933: "The second-class is almost entirely occupied by non-
Aryans. Dreadful, dreadful – to think that's where I belong." Pevsner was removed from his teaching post at Göttingen after the Nazi regime enacted the
Civil Service Law in 1933. His first intention was to move to Italy, but after failing to find an academic post there he moved to England, settling in
Hampstead at
2, Wildwood Terrace, where poet
Geoffrey Grigson was his next-door neighbour. He was able to relocate his wife and children, but his parents delayed their departure largely due to his father Hugo's ill-health and business interests. Pevsner's first post in England was an 18-month research fellowship at the
University of Birmingham, found for him by friends in Birmingham and partly funded by the
Academic Assistance Council. A study of the role of the designer in the industrial process, the research produced a generally critical account of design standards in Britain which he published as
An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (Cambridge University Press, 1937). He was subsequently employed as a buyer of modern textiles, glass and ceramics for the
Gordon Russell furniture showrooms in London. By this time Pevsner had also completed
Pioneers of the Modern Movement: from William Morris to Walter Gropius, his influential pre-history of what he saw as
Walter Gropius' dominance of contemporary design.
Pioneers ardently championed Gropius's first two buildings (both pre–First World War) on the grounds that they summed up all the essential goals of 20th-century architecture; in England, however, it was widely taken to be the history of England's contribution to international modernism, and a manifesto for
Bauhaus modernism, which it was not. In spite of that, the book remains an important point of reference in the teaching of the history of modern design, and helped lay the foundation of Pevsner's career in England as an architectural historian. Since its first publication by
Faber & Faber in 1936, it has gone through several editions and been translated into many languages. The second edition, published by the
Museum of Modern Art in 1949, was renamed
Pioneers of Modern Design.
Second World War Pevsner's parents were actively trying to exit Germany when it
invaded Poland in September 1939 and subsequently entered a state of war. Following her husband's death due to natural causes in 1940, Pevsner's mother Anna was ultimately scheduled for a transport as part of the Nazi's
final solution. Instead of bearing this fate, she opted, shortly before her scheduled transport, to commit suicide in Leipzig on 10 February 1942. Despite the rise of the Nazi regime, Pevsner sent his children Dieter, Tom, and Uta to visit their mother Lola's family in Germany in August 1939. Uta was the only child without a British-issued passport, using German papers which marked her as Jewish. During their visit Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany shortly after. At the time Uta was waiting for the British embassy in Berlin to process her British passport application. However following the declaration the embassy closed without completing her application. Dieter and Tom were able to leave Germany safely but Uta was forced to stay behind. She survived the war in Germany by posing as "Aryan" and at some points a maid. Pevsner was included in the Nazi
Black Book of British residents hostile to the Hitler regime. In 1940, Pevsner was taken to the
internment camp at
Huyton,
Liverpool, as an
enemy alien. Geoffrey Grigson later wrote in his
Recollections (1984): "When at last two hard-faced
Bow Street runners arrived in the early hours of the morning to take [him] ... I managed, clutching my pyjama trousers, to catch them up with the best parting present I could quickly think of, which was an elegant little edition, a new edition, of
Shakespeare's Sonnets." Pevsner was released after three months on the intervention of, among others,
Frank Pick, then Director-General of the
Ministry of Information. He spent some time in the months after
the Blitz clearing bomb debris, and wrote reviews and art criticism for the Ministry of Information's , an anti-Nazi publication for Germans living in England. He also completed for
Penguin Books the
Pelican paperback
An Outline of European Architecture, which he had begun to develop while in internment.
Outline would eventually go into seven editions, be translated into 16 languages, and sell more than half a million copies. In it he gave a definition of architecture: A bicycle shed is a building;
Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal. He gave three ways in which aesthetic appeal could manifest itself in architecture: in a building's façade, the material volumes, or the interior. In 1942 Pevsner finally secured two regular positions. From 1936 onwards he had been a frequent contributor to the
Architectural Review and from 1943 to 1945 he stood in as its acting editor while the regular editor
J. M. Richards was on active service. Under the
ARs influence, Pevsner's approach to modern architecture became more complex and more moderate. Early signs of a lifelong interest in Victorian architecture, also influenced by the
Architectural Review, appeared in a series written under the pseudonym of "Peter F. R. Donner": Pevsner's "Treasure Hunts" guided readers down selected London streets, pointing out architectural treasures of the 19th century. He was also closely involved with the
Reviews proprietor,
H. de C. Hastings, in evolving the magazine's theories on
picturesque planning. In the same year Pevsner was appointed a part-time lecturer at
Birkbeck College, London; he would eventually retire from the college in 1969 as its first Professor of Art History. He lectured at
Cambridge University for almost 30 years, having been
Slade Professor of Fine Art there for a record six years from 1949 to 1955, and was also the
Slade Professor at
Oxford in 1968. ==Postwar work==