Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Preface
1 - Overture
2 - A Child in Vienna
3 - Hard Times
4 - Berlin: Weimar Dies
5 - Berlin: Brown and Red
6 - On the Island
I
II
III
IV
V
7 - Cambridge
8 - Against Fascism and War
9 - Being Communist
I
II
10 - War
I
II
III
11 - Cold War
I
II
III
III
12 - Stalin and After
I
II
III
IV
13 - Watershed
14 - Under Cnicht
15 - The Sixties
I
II
16 - A Watcher in Politics
I
II
III
17 - Among the Historians
18 - In the Global Village
19 - Marseillaise
20 - From Franco to Berlusconi
I
II
III
21 - Third World
I
II
III
IV
22 - From FDR to Bush
I
II
III
23 - Coda
I
II
III
Notes
Copyright Page
To my grandchildren
List of Illustrations
Photographic acknowledgements appear in parentheses.
1. Mimi, Nelly and Gretl Grün
2. Percy, Ernest and Sidney Hobsbaum
3. Nelly and Percy Hobsbaum
4. Aunt Gretl
5. Mother, Nancy, cousin Peter and EH
6. Camping with Ronnie Hobsbaum
7. School-leaving photograph at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium
8. The Popular Front government celebrates Bastille Day
9. World student conference, Paris 1937
10. James Klugmann and delegates at the Congress of World Student Assembly, Paris 1939
11. John Cornford
12. British Communist historians’ delegation to Moscow, 1954
13. British historians at Zagorsk
14. EH in Rome, 1958
15. Eightieth birthday cake, Genoa 1997
16. Italy 2000: reading Il Manifesto (Vincenzo Cotinelli)
17. Trafalgar Square 1961: front page of Daily Herald ( Daily Herald)
18. Trafalgar Square 1961: EH among policemen (Daily Herald )
19. Marlene and EH (Enzo Crea)
20. EH before the era of computers
21. George Eisler
22. Pierre Bourdieu
23. Ralph Gleason
24. Clemens Heller
25. EH with President Cardoso
26. Hortensia Allende
27. EH lecturing in Mexico
28. EH above Llyn Arddy, Wales
29. In Gwenddwr, Powys
30. EH and Markus Wolf
31. An old historian (Giuliano Ben Vegnú)
Preface
Writers of autobiographies have also to be readers of autobiographies. In the course of writing this book I have been surprised to find how many of the men and women I have known have gone into print about their own lives, not to mention the (usually) more eminent or scandalous ones who have had them written by other people. And I am not even counting the considerable number of autobiographical writings by contemporaries disguised as fiction. Perhaps the surprise is unjustified. People whose profession implies writing and communicating tend to move around among other people who do so. Still, there they are, articles, interviews, print, tapes, even videotapes, and volumes such as this, a surprisingly large number of them by men and women who have spent their careers in universities. I am not alone.
Nevertheless, the question arises why someone like myself should write an autobiography and, more to the point, why others who have no particular connections with me, or may not even have known of my existence before seeing the jacket in a bookshop, should find it worth reading. I do not belong to the people who appear to be classified as a special sub-species in the biography section of at least one London bookshop chain as ‘Personalities’, or, as the jargon of today has it, ‘celebrities’, that is to say people sufficiently widely known, for whatever reason, for their very name to arouse curiosity about their lives. I do not belong to the class whose public lives entitle them to call their autobiographies ‘Memoirs’, generally men and women who have actions on a wider public stage to record or defend, or who have lived close to great events and those who took decisions affecting them. I have not been among them. Probably my name will figure in the histories of one or two specialized fields, such as twentieth-century Marxism and historiography, and perhaps it will crop up in some books on twentieth-century British intellectual culture. Beyond that, if my name were somehow to disappear completely from sight, like my parents’ gravestone in the Vienna Central Cemetery, for which I vainly searched five years ago, there would be no discernible gap in the narrative of what happened in twentieth-century history, in Britain or elsewhere.
Again, this book is not written in the now very saleable confessional mode, partly because the only justification for such an ego-trip is genius – I am neither a St Augustine nor a Rousseau – partly because no living autobiographer could tell the private truth about matters involving other living people without unjustifiably hurting the feelings of some of them. I have no good reason for doing so. That field belongs to posthumous biography and not to autobiography. In any case, however curious we are about these matters, historians are not gossip columnists. The military merits of generals are not to be judged by what they do, or fail to do, in bed. All attempts to derive Keynes’s or Schumpeter’s economics from their rather full but different sex lives are doomed. Besides, I suspect that readers with a taste for biographies that lift bedclothes would find my own life disappointing.
Nor is it written as an apologia for the author’s life. If you do not want to understand the twentieth century, read the autobiographies of the self-justifiers, the counsels for their own defence, and of their obverse, the repentant sinners. All of these are post-mortem inquests in which the corpse pretends to be the coroner. The autobiography of an intellectual is necessarily also about his ideas, attitudes and actions, but it should not be a piece of advocacy. I think this book contains answers to the questions that I have been most often asked by journalists and others interested in the somewhat unusual case of a lifelong but anomalous communist and ‘Hobsbawm the Marxist historian’, but answering them has not been my object. History may judge my politics – in fact it has substantially judged them – readers may judge my books. Historical understanding is what I am after, not agreement, approval or sympathy.
Nevertheless, there are some reasons why it may be worth reading, apart from the curiosity of human beings about other human beings. I have lived through almost all of the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history. I have lived in a few countries and seen something of several others in three continents. I may not have left an observable mark on the world in the course of this long life, although I have left a good quantity of printed marks on paper, but since I became conscious of being a historian at the age of sixteen I have watched and listened for most of it and tried to understand the history of my lifetime.
When, having written the history of the world between the late eighteenth century and 1914, I finally tried my hand at the history of what I called The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, I think it benefited from the fact that I wrote about it not only as a scholar but as what the anthropologists call a ‘participant observer’. It did so in two ways. Clearly my personal memories of events remote in time and space brought the history of the twentieth century closer to younger readers, while it reawakened their own memories in older ones. And, more even than my other books, however compelling the obligations of historical scholarship, this one was written with the passion that belongs to the age of extremes. Both kinds of readers have told me so. But beyond this there is a more profound way in which the interweaving of one person’s life and times, and the observation of both, helped to shape a historical analysis which, I hope, makes itself independent of both.
That is what an autobiography can do. In one sense this book is the flip side of The Age of Extremes: not world history illustrated by the experiences of an individual, but world history shaping that experience, or rather offering a shifting but always limited set of choices from which, to adapt Karl Marx’s phrase, ‘men make [their lives], but they do not make [them] just as they please, they do not make [them] under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ and, one might add, by the world around them.
In another sense the autobiography of a historian is an important part of the construction of his or her work. Next to a belief in reason and the difference between fact and fiction, self-awareness, that is to say standing both in one’s body and outside it, is a necessary skill for players of the game in both history and the social sciences, particularly for a historian who, like myself, has chosen his subjects intuitively and accidentally, but ended by bringing them together into a coherent whole. Other historians may pay attention to these more professional aspects of my book. However, I hope others will read it as an introduction to the most extraordinary century in the world’s history through the itinerary of one human being whose life could not possibly have occurred in any other.
History, as my colleague the philosopher Agnes Heller put it, ‘is about what happens seen from outside, memoirs about what happens seen from within’. This is not a book for scholarly acknowledgements, but only for thanks and apologies. The thanks go above all to my wife Marlene who has lived through half my life, read and criticized all chapters to good purpose and who tolerated the years when an often distracted, bad-tempered and sometimes discouraged husband lived less in the present than in a past he struggled to put on paper. I also thank Stuart Proffitt, a prince among editors. The number of people whom I have consulted over the years on questions relevant to this autobiography is too large for acknowledgement, even though several of them have died since I began. They know why I thank them.
My apologies also go to Marlene and the family. This is not the autobiography they might have preferred, for, though they are constantly present, at least from the moment when they entered my life and I theirs, this book is more about the public than the private man. I should also apologize to those friends, colleagues, students and others absent from these pages, who might have expected to find themselves remembered here, or recalled at greater length.
Finally, I have organized the book in three parts. After a brief overture, the personal–political chapters 1–16, roughly in chronological order, cover the period from when memory begins – in the early 1920s – to the early 1990s. However, they are not intended as a straightforward chronicle. Chapters 17 and 18 are about my career as a professional historian. Chapters 19–22 are about countries or regions (other than my native Mitteleuropa and England) with which I have had associations for long periods of my life: France, Spain and Italy, Latin America and other parts of the Third World and the USA. Since they cover the entire range of my dealings with these countries, they do not fit easily into the main chronological narrative, though they overlap with it. I have therefore thought it best to keep them separate.
Eric Hobsbawm
London, April 2002
1
Overture
One day in the autumn of 1994, my wife Marlene, who kept track of the London correspondence while I was teaching my course at the New School in New York, phoned me to say there was a letter from Hamburg she could not read, as it was in German. It came from a person who signed herself Melitta. Was it worth sending on? I knew no one in Hamburg, but without a moment’s hesitation I knew who had written it, even though something like three quarters of a century had passed since I had last seen the signatory. It could only be little Litta – actually she was my senior by a year or so – from the Seutter Villa in Vienna. I was right. She had, she wrote, seen my name in some connection in Die Zeit, the German liberal-intellectual weekly. She had immediately concluded that I must be the Eric with whom she and her sisters had played long, long ago. She had rummaged through her albums and come up with a photo which she enclosed. On it five small children posed on the summery terrace of the villa with our respective Fräuleins, the little girls – perhaps even myself – garlanded with flowers. Litta was there with her younger sisters Ruth and Eva (Susie, always known as Peter, was not yet born), I with my sister Nancy. Her father had marked the date on the back: 1922. And how was Nancy, Litta asked. How could she know that Nancy, three-and-a-half years my junior, had died a couple of years earlier? On my last visit to Vienna I had gone to the houses in which we had lived, and sent Nancy photographs of them. I had thought she was the only one who still shared a memory of the Seutter Villa. Now it came alive again.
I have that photo too. In the album of family photos which has ended up with me, the last survivor of my parents and siblings, the snapshots on the terrace of the Seutter Villa form the second iconographic record of my existence and the first of my sister Nancy, born in Vienna in 1920. My own first record appears to be a picture of a baby in a very large wicker pram, without adults or other context, which was, I assume, taken in Alexandria, where I was born in June 1917, to have my presence registered by a clerk at the British Consulate (incorrectly, for they got the date wrong and misspelled the surname). The diplomatic institutions of the United Kingdom presided over both my conception and my birth, for it was at another British Consulate, in Zurich, that my father and mother had been married, with the help of an official dispensation personally signed by Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary, which allowed the subject of King George V, Leopold Percy Hobsbaum, to marry the subject of the Emperor Franz Josef, Nelly Grün, at a time when both empires were at war with one another, a conflict to which my future father reacted with residual British patriotism, but which my future mother repudiated. In 1915 there was no conscription in Britain, but if there were, she told him, he should register as a Conscientious Objector.1 I would like to think that they were married by the consul who is the main figure in Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties. I should also like to think that while they were waiting in Zurich for Sir Edward Grey to turn from more urgent matters to their wedding, they knew about their fellow-exiles in the city, Lenin, James Joyce and the Dadaists. However, they obviously did not, and almost certainly would not have been interested in them at such a time. They were plainly more concerned with their forthcoming honeymoon in Lugano.
What would have been my life if Fraulein Grün, aged eighteen, one of three daughters of a moderately prosperous Viennese jeweller, had not fallen in love with an older Englishman, fourth of eight children of an immigrant London Jewish cabinet-maker, in Alexandria in 1913? She would presumably have married a young man from the Jewish Mitteleuropean middle class, and her children would have grown up as Austrians. Since almost all young Austrian Jews ended up as emigrants or refugees, my subsequent life might not have looked very different – plenty of them came to England, studied here and became academics. But I would not have grown up or come to Britain with a native British passport.
Unable to live in either belligerent country, my parents returned via Rome and Naples to Alexandria, where they had originally met and got engaged before the war, and where both had relatives – my mother’s uncle Albert, of whose emporium of Nouveautés plus staff I still have a photograph, and my father’s brother Ernest, whose name I bear and who worked in the Egyptian Post and Telegraph Service. (Since all private lives are raw material for historians as for novelists, I have used the circumstances of their meeting to introduce my history of The Age of Empires .) They moved to Vienna with their two-year-old son as soon as the war ended. That is why Egypt, to which I am shackled by the lifetime chains of official documentation, is not part of my life. I remember absolutely nothing about it except, possibly, a cage of small birds in the zoo at Nouzha, and a corrupt fragment of a Greek children’s song, presumably sung by a Greek nursemaid. Nor have I any curiosity about my place of birth, the district known as Sporting Club, along the tramline from the centre of Alexandria to Ramleh, but then, there is not much to be said about it, according to E. M. Forster, whose stay in Alexandria almost coincided with my parents’. All he says about the tram station Sporting Club in his Alexandria, A History and a Guide is: ‘Close to the Grand Stand of the Race Course. Bathing beach on the left.’
Egypt thus does not belong in my life. I do not know when the life of memory begins, but not much of it goes back to the age of two. I have never gone there since the steamer Helouan left Alexandria for Trieste, then just transferred from Austria to Italy. I do not remember anything about our arrival in Trieste, meeting-point of languages and races, a place of opulent cafés, sea captains and the headquarters of the giant insurance company, Assicurazioni Generali, whose business empire probably defines the concept of ‘Mitteleuropa’ better than any other. Eighty years later I had occasion to discover it in the company of Triestine friends, and especially Claudio Magris, that marvellous memorializer of central Europe and the Adriatic corner where German, Italian, Slav and Hungarian cultures converge. My grandfather, who had come to meet us, accompanied us on the Southern Railway to Vienna. That is where my conscious life began. We lived with my grandparents for some months, while my parents looked for an apartment of their own.
My father, arriving with hard savings – nothing was harder than sterling in those days – in an impoverished country with a currency subsiding towards collapse, felt confident and relatively prosperous. The Seutter Villa seemed ideal. It was the first place in my life I thought of as ‘ours’.
Anyone who comes to Vienna by rail from the west still passes it. If you look out of the right-hand window as the train comes into the western outskirts of Vienna, by the local station Hütteldorf-Hacking, it is impossible to miss that confident broad pile on the hillside with its four-sided dome on a squat tower, built by a successful industrialist in the later days of the Emperor Franz Josef (1848–1916). Its grounds reached down to the Auhofstrasse, which led to the west along the walls of the old imperial hunting ground, the Lainzer Tiergarten, and from which it was reached by a narrow uphill street (the Vinzenz-Hessgasse, now Seuttergasse) at the bottom of which there was then still a row of thatched cottages.
The Seutter Villa of my childhood memories is largely the part shared by the old and young of the Hobsbaums (for so, in spite of the Alexandrian consular clerk, the name was spelled), who rented a flat on the first floor of the villa, and the Golds, who rented the ground-floor apartment below us. Essentially this centred on the terrace at the side of the house, where so much of the social life of the generations of both these families was conducted. From this terrace a footpath – steep in retrospect – led down to the tennis courts at the bottom – they are now built over – past what seemed to a small boy a giant tree, but with branches low enough for climbing. I remember showing its secrets to a boy who had come to my school from a place called Recklinghausen in Germany. We had been asked to take care of him, because times were hard where he came from. I can remember nothing about him except the tree and his home-town in what is now the Land Nordrhein-Westfalen. He soon went back. Though I did not think of it as such, this must have been my first contact with the major events of twentieth-century history, namely the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, via one of the children temporarily sent out of harm’s way to well-wishers in Austria. (All Austrians at that time saw themselves as Germans, and, but for a veto from the peacemakers after the First World War, would have voted to join Germany.) I also have a vivid memory of us playing in a barn full of hay somewhere in the grounds, but on my last visit to Vienna with Marlene we checked out the Villa and could find no place where it might have been. Curiously enough, I have no indoor memories of the place, though a vague impression that it was neither very light nor very comfortable. I cannot, for instance, recall anything about our own or the Golds’ apartments, except perhaps high ceilings.
Five, later six, children of pre-school age, or at best in the first years of primary school, in the same garden, are great cementers of inter-family relations. The Hobsbaums and the Golds got on well, in spite of their very different backgrounds – for (notwithstanding their name) the Golds do not seem to have been Jewish. At all events they remained and flourished in Austria, that is to say in Hitler’s Greater Germany, after the Anschluss. Both Mr and Mrs Gold came from Sieghartskirchen, a nowheresville in Lower Austria, he the son of the only local innkeeper–farmer, she the daughter of the only village shopkeeper (anything from socks to agricultural equipment). Both maintained strong family links there. They were sufficiently prosperous in the 1920s to have their portraits painted – a black-and-white copy of the two, sent by one of the two surviving Gold girls a year or so ago, is before me. The picture of a serious-looking gentleman in a dark lounge suit and a starched collar brings nothing back, and indeed I had no close contact with him as a small boy, although he once showed me his officer’s cap from the days before the end of the empire, and was the first person I knew who had actually been to the USA, to which he had travelled on business. From there he brought a gramophone record, the tune of which I now recognize as ‘The Peanut Vendor’, and the information that they had a make of motor-car called ‘Buick’, a name I found, for some obscure reason, hard to credit. On the other hand the image of a handsome long-necked lady with short hair waved at the sides, looking at the world with a serious but not very self-confident gaze over her décolleté shoulder, immediately brings her to life in my mind. For mothers are a much more constant presence in the life of young children, and my mother, Nelly, intellectual, cosmopolitan, educated, and Anna (‘Antschi’) Gold, with little schooling, always conscious of the provincialism of her origins, soon became best friends and remained so to the end. Indeed, according to her daughter Melitta, Nelly was Anna’s only intimate friend. This may explain why photos of unknown and unidentifiable Hobsbawms still keep turning up in family albums of the Gold grandchildren who remained in Vienna. One of the Gold girls recalls, almost as vividly as I do, going (with her mother) to see my mother in her last days. Weeping, Antschi told her: ‘We will never see Nelly again.’
Two people, almost as old as the ‘short twentieth century’, thus began life together and then made their different ways through the extraordinary and terrible world of the past century. That is why I begin the present reflections on a long life with the unexpected reminder of a photo in the albums of two families which had nothing else in common except that their lives were briefly brought together in the Vienna of the 1920s. For memories of a few years of early childhood shared by a retired university professor and peripatetic historian with a retired former actress, television presenter and occasional translator (‘like your mother!’) are of little more than private interest for the people concerned. Even for them, they are no more than the thinnest of threads of spider silk bridging the enormous space between some seventy years of entirely separate, unconnected lives conducted without knowledge or even without a moment’s conscious thought of one another. It is the extraordinary experience of Europeans living through the twentieth century that binds these lives together. A rediscovered common childhood, a renewal of contact in old age, dramatize the image of our times: absurd, ironic, surrealist and monstrous. They do not create them. Ten years after the five infants looked at the camera, my parents were dead, and Mr Gold, victim of the economic cataclysm – virtually all the banks of central Europe were technically insolvent in 1931 – was on his way with his family to serve the banking system in Persia, whose Shah preferred his bankers from remote and defeated empires rather than from neighbouring and dangerous ones. Fifteen years after, while I was at an English university, the Gold girls, returned from the palaces of Shiraz, were – all of them – beginning their careers as actresses in what was about to become part of Hitler’s Greater Germany. Twenty years after, I was in the uniform of a British soldier in England, my sister Nancy was censoring letters for the British authorities in Trinidad, while Litta was performing under our bombs in the Kabarett der Komiker in wartime Berlin to an audience, some of whom may well have rounded up my relatives who had probably patted the Gold girls’ heads at the Seutter Villa, for transport to the camps. Five years later, as I began to teach in the bombed ruins of London, both the Gold parents were dead – he, probably from hunger, in the immediate aftermath of defeat and occupation, she, evacuated into the western Alps before the end, of disease.
The past is another country, but it has left its mark on those who once lived there. But it has also left its mark on those too young to have known it, except by hearsay, or even, in an a-historically structured civilization, to treat it, in the words of a game briefly popular towards the end of the twentieth century, as a ‘Trivial Pursuit’. However, it is the autobiographical historian’s business not simply to revisit it, but to map it. For without such a map, how can we track the paths of a lifetime through its changing landscapes, or understand why and when we hesitated and stumbled, or how we lived among those with whom our lives were intertwined and on whom they depended? For these things throw light not only on single lives but on the world.
So this may serve as the starting-point for one historian’s attempt to retrace a path through the craggy terrain of the twentieth century: five small children posed eighty years ago by adults on a terrace in Vienna, unaware (unlike their parents) that they are surrounded by the debris of defeat, ruined empires and economic collapse, unaware (like their parents) that they would have to make their way through the most murderous as well as the most revolutionary era in history.
2
A Child in Vienna
I spent my childhood in the impoverished capital of a great empire, attached, after the empire’s collapse, to a smallish provincial republic of great beauty, which did not believe it ought to exist. With few exceptions, Austrians after 1918 thought they should be part of Germany, and were prevented from doing so only by the powers that had imposed the peace settlement on central Europe. The economic troubles of the years of my childhood did nothing to increase their belief in the viability of the first Austrian Federal Republic. It had just passed through a revolution, and had settled down temporarily under a government of clerical reactionaries headed by a Monsignor, based on the votes of a pious, or at least strongly conservative, countryside, which was confronted by a hated opposition of revolutionary Marxist socialists, massively supported in Vienna (not only the capital but an autonomous state of the Federal Republic) and almost unanimously by all who identified themselves as ‘workers’. In addition to police and army, which were under government control, both sides were associated with paramilitary groups, for whom the civil war had been only suspended. Austria was not only a state which did not want to exist, but a predicament which could not last.
It did not last. But the final convulsions of the first Austrian Republic – the destruction of the social democrats after a brief civil war, the assassination of the Catholic prime minister by Nazi rebels, Hitler’s triumphant and applauded entry into Vienna – happened after I left Vienna in 1931. I was not to return there until 1960, when the very same country, under the very same two-party system of Catholics and Socialists, had become a stable, enormously prosperous and neutral little republic, perfectly satisfied – some might say too satisfied – with its identity. But this is a historian’s retrospect. What was a middle-class childhood like in the Vienna of the 1920s? The problem is how to distinguish what one has learned since from what contemporaries knew or thought, and the experiences and reactions of adults from those who were children at that time. What children born in 1917 knew of the events of the still young twentieth century which were so alive in the minds of parents and grandparents – war, breakdown, revolution, inflation – was what adults told us or, more likely, what we overheard them talking about. The only direct evidence we had of them were the changing images on postage stamps. Stamp collecting in the 1920s, though it was far from self-explanatory, was a good introduction to the political history of Europe since 1914. For an expatriate British boy it dramatized the contrast between the unchanging continuity of George V’s head on British stamps and the chaos of overprints, new names and new currencies elsewhere. The only other direct line to history came through the changing coins and banknotes of an era of economic disruption. I was old enough to be conscious of the change from Kronen to Schillings and Groschen, from multi-zeroed notes to notes and coins, and I knew that before Kronen there had been Gulden.
Though the Habsburg Empire had gone, we still lived on its infrastructure and, to a surprising extent, by pre-1914 central European assumptions. The husband of one of my mother’s great friends, Dr Alexander Szana, lived in Vienna and, unhappily for his wife’s peace of mind, worked on a German-language newspaper thirty miles down the Danube in what we called Pressburg and the Hungarians called Pozsony, and what had then become Bratislava, the chief Slovak city in the new Czechoslovak Republic. (It is now the capital of an internationally sovereign Slovakia.) Except for the expulsion of former Hungarian officials, between the wars it had not yet been ethnically cleansed of its polyglot and polycultural population of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks, assimilated westernized and pious Carpathian Jews, gypsies and the rest. It had not yet really become a Slovak city of ‘Bratislavaks’ from which those with memories of what it had remained until the Second World War still distinguish themselves as ‘Pressburaks’. He went there and returned by the Pressburger Bahn, a tram which ran from a street in the centre of Vienna to a loop on the central streets of Pressburg. It had been inaugurated in the spring of 1914 when both cities were part of the same empire, a triumph of modern technology, and simply carried on; as did the famous ‘opera train’ by which the cultured of Brünn/Brno in Moravia went for a night at the Vienna Opera, a couple of hours’ distant. My uncle Richard lived both in Vienna and in Marienbad, where he had a fancy goods shop. The frontiers were not yet impenetrable, as they became after the war destroyed the Pressburg tram’s bridge across the Danube. The ruins of the bridge could still be seen in 1996, when I helped to make a television programme about it.
The world of the Viennese middle class, and certainly of the Jews who formed so large a proportion of it, was still that of the vast polyglot region whose migrants had, in the past 80 years, turned its capital into a city of two million – except for Berlin by far the largest city on the European continent between Paris and Leningrad. Our relatives had come from, or were still living in, places like Bielitz (now in Poland), Kaschau (now in Czechoslovakia) or Grosswardein (now in Romania).1 Our grocers and the porters of our apartment buildings were almost certainly Czech, our servant-girls or child-minders not native Viennese: I still remember the tales of werewolves told me by one from Slovenia. None of them was or felt uprooted or cut adrift from ‘the old country’ unlike European emigrants to the United States, since for continental Europeans the sea was the great divider, whereas travel on rails, even over large distances, was something everyone was used to. Even my nervous grandmother thought nothing of taking short trips to visit her daughter in Berlin.
It was a multinational, but not a multicultural society. German (with a local intonation) was its language, German (with a local touch) its culture, and its access to world culture, ancient and modern. My relatives would have shared the passionate indignation of the great art historian Ernst Gombrich, when, to fit in with late twentieth-century fashions, he was asked to describe his native Viennese culture as Jewish. It was plain Viennese middle-class culture, unaffected by the fact that so many of its eminent practitioners were Jews and (faced with the endemic anti-Semitism of the region) knew themselves to be Jews, any more than by the fact that some of them came from Moravia (Freud and Mahler), some from Galicia or the Bukovina (Joseph Roth) or even from Russe on the Bulgarian Danube (Elias Canetti). It would be just as pointless to look for consciously Jewish elements in the songs of Irving Berlin or the Hollywood movies of the era of the great studios, all of which were run by immigrant Jews: their object, in which they succeeded, was precisely to make songs or films which found a specific expression for 100 per cent Americanness.
As speakers of the Kultursprache in a former imperial capital children instinctively shared the sense of cultural, if no longer political, superiority. The way Czechs spoke German (böhmakeln) struck us as inferior and therefore funny, and so did the incomprehensible Czech language with its apparent accumulation of consonants. Without knowing, or having any opinion about, Italians we referred to them with a touch of contempt as Katzelmacher . Emancipated and assimilated Viennese Jews talked about Eastern Jews as of some other species. (I distinctly remember asking an embarrassed older member of the family whether those Eastern Jews had surnames like ours, and if so what names, since they were obviously so different from us.) It seems to me that this explains much of the enthusiasm with which Austrians greeted their annexation by Hitler’s Germany: it restored their sense of political superiority. At the time I only noticed that one or two of my classmates in secondary school were Hakenkreuzler (swastikers). Since I was an English boy, however culturally indistinguishable from the Austrians, this clearly did not concern me directly. But it brings me to the question of politics.
Because I was to be seized so young and so long by that typical twentieth-century passion, political commitment, it seems reasonable to ask how much of its roots can be found in a childhood in 1920s Vienna. That is difficult to reconstruct. We lived in an era steeped in politics, although the affairs of the wider world came to us, as I have said, mainly through overheard adult conversations, whose purport children did not fully grasp. I remember two of these, both probably around 1925 or so. One occurred in an alpine sanatorium where I had been sent to recover from some illness (we children appeared constantly to have some sickness or other) under the supervision of my aunt Gretl who was also convalescing there. ‘Who is this Trotsky?’ asked a woman, whom I vaguely recall or imagine as maternal and middle-aged, but not without a touch of satisfaction. ‘Just a Jewish boy called Bronstein.’ We knew about the Russian Revolution, but what exactly was it? Another happened at an athletics meeting to which my uncle (and presumably my father) had taken me, made memorable by my first experience of a black sprinter by the name of Cator. ‘You say there’s no war anywhere at the moment,’ said someone, ‘but surely, there’s a revolt in Syria?’ What did or could this mean to us? We knew there had been a world war, as any British boy born in 1944 would grow up knowing that there had been one. Two of my British uncles had been in it, our neighbour Mr Gold would show me his tall officer’s cap, and my best friend was a war orphan – his mother kept her husband’s sword on the wall. However, nobody I knew, English or Austrian, regarded the Great War as a heroic episode, and Austrian schools kept quiet about it, partly because it concerned another country at another time – the old Habsburg Empire – partly perhaps also because the Austrian armies had not covered themselves with much glory. It was not until I went to Berlin that I experienced the ex-officer schoolmaster proud of his front-line service. Before that, my most powerful image of the Great War came from Karl Kraus’s wonderful documentary super-drama The Last Days of Humanity, which both my mother and my aunt Gretl had bought as soon as it came out in 1922. I still have my mother’s copy, and still re-read it from time to time.
What else did we know about the times we lived in? Vienna schoolchildren took it for granted that people had the choice between two parties – the Christian socials and the social democrats or Reds. Our simple materialist assumption was that if you were a landlord you voted for the first, if you were a tenant for the second. Since most Viennese were tenants, this naturally made Vienna a Red city. Until after the civil war of 1934 communists were so unimportant that a number of the most enthusiastic ones chose to be active in other countries where there was more scope for them – mainly Germany, such as the famous Eislers: the composer Hanns, the Comintern agent Gerhart, and their sister, the formidable Elfriede, better known as Ruth Fischer, who briefly became leader of the German Communist Party – but also in Czechoslovakia, such as Egon Erwin Kisch. (Many years later the painter Georg Eisler, Hanns’s son, became my best friend.) I cannot recall paying attention to the only communist in the circle of the former Grün sisters, who wrote under the pen-name Leo Lania, then a young man who declared Zola’s L’Oeuvre to be his favourite book and Eugene Onegin and Spartacus his favourite heroes in literature and history. Our family was, of course, neither Black nor Red, since the Blacks were anti-Semites and the Reds were for workers and not people of our class. Besides, we were English, so the matter did not concern us.
And yet, moving from primary to secondary school, and from infancy towards puberty in the Vienna of the late 1920s, one acquired political consciousness as naturally as sexual awareness. In the summer of 1930 I made friends in Weyer, a village in Upper Austria where the doctors were vainly trying to deal with my mother’s lungs, with Haller Peter, the boy of the family from whom we rented lodgings. (By the tradition of bureaucratic states, when names were called for, surnames came before given names.) We fished and went robbing orchards together, an exercise I thought my sister would also enjoy, but which, as she admitted to me many years later, had terrified her. Since his father was a railwayman, the family was Red: in Austria, and especially in the countryside, it would not have occurred to any non-agricultural worker in those days to be anything else. Though Peter – about my age – was not visibly interested in public affairs, he also took it for granted that he was Red; and somehow, between lobbing stones at trout and stealing apples, I also concluded that I wanted to be one.
Three years earlier I remember another summer holiday in a Lower Austrian village called Rettenegg, at a time situated vaguely in my private life, but firmly in history. As usual, my father did not join us, but remained at work in Vienna. But the summer of 1927 was the time when the workers of Vienna, outraged by the acquittal of rightwingers who had killed some socialists in an affray, went on to the streets en masse, and burned down the Palace of Justice on the Ringstrasse (the great circular boulevard which surrounds the old central city of Vienna), eighty-five of them being massacred in the process. My father had, it seems, been caught up in the riot, but got away safely. I have no doubt that the grown-ups must have discussed this intensively (not least, my mother), but I cannot say that it made the slightest impact on me, unlike the story that, once upon a time – namely in 1908, on a journey to Egypt, his ship had passed close to Sicily at the time of the great Messina earthquake. What I actually remember from that holiday was watching the local craftsman build a boat outside our lodgings and the pine forests up the mountain which I explored alone, until I reached a woodcutters’ site, where the men gave me some of their Sterz, the stiff cereal porridge on which they lived in the woods. On the way there I saw, for the first time in my life, the great black woodpecker, all one-and-a-half foot of it under the vivid red helmet, drumming against a stump in a clearing like a mad miniature hermit, alone under the stillness of the trees.
Still, it would be too much to say that the summer at Weyer made me political. It is only in retrospect that my childhood can be seen as a process of politicization. At the time playing and learning, family and school defined my life, as they defined the lives of most Viennese children in the 1920s. Virtually everything we experienced came to us in these ways or fitted into one or another of these frameworks.
Of the two networks which constituted most of my life, the family was by far the more permanent. It consisted of a larger Viennese clan, the relatives of my grandparents and a smaller Anglo-Austrian part, two Grün sisters, my mother and her younger sister Gretl, married to two Hobsbaum brothers, namely my father and the younger Sidney, who also lived in Vienna for much of the 1920s. As for school, one did not go there until the age of six. After that, as our addresses changed I passed through two primary schools and three Gymnasia, and my sister – who left Vienna before the age of ten – through two primary schools. In these circumstances school friendships tended to be temporary. Of all those I came to know at my five schools in Vienna, all but one were to disappear totally from my subsequent life.
The family, on the other hand, was an operational network, tied together not only by the emotional bonds between mothers, children and grandchildren, and between sisters and brothers, but by economic necessity. What there was of the modern welfare state in the 1920s hardly touched middle-class families, since few of their members were employed for wages. Whom else could one call on for help? How could one not help relatives in need, even if one did not particularly like them? I don’t believe that this was specially characteristic of Jewish families, although my mother’s Viennese family undoubtedly had a sense that the mishpokhe, or at least the kinsmen and kinswomen living in Vienna, constituted a group, which met from time to time – always, as I recall from long and spectacularly boring sessions round tables placed together in some open-air café ś to take family decisions or just gossip. We were given ice-cream, but short pleasures do not compensate for lengthy tedium. If there was anything specifically Jewish about it, it was the assumption among all of them that the family was a network stretching across countries and oceans, that shifting between countries was a normal part of life, and that for people engaged in buying and selling – as so many members of Jewish families were – earning one’s living was an uncertain and unpredictable matter, especially in the era of catastrophe which had engulfed central Europe since the collapse of civilization in August 1914. As it turned out, no part of the Hobsbaum–Grün family was to need the safety net of the family system more than my parents, especially after my father’s death changed an economic situation of permanent crisis into one of catastrophe. But until then – in my case until the age of eleven plus – we children were barely aware of this.
We were still in the era when taking a taxi seemed an extravagance that required special justification, even for relatively well-off people. We – or at least I – seemed to have all the usual possessions our friends had and do all the things they did. I can recall only one occasion when I had an inkling of how tough things were. I had just entered secondary school (Bundesgymnasium XIII, Fichtnergasse). The professor in charge of the new form – all teachers at a Gymnasium were automatically Herr Professor, just as we automatically were now addressed like adults as Sie and not like children as Du – had given us the list of books we needed to buy. For geography we needed the Kozenn-Atlas , a large and evidently rather expensive volume. ‘This is very dear. Is it absolutely necessary for you to have it?’ my mother asked in a tone which must clearly have communicated to me a sense of crisis, if only because the answer to her question was so obvious. Of course it was. How could Mummy not see this? The book was bought, but the sense that on this occasion, at least, a major sacrifice had been made has remained with me. Perhaps this is a reason why I still have that atlas on my shelves, a bit tattered and full of the graffiti and marginalia of someone in the early forms of secondary school, but still a good atlas, to which I refer from time to time.
Perhaps other children of my age might have been more conscious of our material problems. As a boy I was not much aware of practical realities; and adults, insofar as their activities and interests did not overlap with my own, were not part of practical reality so far as I was concerned. In any case I lived for much of the time in a world without clear boundaries between reality, the discoveries of reading and the creations of imagination. Even a child with a more hard-headed sense of reality, such as my sister, had no clear idea of our situation. Such knowledge simply was not supposed to be part of the world of our childhood. For instance, I had no idea what work my father did. Nobody bothered to tell children about these things, and in any case the ways in which people like my father and uncle earned their living were far from clear. They were not men with firmly describable occupations, like the figures on ‘Happy Families’ cards: doctors, lawyers, architects, policemen, shopkeepers. When asked what my father did, I would vaguely say, or write, ‘Kaufmann’ (merchant), knowing quite well that this meant nothing, and was almost certainly wrong. But what else was one to put?
To a large extent, our – or at least my – lack of awareness of our financial situation was due to the reluctance, no, the refusal, of my Viennese family to acknowledge it. It was not that they insisted on the last resort of the middle class fallen on bad times, ‘keeping up appearances’. They were aware of how far they had fallen. ‘It really lifts the heart to see this in our impoverished and proletarianized times,’ my grandmother wrote to her daughter, marvelling at the smoothness and opulence of a nephew’s wedding, noting bitterly that the bridegroom had given his bride ‘a very beautiful and valuable ring, made by us’ in better days. That is before Grandpa Grün, his savings reduced in value by the great inflation of the early twenties to the price of a coffee and cake at the Café śIlion, returned in old age to the occupation of his youth as a commercial traveller, selling trinkets in provincial towns and alpine villages. Large swathes of the Austrian middle class were in a similar position, impoverished by war and postwar, getting used to tightened belts and a far more modest lifestyle than ‘in peacetime’ – i.e. before 1914. (Nothing since 1918 counted as peace.) They found having no money hard – harder, they thought, than the workers who were, after all, used to it. (Later, when I became an enthusiastic communist teenager my aunt Gretl shook her head over my refusal to accept what, to her, was this self-evident proposition.) Not that the English husbands of Grün daughters were better off. Two of them were spectacularly unfitted for the jungle of the market economy: my father and Wilfred Brown, a handsome wartime internee who married the oldest sister, Mimi. Even my uncle Sidney, the only Hobsbaum brother to earn a living in business, spent most of the decade extracting himself from the ruins of one failed project only to plunge into the next, equally doomed, enterprise.
At bottom my Viennese family found any other way of life than that before 1914 inconceivable, and carried on with it, against the odds. Thus my mother, even when unable to pay the grocery bills, let alone the rent and utilities, always employed servants. Nor were these old retainers, such as Helene Demuth, who is buried with the Karl Marxes in Highgate Cemetery. They were and remained the quintessential ‘servant problem’ of middle-class ladies, an endless succession of young women from agencies who stayed a month or two, ranging from the rare ‘eine Perle’ (a pearl), to the clumsy arrival straight from the country, who had never seen a gas-stove, let alone a telephone. When my mother visited England for the first time in 1925, to take care of her sister Mimi who was then ill in Barrow-in-Furness, she wrote to her other sister, impressed not only with the efficiency, equanimity and lack of fuss with which households were run (so different from Vienna Jewish families …), but that it was done without servants. ‘Here you find ladies who do everything themselves, and have children, and even do all the laundry themselves, and still remain ladies.’2
Even so, she never seriously considered the British option. ‘As someone with years of experience of being broke,’ she wrote to her sister who complained of money troubles in Berlin,
let me give you one major piece of advice, which I urge you to take seriously. Try not ever to admit that you could do without a maid!! In the long run you can’t manage without one anyway, and so it is best to start with the assumption that a maid is just as much a necessity as food or a roof over your head. What you save is nothing compared to the loss in health, comfort, and above all the state of your nerves: and the worse things get, the more you need them. True, just lately I wondered whether to give Marianne notice – not that I could do it before Christmas, it’s too late, and she was always so good – but the only reason I did was that I’m ashamed that she should see that I can’t pay the grocer etc. And, deep down I know perfectly well it is best to grow a thick skin and to keep her. 3
Of all this we knew or understood nothing except that the parents had rows, possibly with increasing frequency – but whose parents do not have rows? – and, in the central European winters, that the rooms were icy. (Had we lived in Britain in the era of coal-fired fireplaces, very nearly the most inefficient form of indoor heating invented, this would not necessarily have been due to lack of money to buy winter fuel.)
Firm and cohesive, partly because of the very precariousness of its material base, the family divided the world, and therefore my life, into two parts: inside and outside. In effect, so far as we children were concerned, the family and its close friends constituted, or determined, the world of adults that I knew as people and not merely as service providers or, as it were, stage extras on the filmset of our life. (It also determined which children would remain permanently part of our lives and we of theirs, like the Gold girls, or the daughter of the Szanas.) The adults I knew consisted almost entirely of relatives, or of the friends of parents and relatives. Thus I have no memory as a person, of the dentist my mother took me to, even though the experience of going there was only too unforgettable, for he was not someone she ‘knew’. On the other hand I remember Doktor Strasser as a real person, presumably because the family knew him and his family. Curiously enough, teachers do not appear to have belonged to the world of individual adults until my last year in Vienna, and only became people with whom I had personal relations, in Berlin.
School was strictly outside. And ‘outside’, lacking adults as real persons, consisted essentially of other children. The world of children, whether ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, was one which the adults did not really understand, just as we did not really understand what they were about. At best, each side of the generation gap accepted what the other side did as ‘how like children’ or ‘that’s what grown-ups do’. Only puberty, arriving in my last year in Vienna, began to undermine the walls between these separate spheres.
Of course the two spheres overlapped. My reading, especially my English reading, was largely supplied by adults, although I found Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper which well-meaning relatives sent from London both boring and incomprehensible. On the other hand from an early age I gobbled up the German books on birdlife and animals which I received as presents, and after primary school, plunged into the publications of Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde, a society for the popularization of the – mainly biological and evolutionary – natural sciences, to which they subscribed for me. We were taken to the theatre from an early age to plays we might enjoy, but which adults also admired – say, to Schiller’s William Tell (but not to Goethe’s Faust), and the works of the early nineteenth-century Viennese popular playwrights – the charming sentimental magic plays of Raimund, the savagely funny comedies of the great Johann Nestroy, whose bitter wit we did not yet understand. But we would be sent with other primary schoolchildren to the morning sessions of films at the local cinema, the long-gone Maxim-Bio, to see shorts of Chaplin and Jackie Coogan, and, more surprisingly, Fritz Lang’s rather longer Nibelungen epic. In my Viennese experience adults and children did not go to the movies together. Again, intellectual children would naturally make their choice among the books on their parents’ and relatives’ shelves, perhaps influenced by what they heard at home, perhaps not. To this extent the generations shared some tastes. On the other hand, the reading material selected for children by our elders was not, in general, supposed to be of serious interest to adults. Conversely, of all adults with whom we had any dealings, only teachers (who disapproved) were even aware of the passionate interest of thirteen-year-olds in the pocket-sized adventures of detectives with invariably English names which circulated in our classes under such titles as Sherlock Holmes the World Detective – no connection with the original – Sexton Blake, Frank Allen, the Avenger of the Disinherited and the most popular of all, the Berlin detective Tom Shark, with his buddy Pitt Strong, who operated out of the Motzstrasse, familiar to readers of Christopher Isherwood, but as remote to Viennese boys as Holmes’s Baker Street.
Children in the Vienna of the mid-twenties still learned to write the old Gothic script by scratching letters on slates framed in wood, and wiping them with small sponges. Since most post-1918 school texts were in the new roman print, we obviously also learned to read and later write that way, but I cannot remember how. By the time one entered secondary education at the age of eleven one was obviously expected to have acquired the three Rs, but what else we learned in primary school is less clear. Plainly, I found it interesting, since I look back on my elementary schooldays with pleasure, recalling all manner of stories about Vienna and trips into the semi-rural neighbourhood to search for trees, plants and animals. I suppose all this came under the pedagogic heading ‘Heimatkunde’, which, since the German word Heimat notoriously has no exact English equivalent, can best be translated as ‘knowledge of where we come from’. I can see now that it was not a bad preparation for a historian, since the great events of conventional history in and around Vienna were only an incidental part of what Viennese children learned about their habitat. Aspern was not only the name of the battle the Austrians won against Napoleon (neighbouring Wagram, which they decisively lost, was not in the collective memory), but a place in the remote zone beyond the Danube, not yet part of the city, where people went to swim in the lagoons left by the old course of the river, and explored wildernesses of martens and waterfowl. The Turkish sieges of Vienna were important because they had brought coffee into the city as part of the Turkish booty, and therefore our Kaffeehäuser. Of course we had the enormous advantage that the official history of the old imperial Austria had disappeared from sight, except as buildings and monuments, and the new Austria of 1918 had no history yet. It is political continuity that tends to reduce school history to the canonical succession of dates, monarchs and wars. The only historical event I recall celebrating at school in the Vienna of my childhood was the centenary of Beethoven’s death. The teachers themselves knew that in the new era school also had to be different, but they were not yet clear just how. (As my school songbook put it at the time – 1925 – ‘the new methods of teaching having not yet been entirely clarified’.) I was to discover the ‘1066 and all that’ type of history in the secondary Gymnasium, not yet emancipated from traditional pedagogy. Naturally this was unexciting. German, geography, Latin and eventually Greek (which I had to give up on coming to England) seemed much more to my taste, but not, alas, mathematics and the physical sciences.
And certainly not religious instruction. I do not think this arose at all in primary school, but in secondary school I seem to recall that the non-Catholics, Lutherans, Evangelicals, the odd Greek Orthodox, but mainly the Jews, were excused the periods presumably devoted to this subject in class. The minority alternative, an afternoon class for Jews conducted in another part of town by a Miss Miriam Morgenstern and her various successors, was uninspiring. We were repeatedly told and interrogated on the Bible stories in the Pentateuch. I recall the shock I caused when I answered yet another question on who was the most important of the sons of Jacob, unable to believe that they were, once again, going on about Joseph, ‘Judah’. After all, I reasoned, had not all the Jews (Juden) been called after him? It was the wrong answer. I also acquired a knowledge of printed Hebrew characters which I have since lost, plus the essential invocation to the Jews, the ‘Shema Yisroel’ (the language was always pronounced in the Ashkenazi manner and not in the Sephardic pronunciation imposed by Zionism), and a fragment of the ‘Manishtana’, the ritual questions and answers supposed to be recited during Passover by the youngest male. Since nobody in the family celebrated Passover, took notice of the Sabbath or any of the other Jewish holidays, or kept any Jewish dietary rules, I had no occasion to use my knowledge. I knew that one was supposed to cover one’s head in the Temple, but the only times I ever found myself in one were at weddings and funerals. I watched the one school friend who practised the full ritual when addressing the Lord – prayer-shawl, phylacteries and the rest – with an uninvolved curiosity. Moreover, if our family had practised these things, an hour a week at school would have been neither necessary nor sufficient to acquire them.
Though entirely unobservant, we nevertheless knew that we were, and could not get away from being, Jews. After all there were 200,000 of us in Vienna, 10 per cent of the city’s population. Most Viennese Jews bore assimilated first names, but – unlike those in the Anglo-Saxon world – rarely changed their surnames, however recognizably Jewish. Certainly in my childhood nobody I knew had been converted. In principle, under the Habsburgs as under the Hohenzollerns, the abandonment of one form of religious service for another had been a price willingly paid by very successful Jewish families for social or official standing, but after the collapse of society, the advantages of conversion disappeared even for such families, and the Grüns had never aimed so high. Nor could Viennese Jews think of themselves simply as Germans worshipping (or not worshipping) in a particular way. They could not even dream of escaping their fate of being one ethnicity among many. Nobody gave them the option of belonging to ‘the nation’, because there was none. In the Austrian half of the Emperor Franz Josef’s dominions, unlike in the Hungarian half, there was no single ‘country’ with a single ‘people’ theoretically identified with it. Under such circumstances for Jews to be ‘German’ was not a political or national but a cultural project. It meant leaving behind the backwardness and isolation of shtetls and shuls to join the modern world. The city fathers of the town of Brody in Galicia, 80 per cent of whose population was Jewish, had petitioned the emperor long ago to make German the language of school education, not because the emancipated citizens of Brody wanted to be like beer-drinking Teutons, but because they did not want to be like the Hasidim with their miracle-working hereditary wunderrabbis or the yeshiva-bokhers explicating the Talmud in Yiddish. And that is why middle-class Viennese Jews, whose parents or grandparents had migrated from the Polish, Czech and Hungarian hinterlands, demarcated themselves so decisively from the Eastern Jews.
It is no accident that modern Zionism was invented by a Viennese journalist. All Viennese Jews knew, at least since the 1890s, that they lived in a world of anti-Semites and even of potentially dangerous street anti-Semitism. ‘Gottlob kein Jud’ (Thank God it wasn’t a Jew) is the immediate reaction of a (Jewish) passer-by to the cries of newspaper vendors on the Vienna Ring, announcing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the opening scene of Karl Kraus’s wonderful The Last Days of Humanity. There was even less reason for optimism in the 1920s. There was no doubt in most people’s minds that the governing Christian-Social Party remained as anti-Semitic as its founder, Vienna’s celebrated mayor Karl Lueger. And I still recall the moment of shock when my elders – I was barely thirteen – received the news of the 1930 German Reichstag election, which made Hitler’s National Socialists the second-largest party. They knew what it meant. In short, there was simply no way of forgetting that one was Jewish, even though I cannot recall any personal anti-Semitism, because my Englishness gave me, in school at least, an identity which drew attention away from my Jewishness. Britishness probably also immunized me, fortunately, against the temptations of a Jewish nationalism, even though Zionism among the central European young generally went together with moderate or revolutionary socialist views, except for the disciples of Jabotinsky, who were inspired by Mussolini and now govern Israel as the Likud party. Of course Zionism had a greater presence in Herzl’s city than among indigenous Jews in, say, Germany where, until Hitler, it attracted only an untypical fringe. There was no way of overlooking the existence either of anti-Semites or of the blue-white football club Hakoah, which faced my father and Uncle Sidney with a problem of conflicting loyalties when it played the visiting British team Bolton Wanderers. However, the vast majority of emancipated or middle-class Viennese Jews before Hitler were not, and never became, Zionist.
We had no idea what dangers threatened the Jews. Nobody had, or could have. Even in the benighted pogrom-ridden corners of Carpathian Europe and the Polish–Ukrainian plains from which the firstgeneration immigrants came to Vienna, systematic genocide was inconceivable. In case of serious trouble, the old and experienced argued in favour of keeping a low profile, taking evasive action and staying on the right side of such authorities as were in a position to protect them, and might have an interest in doing so, or at least an interest in re-establishing law and order, however inequitable, on their domains. The young and revolutionary called for resistance and active self-defence. The old knew that, sooner or later, things would settle down again; the young might dream of total victory (e.g. world revolution) but how could they imagine total destruction? Neither actually expected a modern country permanently to get rid of all its Jews, something that had not happened since Spain in 1492. Still less could one imagine their physical extirpation. Moreover, only the Zionists actually envisaged the systematic exodus of all Jews into a mono-ethnic nation-state, leaving their former homes, in the Nazi expression, ‘judenrein’. When people before, or even in the first years of, Hitler talked of the dangers of anti-Semitism, they meant an intensification of what Jews had always suffered: discrimination, injustice, victimization, the confident, contemptuous strong intimidating and sometimes brutalizing the minority of the inferior weak. It did not and could not yet mean Auschwitz. The word ‘genocide’ was not coined until 1942.
What exactly could ‘being Jewish’ mean in the 1920s to an intelligent Anglo-Viennese boy who suffered no anti-Semitism and was so remote from the practices and beliefs of traditional Judaism that, until after puberty, he was unaware even of being circumcised? Perhaps only this: that sometime around the age of ten I acquired a simple principle from my mother on a now forgotten occasion when I must have reported, or perhaps even repeated, some negative observation of an uncle’s behaviour as ‘typically Jewish’. She told me very firmly: ‘You must never do anything, or seem to do anything that might suggest that you are ashamed of being a Jew.’
I have tried to observe it ever since, although the strain of doing so is sometimes almost intolerable, in the light of the behaviour of the government of Israel. My mother’s principle was sufficient for me to abstain, with regret, from declaring myself konfessionslos (without religion) as one was entitled to do in Austria at the age of thirteen. It has landed me with the lifetime burden of an unpronounceable surname which seems spontaneously to call for the convenient slide into Hobson or Osborn. It has been enough to define my Judaism ever since, and left me free to live as what my friend the late Isaac Deutscher called a ‘non-Jewish Jew’, but not what the miscellaneous regiment of religious or nationalist publicists call a ‘self-hating Jew’. I have no emotional obligation to the practices of an ancestral religion and even less to the small, militarist, culturally disappointing and politically aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds. I do not even have to fit in with the most fashionable posture of the turn of the new century, that of ‘the victim’, the Jew who, on the strength of the Shoah (and in the era of unique and unprecedented Jewish world achievement, success and public acceptance), asserts unique claims on the world’s conscience as a victim of persecution. Right and wrong, justice and injustice, do not wear ethnic badges or wave national flags. And as a historian I observe that, if there is any justification for the claim that the 0.25 per cent of the global population in the year 2000 which constitute the tribe into which I was born are a ‘chosen’ or special people, it rests not on what it has done within the ghettos or special territories, self-chosen or imposed by others, past, present or future. It rests on its quite disproportionate and remarkable contribution to humanity in the wider world, mainly in the two centuries or so since the Jews were allowed to leave the ghettos, and chose to do so. We are, to quote the title of the book of my friend Richard Marienstras, Polish Jew, French Resistance fighter, defender of Yiddish culture and his country’s chief expert on Shakespeare, ‘un peuple en diaspora’. We shall, in all probability, remain so. And if we make the thought experiment of supposing that Herzl’s dream came true and all Jews ended up in a small independent territorial state which excluded from full citizenship all who were not the sons of Jewish mothers, it would be a bad day for the rest of humanity – and for the Jews themselves.
3
Hard Times
In the late evening of Friday 8 February 1929 my father returned from another of his increasingly desperate visits to town in search of money to earn or borrow, and collapsed outside the front door of our house. My mother heard his groans through the upstairs windows and, when she opened them on the freezing air of that spectacularly hard alpine winter, she heard him calling to her. Within a few minutes he was dead, I assume from a heart attack. He was forty-eight years old. In dying, he also condemned to death my mother, who could not forgive herself for the way she felt she had treated him in what turned out to be the last terrible months, indeed the very last days, of his life.
‘Something has broken inside me,’ she wrote to her sister in the first letter after his death.
I can’t write about it yet. You can imagine how every cross word and every unkind thought now cuts through me like a knife. That ‘never again’, Gretl! What wouldn’t I do now, and what would I have done before, if I had known this would happen … If at least he had been ill for only one day, I could have nursed him and been loving to him again … At least I was there and he didn’t have to die alone.
It was no consolation.
Within two and a half years she was dead also, at the age of thirty-six. I have always assumed that her many self-lacerating, underdressed visits to his grave in the harsh winter months after his death contributed to the lung disease which killed her.
It is not surprising that her self-control frayed and snapped in those appalling months – far less surprising than the fact that, by superhuman efforts, she managed to conceal the situation from her children. Times had never been good since the first years when the young couple had arrived from Egypt with a modest reserve of hard and stable pounds sterling in an Austria sliding into hyperinflation. I have no idea how my father expected or hoped to earn his living in a country whose language he never learned to speak well. Indeed, I have no idea how he had earned his living before he went to Egypt, where a presentable and well-spoken, intelligent but not too intellectual man in his twenties, with a rather impressive record as a sportsman, would have no trouble in finding a job in some shipping or trading office in the large colony of British expats. Perhaps he expected to find similar help as an Englishman in Vienna, although the expatriate colony here was small (even if it had given birth to several of Vienna’s football teams). All I know for certain is that he ordered notepaper headed. ‘L. Percy Hobsbawn, Vienna. Tel. Ad. ‘‘Hobby’’. Tel. Nr… …’. For a brief moment in 1920 my mother reported to her sister that she had servants in the plural: a cook and a maid (who disappeared almost immediately).
From then on it was downhill all the way. From the Seutter Villa we moved into a distinctly more modest flat in a neighbouring suburb, Ober St Veit. From the mid-twenties the family seems to have constantly lived from hand to mouth, barely knowing where the money for the daily expenses would come from. That, I suspect, is why my mother began seriously to try to earn money from her writing, working increasingly long hours with increasing intensity. Still, whatever her literary work contributed to the family income, in the course of 1928 the situation became increasingly catastrophic. By late 1928 the landlord had given us notice. We had to negotiate to avoid the gas being cut off. Two days before Christmas my mother wrote to her sister: ‘It’s Friday and I haven’t bought a single present yet. If Percy doesn’t bring any money tomorrow, I don’t know what I shall do.’
The new year had brought no respite. Three days before my father’s death she complained to her sister that things were getting worse by the day, the rent and phone bill were unpaid, and ‘I usually don’t even have a Schilling in the house’ and she still had no idea where the family would live when the notice to quit expired. Such was the situation when my father went out for the last time. And now he was dead. He was buried a few days later in the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery of Vienna. All I can remember of his death was a dark night when my sister and I were moved, half asleep, from our room to our parents’ bedroom to be vaguely told that something terrible had happened, and the icy wind sweeping over us at the open grave.
Perhaps this is the moment for a son to confront the difficult task of writing about his father.
The task is unusually difficult, because I have virtually no memories of him, that is to say I have clearly chosen to forget most of what I might have remembered. I know what he looked like, a medium-size sinewy man in rimless pince-nez, black hair parted in the middle, with a horizontally lined forehead, but even this impression may owe more to the camera than to my own memory. In my mental family photo album of childhood he is preserved in no more than a half-dozen or so images, all, I think, from the years at Ober St Veit: Daddy wearing a tweed suit – unusual in Vienna; Daddy taking me to an amateur football match; acting as his ball-boy at mixed-doubles tennis games somewhere on the road between our house and the Lainzer Tiergarten, the old imperial hunting ground; Daddy singing English music-hall songs; one short but radiant memory of going for a walk with Daddy on the nearby hills. Then one or two less agreeable images: Daddy trying – and evidently failing – to teach me boxing (he did not persist); and one much more specific image of Daddy in a towering rage in the garden of the Einsiedeleigasse. I must then have been in the last years of primary school, aged nine or ten. He had asked me to fetch a hammer to knock in some nail, possibly something that had come loose from a deck-chair. I was at that time passionately into prehistory, possibly because I was in the middle of reading the first volume of the trilogy Die Höhlenkinder (The Cave Children) by one Sonnleitner, in which a couple of (unrelated) Robinson Crusoe orphan children in an inaccessible alpine valley grow up to reproduce the stages of human prehistory, from palaeolithic to something like recognizable Austrian peasant life. As they were reliving the stone age, I had constructed a stone-age hammer, carefully lashed to its wooden handle in the proper manner. I brought it to him and was amazed at his furious reaction. I have since been told that he was often short-tempered with me, but if, as is likely, this was so, I have blotted it out. I have only one image of him in work. One day he brought home a device he was (as so often) unsuccessfully trying to sell, a shop-sign in which a luminous word – it might have been the name of a product or retailer – was visible on the street as reflected in a mirror. Perhaps he wanted to discuss its prospects with a visitor, which almost certainly meant his brother; for if he had any Viennese friends of his own, I cannot recall them.
Nor can I remember him by the memory of others. There were anecdotes about him in his London youth, and in Egypt, mostly to do with his physical prowess and his attraction for women (although I have never heard the faintest suggestion that he had been unfaithful to his wife). Every East End Jewish family needed at least one brother who could, as they used to say, ‘handle himself’ and stand up to the local Irish. In the Hobsbaum family this was my father’s role; and, since the ring was an accepted option for poor young East Enders, including young Jews with good muscles and quick reflexes, he became a more than useful boxer. He remained an amateur, but the visible record of his success was the two cups which he won as amateur lightweight champion of Egypt in 1907 and 1908 or thereabouts, presumably mainly against competitors from the British occupying forces. They stood on a shelf in our home – Austrian rooms, lacking fireplaces also lacked mantelpieces – and my sister, who remembered him fondly even though she was only just eight when he died, later kept them in her house. He is said on one occasion to have saved his brother Ernest, who had got into trouble swimming. My mother’s novel, which is about a young woman in pre-1914 Egypt, contains a portrait of an all-round athlete demi-god in action, which is almost certainly based on him.
However, he does not come into family anecdotes or jokes in the Vienna years. It seems clear that he did not get on well with his parents-in-law, certainly not with Grandmother Grün. Beyond this, there is very little indeed about him in my mother’s very full letters to her sister – much less than about Sidney, her brother-in-law. Nothing about his plans, his activities, his failures. Nothing about what they did or where they went together. After our parents’ death, he, or more precisely his Vienna years, were hardly talked about in Sidney and Gretl’s household. He seems to disappear from sight.
The truth is that for him the years in Vienna were a disaster. In my mother’s words: ‘So much worry, so much misery, so many disappointments, and then for it to end like that.’ With a regular salary from a regular, not too demanding, job he would have been a happy man, a charming companion, an asset in any milieu that appreciated sport, a little music and fun. Such things were available to men without means or professional qualifications in the formal or informal outposts of the British Empire but not in postwar Vienna. Perhaps, in the distant, irrecoverable world before 1914, he would have been found some job in or through the then prosperous network of the grandparents’ families. After all, one has to do something for one’s daughter’s husband, even if he is a bit of a schlemiel. In the 1920s this was no longer possible. He was on his own. Few people I know have been as unsuited to earning their living in a pitiless world as my father. By the end there can have been very little confidence left in him, if only because nobody believed in him any more. After his death his wife took momentary comfort in the thought that ‘it wouldn’t have got better in the future, only worse. He has been spared that.’
He did not leave much behind except his boxing cups, his season ticket, with photo ID, for the Vienna transport system and a substantial collection of English books, mostly the paperbacks produced by the German firm of Tauchnitz for sale exclusively outside Britain, and therefore, I assume, acquired in Egypt. I cannot recall any new Tauchnitzes coming into the house in Vienna, but perhaps that was because there was no money for them. As I recall, they were mostly late Victorian and Edwardian titles, a lot of Kipling stories (but not Kim), which I read avidly but without understanding, some lesser pre-1918 authors and works on travel and adventure, among which I still remember a now forgotten epic of old-time whaling, The Cruise of the Cachalot. There were also some hardbacks, among which I recall Wells’s Mr Britling Sees It Through. I never opened it. And there was a thick bound volume of Tennyson’s poetry, which looked like a present or school prize. What my father gave to me came through those books, which presumably he (with or without my mother) had chosen or chosen to preserve. Did he himself read to me ‘The Revenge’ (‘In Flores on the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay’) which, with ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘Sunset and Evening Star’ and, of course, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ are the only poems I can retrace to that Tennyson volume? If so, it represents the only direct intellectual contact with him that I can remember.
However, I still have one of the few surviving documents of his life. It is a 1921 entry in one of his sister-in-law’s confessional albums, those sets of answers to questions about oneself which were still popular, at least in central Europe. I reprint the questions and answers. They may serve as his epitaph.
FAVOURITE QUALITY IN MAN: Physical strength
FAVOURITE QUALITY IN WOMAN: Virtue
YOUR IDEA OF HAPPINESS: To have all wants fulfilled
YOUR IDEA OF UNHAPPINESS: Unluck
WHAT ARE YOU BEST AND WORST AT: Missing opportunities. Grasping them.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE SCIENCE: None
WHAT TENDENCY IN ART DO YOU LIKE: Modern
WHAT SOCIAL LIFE DO YOU PREFER? My family
WHAT DO YOU HATE MOST? Modern society
FAVOURITE WRITER/COMPOSER: —
FAVOURITE BOOK AND MUSICAL INSTRUMENT: Piano
FAVOURITE HERO IN FICTION OR HISTORY: Earl of Warwick
FAVOURITE COLOUR AND FLOWER: Rose
FAVOURITE FOOD AND DRINK: —
FAVOURITE NAME: —
FAVOURITE SPORT: Boxing
FAVOURITE GAME: Bridge
HOW DO YOU LIVE? Quietly
YOUR TEMPERAMENT AND CHIEF CHARACTERISTIC: False idealist. Tendency to dream.
MOTTO: Sufficient for the day and perhaps a little over.
He did not realize even this modest ambition.
My father’s death left the family temporarily destitute. There seems to have been no insurance of substance. When, a few days later, I needed new footwear, because my existing shoes let in the icy cold of that terrible winter – I remember crying with the pain of it on the Ringstrasse – my mother had to get new ones for me from a Jewish charity. The family did what they could to help, but there was no money to spare. In any case, the only money she would accept as a cash gift was the £10 which Uncle Harry sent from London. This was a far from negligible sum. Together with what was left of a publisher’s advance and a few book reviews she reckoned it would keep us for about two months.
In spite of my mother’s justified apprehensions, we had to move into the grandparents’ flat. There was nowhere else to go. The three of us slept in the small side room of the three-room apartment, and my mother had to set about earning her living. In the meantime some of her more prosperous friends saved her self-respect by disguising their help as payment for English lessons. (I am fairly sure that the first money I ever earned, which was during these months for lessons to help the daughter of one of her best friends through the entry exam for secondary school, was a tactful way of saving her the cost of my pocket money.) I do remember at least one genuine paying pupil who contributed to our income, a Miss Papazian, the daughter of an Armenian businessman.
Fortunately my mother had already built up her literary connections. Since 1924 she had relations with Rikola-Verlag (later Speidelsche Verlagsbuchhandlung), a small Viennese publishing house, which had already published what proved to be her only novel. The publisher, a Mr Scheuermann, did what he could to help. In any case he valued her as a translator. She had already translated one novel by a now forgotten mid-western Scandinavian-American writer and Scheuermann gave her a contract for another and offered to put her relations with his firm on a more permanent basis. I vaguely remember him as a tallish man with a stoop. She had also been selling short stories in the periodical market, her own or translated English ones, both in Britain and in Germany. They brought in something, though pretty certainly not a living income. (After her death my aunt Mimi, in one of her many spells of financial embarrassment, returned to trying to market my mother’s material.)
In the end she had to take a job with the firm of Alexander Rosenberg, Vienna and Budapest, representing British textile producers, presumably on the strength of her knowledge of English. She enjoyed office life, after years of solitary labour at home – she got on well with people – and besides, it gave her the chance to get away from the constant nervous tension of living at close quarters with her mother in an overcrowded flat. Until then she would escape by going to the café for an hour, simply to have some time of her own. I remember being taken to the office and shown off to her colleagues.
Then, at the end of 1929, she began to spit blood. By early April the doctors had collapsed one lung. For the last year and a half of her life she died slowly in a succession of hospitals and sanatoria. The exact nature of her lung disease is not clear, for I understand that it does not entirely fit the diagnosis of tuberculosis, which in those days was both common and potentially lethal. Whatever it was, medical help could not do much to slow it down. As it happened, regular paid employment had put her into the social insurance system of ‘Red Vienna’, the benefits of which she now discovered. It is impossible to imagine how her medical care could otherwise have been paid for.
Her illness transformed our situation. There was no way in which she could henceforth look after a boy of twelve and a girl of nine. Fortunately for both her children, in the spring of 1929 Sidney had finally managed to strike it rich – at least by the undemanding standards of the Hobsbaum and Grün families in the 1920s. He landed a job, insecure, imprecise but with pay and scope, in Berlin with Universal Films. This not only satisfied his lifelong ambition to be associated with the world of artistic creation, but gave him and Gretl the means to take responsibility for the half-orphaned children of his brother and her sister. We thus owe the shape of our future lives to Carl Laemmle, founder of the Hollywood star system and Universal Films. We were now split. Nancy went to Berlin immediately. I stayed in Vienna until my mother’s death in July 1931.
I do not know why. Perhaps Sidney and Gretl felt that they could not immediately cope with two additional children, or with the problem of finding at a moment’s notice a Berlin school that would suit a boy halfway through his third year at a secondary school in Vienna. It is true that my mother was patently more attached to me than to my sister, but she had got used to the thought that, as it was unlikely that she would be able to cope permanently with two children, she would have to lose them. In any case her idea had long been that, if possible, I should eventually go to England to be educated there, and to make a career as a real Englishman. Most central European middle-class Jews tended to idealize Britain, so stable, strong, boring and lacking in neuroses, not least, evidently, the Grün girls all of whom had married Englishmen. Even so, leaving marriage aside, my mother was an exceptionally passionate Anglophile. As she wrote to her sister, the mere thought that the letter she drafted for Mr Rosenberg was going to Huddersfield made her feel sentimental about England. It was she who insisted that in our house only English should be spoken, not just with my father but with her. She corrected my English and tried to expand it from the basic vocabulary of domestic communication. She dreamed that I might one day find myself in the Indian Civil Service – or rather, since I was so obviously interested in birds, in the Indian Forestry Service, which would bring me (and her) even closer to the world of her admired Jungle Book.
Until my father’s death, these were dreams for a remote future. Now a chance to send me to England arose immediately, for her sister Mimi offered to invite me to the boarding house she and her husband had just opened in Lancashire, on the edge of Southport, close by the Birkdale golf-links. I went there after the end of the 1928–9 school year. It was my first visit to Britain, and indeed my first journey alone. (Mimi’s first action when I arrived was to take the money I carried on me, for, as so often, her cash-flow was in one of its periods of pause.) For a while my mother hoped I might be able to stay there permanently, asking me to find out when school started, and ‘whether you will have to learn a lot in order to catch up with the boys of your age’. ‘I am anxious to hear about your plans for the autumn – or rather Auntie Mimi’s plans for you,’ she wrote in another letter. ‘I hope for your sake you can stay there, and I’m sure you hope so too.’ It is impossible to know how seriously she took the possibility, and clearly there was no concrete planning. In any case there was never more than the ghost of a chance that the footloose and always cash-strapped Mimi, with or without her handsome but economically useless husband, could provide a permanent base for me. I returned to Vienna at the end of the school vacation.
Whether I wanted to stay in Britain, or what I thought of the idea, I can no longer remember. Visiting England, being shown round London and getting to know Uncle Harry and Aunt Bella, but especially my cousin Ronnie – my senior by five years – was exciting, although I found Southport a dead loss, and life among the paying guests at Wintersgarth uninspiring. Apart from the memory of endless streets of small yellowy-grey brick houses on the way into London, and the surprising discovery that Lancashire people pronounced English vowels quite differently from us, I brought back two main discoveries from England. The first was the weeklies read avidly by British working-class boys – The Wizard , Adventure and other such titles, very different from the bien-pensant material English relatives had sent us in Vienna from time to time. I read them hungrily and with unalloyed enjoyment, spent all my pocket money on them, and took a collection back to Vienna. (They did not cost much – 2d an issue, if I remember correctly.) I did not realize it then, but reading these dense grey columns of fantasy adventure and dreams made me, for the first time, a genuine Briton since, at least for a moment, they put me on the same wavelength as most British boys of my age group.
The second was the Boy Scouts. I was taken to a world jamboree of the movement, which took place at the time not far from Southport, and returned an enthusiastic convert, with a copy of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys , determined to join them. I did so the next year in Vienna, where the ‘Pfadfinder’ (Scouts) competed with the blue-shirted Social-Democratic ‘Red Falcons’, which my mother dissuaded me from joining on the grounds that their campfires were admirable, but I was still too young to commit myself to the Marxism that went with them. I was thus to make my entry into public life at the age of fourteen not under revolutionary auspices, but at a Boy Scout parade, composed mainly of middle-class Viennese Jewish boys, formally inspected by the then President of Austria, an undistinguished and doubtless anti-Semitic Catholic politician by the name of Miklas.
I was a passionately enthusiastic Scout, even recruiting some of my classmates, though not much gifted either for fieldcraft or group life. It was among the Scouts that I found my best friend in the days between the deaths of my father and my mother. We maintained contact until his death, for he escaped to England after Hitler occupied Austria, found a job as a doorkeeper to the Afghan legation in London and remained to become a medical technician. (My troop leader ended up in Australia.) Had there been any Baden-Powell Scouts in Germany, I might well have joined them there too, after my mother’s death, but there were none, any more than at that time – difficult though this may be to credit now – there were any German football teams that counted internationally. If there were the equivalent of the Austrian ‘Red Falcons’, they belonged to a very much less exciting and not at all revolutionary Social-Democratic Party. Marxism thus had no competitors.
For the two years after my return from England I lived a curiously provisional semi-independent life. To stay with a neurotic and semi-invalid grandmother after my mother went into hospital was clearly out of the question. For a few months I was taken over by Great-uncle Viktor Friedmann and Aunt Elsa, who had at least one child still in the house, my cousin Herta, several years my senior. (Her brother Otto had been boarding with Sidney and Gretl in Berlin, so there was some obligation of reciprocity.) For the rest of the school year I commuted daily from their flat in the Seventh District, the other side of the Old Town, to my Gymnasium in the Third District, opposite – though I did not then know it – the house built for himself by the philosopher Wittgenstein. In the summer of 1930 I joined Gretl, Nancy and Peter in an Upper Austrian alpine village, Weyer-an-der-Enns, to be near my mother, who had been sent to a hospital/sanatorium there. As all readers of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain know, mountain air was prescribed for TB sufferers. But it did her no good.
I spent my last school year in Vienna alone, or rather as a sort of male au pair. Someone discovered a Mrs Effenberger, widow of a colonel and, like so many good Viennese, from southern Bohemia – she came from Pisek – whose son Bertl, two or three years younger than me, wanted English lessons. In return for these, and possibly a very modest subsidy, she was prepared to look after me. Since she lived in the outer suburb of Währing, I had to move school yet again and joined the Federal Gymnasium XVIII in the Klostergasse, my third secondary school in three years. By this time my mother had left Weyer and been transferred to a hospital not too far from Währing. I visited her there every week. Sidney and Gretl invited me to join them and my sister in Berlin over Christmas, but sitting by my mother’s bed was my only regular physical contact with family. I, in turn, was all that was left of her life’s work and hopes, within regular reach of her hand.
Sometime in the early summer of 1931 it became clear to the adults that the end was close. Gretl must have come to Vienna and stayed there. My mother was transferred to a garden sanatorium in Purkersdorf, just west of Vienna, where I saw her for the last time shortly before going to camp with the Scouts. I can remember nothing of the occasion except how emaciated she looked and that, not knowing what to say or do – there were others present – I glanced out of the window and saw a hawfinch, a small bird with a beak strong enough to crack cherry stones, that I had never seen before and for which I had long been on the lookout. So my last memory of her is not one of grief but of ornithological pleasure.
She died on 12 July 1931. I was fetched from camp. Shortly after the funeral she was buried in the summer heat in the same grave as my father. I left Vienna for good and went to Berlin. From then on Nancy and I were together again, and Sidney, Gretl and their son Peter (then just six) were our family. It was not to be the last death in the family in that decade.
Perhaps this is the moment for some reflections on my mother.
She was the smallest of the three Grün girls, the most intelligent, clearly the most gifted except in joie de vivre. Less pretty and spontaneous than her younger sister, the family beauty Gretl, less rebellious and adventurous than the older Mimi, she was in many ways perhaps the most conventional of the three. Engaged to Percy at the age of eighteen, married earlier than the other two – and according to her letters as a virgin – she returned to Vienna after the war a married woman with one child, and on the verge of expecting another. Her sisters and many of her friends had meanwhile passed through that pressure-cooker of change and emancipation, the war and the era of breakdown and revolution at the end of it, unmarried and unattached. Not that she missed all the war. For a few months, while waiting to go to Switzerland to marry at the British Consulate in Zurich, she worked as a volunteer nurse in a military hospital. There she learned that wounded men could not bear lying on any but the most smoothly laid bedsheets – she later taught me the trick of making such beds – and tried to communicate with a dying Ruthenian soldier by selecting phrases from a volume of what she discovered to be translations of fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm, the German text of which she could easily refer to. Still, life in the colonial society of Alexandria was an exotic, but recognizable version of life in Europe before 1914. Not so life in the Vienna to which she returned after four years’ absence.
In some ways she remained conventional in the pre-1914 Viennese middle-class sense. As I have already said, she found it almost inconceivable to live without servants, and was amazed to discover that in England ladies could both do their own cooking and housework without them and stay ladies. She took it for granted that a married woman must put her interests second to those of husband and children, and was shocked and irritated by her sister Mimi who refused to do so. Not that this made her a particularly successful mother, but then, as my sister and I agreed many years later when comparing notes about our youth, none of the several people who were or acted as our parents was fitted for the job by talent or training. None was very good at it, nor was there any reason why one would expect them to have been. Their parents had not been either. She did not plunge headlong into the new ways of the world, though she eventually followed them. She did not cut her hair until 1924 or 1925, and was disappointed when nobody seemed to notice that she had.
Life in Vienna made few concessions to one who (in her album ‘confession’) claimed that her idea of happiness was ‘to look into a glowing fireplace, having no further wishes’ and who claimed that her favourite book was Andersen’s Fairy Tales. I do not think she was an efficient or enthusiastic housewife or much of a manager, although she seems to have enjoyed dressmaking and even the endless adaptation and adjustment of old clothes to new uses or growing children, which tight budgets made necessary. There were times when she went on strike against the constant unceasing struggle to make ends meet. ‘I just went into town and into the Café, and thought ‘‘après moi’’ …’ she wrote one day when the laundry was due to return, there was not enough money in the house to pay for it, and the two friends to whom she had run to borrow it from were not in. Or she might simply decide to go to the movies alone to forget. Or else, increasingly, she buried herself in her writing, which had at least the material justification that it brought in money. Or in the handful of close friendships (including the one with her younger sister) from which, as time went on, she almost certainly received her main moral support. And who, in turn, relied on her friendship, loved and admired her.
Curiously enough, she was not a great reader of contemporary literature. In the mid-twenties, asked by her convalescent sister for books to read, she said she had read hardly anything lately other than Shakespeare, and had not been in a bookshop for ages.
When did she begin to think of herself as a writer, a far less common occupation for women in central Europe at that time than it would have been on the already heavily feminized scene of British fiction? When did she choose the pen-name of ‘Nelly Holden’? By 1924 she had already sent manuscripts to Rikola-Verlag and written, or at least drafted, a novel – presumably the one based on her own experiences about a young girl in Alexandria which was published by Rikola as Elisabeth Chrissanthis in 1926. Another novel was written by the time my father died, but, to her dismay, the publisher was unenthusiastic, urged rewriting and in the end it was never published. Conceivably it might have been, if my mother had been able to go on working. The manuscript does not seem to have survived. There is no way of telling how seriously she took the short stories she wrote for the magazine market. On the other hand, she clearly took great and legitimate pride in the professionalism and literary quality of her translations.
How good a writer was she? I read her novel only many years later. When young I kept away from it, I don’t know why. She wrote seriously with style in an elegant, lyrical, harmonious and carefully considered German, which was perhaps natural for a young Viennese intellectual who had once been a faithful attender at the recitals of the great Karl Kraus, but I cannot honestly claim that she looked like a writer of the first class. She also wrote poems which have disappeared. When I read them as a teenager, I shocked my aunt Gretl by telling her I did not think highly of them, believing even then that one should not delude oneself even about the people or things one cared about most in life.
These are the reconstructions of an old man, who still tries to be guided by this principle in his professional and private passions. And in any case all this is quite irrelevant to my relations with the person who has had the most profound influence on my life. I am now old enough to be the grandfather of a woman who died at the age of thirty-six, and yet, it would seem absurd if somewhere across the Styx we were to meet and I would see her or treat her as a young woman. She would still be my mother. I would expect her to ask me what I had done with my life, and to tell her that I had managed to realize at least some of her hopes for me, that I had accepted at least some of the signs of public recognition because I believed they would have pleased her. And I think I would be no more honest or dishonest than Sir Isaiah Berlin who used to excuse taking his knighthood by saying that he had only done it to give pleasure to his mother. I have no doubt at all that the measurable proof that the boy she had made such efforts to turn into a proper Englishman had in the end become an accepted member of the official British cultural establishment would have given her greater happiness than anything in the last ten years of her short life.
I think her influence on me was above all moral, though in the days of her illness I was also moved by the desire not to hurt her or go against her wishes. I took notice of her even when she criticized my behaviour. I took her seriously. I think it was her honesty as well as her pride that carried conviction. She had no religious faith and no interest in being Jewish as such, although, to please her mother, she had gone through a religious marriage ceremony as well as a secular one. Yet, as I have already recalled, she gave me the lasting foundation for my own sense of being a Jew, to the irritation or puzzlement of those who cannot believe that a mere negative can be a sufficient basis for identity. She probably postponed my political commitment by suggesting that even very bright boys might need time for reflection and intellectual growth, just as she taught me that there were great writers who could be understood only when one got older. And, since she always levelled with me, she made me believe her.
Not that, even leaving age aside, we were on the same intellectual wavelength. Her enthusiasm for Pan-Europe, a somewhat conservative movement for a single European polity (but excluding Russia) propagated by an Austrian aristocrat, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, never infected me. It was the one excursion of a liberal but basically non-political mind into the realm of politics. On the other hand she was frankly bored by the writings of her friend Grete Szana’s husband, the peripatetic Alexander Szana, in which he reported on his politico-social travels to Russia (highly critical), to North Africa, and elsewhere. I listened to him avidly, no doubt encouraged by his generous gifts of the cosmopolitan stamps arriving in his newspaper office. Thanks to these memories I was later to choose to go to North Africa, when Cambridge offered me an undergraduate travel grant in 1938. I obviously derive my admiration for Karl Kraus from her, but her insistence on making me listen to a full performance of Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah on our grandparents’ radio – I don’t think we had one ourselves – put me off classical music for several years.
I still remember sitting by her bedside in the hospital, both of us listening to one another, as I prepared for growing up and she for death. She wanted to live. ‘I wish I could believe it,’ she told me, pointing to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science Scriptures, which a visitor had left her. ‘Perhaps if I had that faith, it might do more for me than the doctors have done so far,’ I remember her saying, ‘but I can’t believe it.’ But shortly before her death she imagined she was getting better, she might even be cured. I am told this is always a reliable sign that the end is close at hand.
In retrospect the years between my parents’ deaths appear a period of tragedy, trauma, loss and insecurity, which was bound to leave deep traces on the lives of two children who passed through it. This is certainly true, and it is clear that my sister took many years to recover from the loss of her father followed by an uncomprehending childhood and a resentful youth of constant disruption and emotional insecurity. I have no doubt at all that I must also bear the emotional scars of those sombre years somewhere on me. And yet I do not think I was conscious of them as such. That may be the illusion of someone who, like a computer, has a ‘trash’ facility for deleting unpleasant or unacceptable data, but one from which others may be able to recover them. However, I do not believe that this is the only explanation why, though not particularly happy, I did not experience these years as specially distressing. Perhaps the realities of the situation passed me by because I lived most of the time at some remove from the real world – not so much in a world of dreams, but of curiosity, enquiry, solitary reading, observation, comparison and experimentation – this was the only time in my life when I built myself a radio set (crystal-sets were easy to construct out of cigar boxes). Although in my year as a Boy Scout I developed at least one lasting friendship, I lived without intimacy. When I think about my own life in the last year before my mother’s death, what comes into my mind are three memories: first, sitting alone on a swing in the garden of Mrs Effenberger, trying to learn by heart the song of the blackbirds, while noting the variations between them; second, receiving my mother’s birthday present – a very cheap secondhand bike – with the sort of embarrassment that only teenagers suffer, since its frame was visibly both repainted and bent; and third, passing by a shop window framed by mirrors one afternoon and discovering what my face looked like in profile. Was I as unattractive as that? Even the fact (which I had learned from one of the fascinating popular science booklets of Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde) that I must clearly belong to the thin one of Kretzschmer’s three psychosomatic types, and that, like Frederick the Great, I would therefore look better in old age, did not bring consolation. Like so much else, then and later, I kept my feelings to myself.
Nor, in later life, was I to think much about those times. After leaving Vienna in 1931 I never saw the grave again. In 1996 I went to look for it, as part of a television programme about interwar history as experienced by a central European child. But after more than sixty years of world history the grave, with the stone plate that my mother had ordered for it (at a cost of 400 Schillings), could no longer be found. The camera crew filmed me looking for the site. Only the electronic databank which the authorities of the Jewish section of the Vienna Central Cemetery, conscious of the American tourist trade, had had the foresight to compile, recorded that the grave contained the remains of Leopold Percy Hobsbaum, died 8 February 1929, Nelly Hobsbaum, died 12 July 1931 and – to my surprise – also Grandmother Ernestine Grün, died 1934.
4
Berlin: Weimar Dies
When I went back to Vienna in 1960 for the first time after almost thirty years, nothing appeared to have changed. The houses we had lived in and the schools we had attended were still there, even if they looked smaller now, the streets were recognizable, even the trams ran under their old numbers and letters, along the same routes. The past was physically present. Not so in Berlin. The first time I returned there, I stood outside what should have been the house we had all lived in, on the Aschaffenburgerstrasse in Wilmersdorf. On the map the street still ran from the Prager Platz to the Bayrischer Platz. The Barbarossastrasse should have opened just opposite the front door of our old apartment building, leading directly to my sister’s school. But nothing was there any longer. There were houses, but I did not recognize them. As in one of those nightmares of disorientation and displacement, not only could I no longer identify anything about the place, but I did not even know in which direction to look to get my old bearings. The ruined building of my old school was still physically present on the Grunewaldstrasse, but the school itself had not survived the war. The location of my uncle’s office in the city centre was not even identifiable on the map, since the whole area round Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz, a bomb-destroyed no-man’s land between East and West, had not been even notionally restored since the war. In Berlin the physical past had been wiped out by the bombs of the Second World War. On ideological grounds, neither the two Germanies of the Cold War nor the reunited Germany of the 1990s were interested in restoring it. The capital of the new ‘Berlin Republic’, like the West Berlin of the Cold War a subsidized showcase for the values of wealth and freedom, is an architectural artefact. The German Democratic Republic was not a great builder – its most ambitious construction, apart from the Stalinallee, was the Berlin Wall – neither was it much of a restorer, although it did its best with the architecturally very beautiful old Prussian centre of the city, which happened to lie in its territory. So the city in which I spent the two most decisive years of my life lives on only in memory.
Not that the Berlin of the last Weimar years was much to write home about architecturally. It was a boom city of the nineteenth century, that is to say essentially heavy late Victorian (in German terms: Wilhelmine), but lacking the imperial style and urban cohesion of the Vienna of the Ringstrasse, or the planning of Budapest. It had inherited a rather fine neo-classical stretch, but most of it consisted, in the heavily proletarian East – Berlin was a centre of industry – of the endless courtyards of giant ‘rent-barracks’ (Mietskasernen) on treeless streets, and in the greener and solidly middle-class West of more decorated and (obviously) more comfortable apartment blocks. Weimar Berlin was still essentially William II’s Berlin which, except for its sheer size, was probably the least distinguished capital city of non-Balkan Europe, apart perhaps from Madrid. In any case, intellectual teenagers were unlikely to be impressed by the imperial efforts at memorability, such as the Reichstag and the adjoining Siegesallee, a ridiculous avenue of thirty-two Hohenzollern rulers immortalized in statues, all indicative of military glory and – this was a source of endless Berlin jokes – invariably with one foot behind and one in front. It was destroyed after the war by the victorious but humourless Allies, presumably as part of the elimination of Prussia, and all that might remind Germans of Prussia, from the post-1945 memory. It has left only one equally incongruous literary monument. Rudolf Herrnstadt, the former editor of the official daily of the East German government, purged from the Socialist Unity Party’s leadership in 1953 and denounced as a supporter of Beria, the (executed) Soviet secret police chief, was exiled to the Prussian State Archives. (In fairness to a regime that has had a justifiably bad press, it must be said that no alleged traitor within its ranks was executed, even in the worst Stalinist years.) There he amused himself by writing a brilliantly funny squib, Die Beine der Hohenzollern (The Legs of the Hohenzollern) on the basis of a file he had discovered there. This was a collection of essays by secondary-school boys, set by some master desperate to extract pedagogic content from a class visit to the (then new) monument to Prussian patriotism. How far did the postures of the statues express the characters of their subjects? This was the topic on which the class wrote its compositions; evidently with such loyal success that the Kaiser himself asked to see the essays and commented on them in his own imperial hand. It was an exercise very much in the spirit of Weimar Berlin.
The Berlin in which the young of the middle class lived in 1931–3 was a place to move about in, not to stand and stare, of streets rather than buildings – the Motzstrasse and Kaiserallee of Isherwood and Erich Kästner and of my youth. But for most of us, the point of these streets was that so many led to the really memorable part of the city, the ring of lakes and woods that surrounded and still surrounds it: to the Grunewald, and its narrow tree- and bush-lined lakes, the Schlachtensee and the Krumme Lanke, along whose frozen surfaces we skated in winter – Berlin is a distinctly cold city – to Zehlendorf, gateway to the marvellous Wannsee system of lakes in the west. The eastern lakes were not such a regular part of our world. The west was where the rich and the very rich lived in grey stone mansions amid the trees. By a paradox not uncharacteristic of Berlin, the ‘Grunewaldviertel’ had been originally developed by a millionaire member of a local Jewish family that prided itself on a long left-wing tradition, going back to an avidly book-collecting ancestor converted to revolution in 1848 Paris – he had bought a first edition of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto there. It was represented in my lifetime by the sons and daughters of R. R. Kuczynski, a distinguished demographer who found refuge after 1933 at the LSE. All of them became lifelong communists, the two best known being Ruth, who, in a long and adventurous career in Soviet intelligence acted, among other things, as contact for Klaus Fuchs in Britain, and the charming and ever-hopeful economic historian Jürgen, an ingenious defender of what he took to be Marx’s thesis on the pauperization of the proletariat, who took the gigantic family library back to East Berlin, where he died at the age of ninety-three, the doyen of his subject, having probably written more words than any other scholar of my acquaintance, even without counting the forty-two volumes of his History of the Conditions of the Working Class. He simply could not stop himself reading and writing. Since the family still owned the Grunewaldviertel, he was probably the richest citizen of East Berlin, which enabled him to extend the library and to offer an annual prize of 100,000 (Eastern) Deutschmarks for promising work by young GDR scholars in economic history which, thanks to his support, flourished in East Germany. He survived the GDR, where he had expressed moderately dissenting opinions, which were tolerated because his ingenuous loyalty was so patent. And he had after all been in the Communist Party longer than the state’s rulers.
For Berlin, like Manhattan (with which it liked to compare itself in the Weimar years), was politically a city left of centre. It lacked a historically rooted indigenous bourgeois patriciate, and was therefore more welcoming to the Jews. (The aristocratic tradition of Prussian court, army and state looked down on bourgeois of any description.) It was a bullshit-detecting city sceptical of claims to social superiority, nationalist rhetoric and sentimentality. In spite of Dr Goebbels, who made it his business to wrest it from the Reds on Hitler’s behalf, it never became a Nazi city at heart. Unlike the dialect of Vienna, spoken in one way or another by everyone from emperor to dustman, the Berlin dialect, a speeded-up, wisecracking urban adaptation of the plattdeutsch language of the north German plain, was primarily a demotic idiom separating the people from the toffs, though well understood by all. The mere insistence on specific Berliner grammatical forms which, correct in dialect, were patently incorrect in school German, was enough to keep it separate from educated talk. Naturally the middle-class pupils of my classical Gymnasium took to it with enthusiasm, as the pupils of prestigious Paris lycées take to the plebeian argot of their city, and after the end of the GDR, inhabitants of the former East Berlin, resentful but proud, liked to distinguish themselves from the Western rulers of their part of Germany by insisting on ‘berlinering’, i.e. talking the broadest dialect. It was a confident, brash, in-your-face idiom, into which I also plunged with enthusiasm, even though to this day the native inflection of my German hints at Vienna. Even today the sound, now rare on the street, of pure Berlinerisch, brings back to me the historic moment that decided the shape both of the twentieth century and of my life.
I came to Berlin in the late summer of 1931, as the world economy collapsed. Within weeks of my arrival, Britain, its axis for the past century, abandoned both the gold standard and free trade. In central Europe catastrophe had been expected since the Americans called in their loans and it had occurred earlier that summer when two major banks had collapsed. Financial cataclysm did not have much direct impact on a displaced teenager, but unemployment, already rising steeply – it hit 44 per cent of the German labour force in 1932 – reached into our own family. My cousin Otto, who had lived with Sidney and Gretl and still visited them from time to time, had lost his job, and reacted by becoming a communist. He was not the only one: in 1932 85 per cent of the membership of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) was unemployed. Younger than him, I was naturally impressed by someone so tall, handsome, successful with women, and now wearing a badge with the Russian initials of the Young Communist International. I suppose he was the first communist I had ever knowingly met: in Austria there were hardly any, and joining the Communist Party was therefore not something that would come to young men’s minds until after the civil war of 1934 had discredited the social-democrat leaders.
The collapse of the world economy was up to a point something young persons of the middle class read about, rather than experienced directly. But the world economic crisis was like a volcano, generating political eruptions. That is what we could not escape, because it dominated our skyline, like the occasionally smoking cones of the real volcanoes which tower over their cities – Vesuvius, Etna, Mont Pelée. Eruption was in the air we breathed. Since 1930 its symbol was familiar: the black swastika in a white circle on red ground.
It is difficult for those who have not experienced the ‘Age of Catastrophe’ of the twentieth century in central Europe to see what it meant to live in a world that was simply not expected to last, in something that could not really even be described as a world, but merely as a provisional way-station between a dead past and a future not yet born, unless perhaps in the depth of revolutionary Russia. Nowhere was this more palpable than in the dying days of the Weimar Republic.
Nobody had really wanted Weimar in 1918, and even those who accepted, or even actively supported it, thought of it as at most a second-best compromise: better than social revolution, bolshevism or anarchy (if they were on the moderate right), better than the Prussian Empire (if they were on the moderate left). It was anybody’s guess whether it would outlast the catastrophes of its first five years: a penal peace treaty almost unanimously resented by Germans of all political stripes, failed military coups and terrorist assassins on the extreme right, failed local Soviet republics and insurrections on the extreme left, French armies occupying the heartland of German industry, and on top of all this, the (to most people) incomprehensible, and even to this day unparalleled, phenomenon of the galloping Great Inflation of 1923. For a few years in the middle 1920s it looked briefly as though Weimar might work. The Mark was stabilized – it remained stable until the war and again from 1948 until its demise – the most powerful economy of Europe, recovered from the war, had regained its dynamism, and for the first time political stability seemed in sight. It did not, it could not, survive the Wall Street Crash and the Great Slump. In 1928 the lunatic ultra-right had seemed virtually extinct. In the elections of that year Hitler’s Nazi Party was reduced to 2.5 per cent and twelve seats in the Reichstag, actually less than the increasingly enfeebled Democrat Party, the most loyal supporters of Weimar. Two years later the Nazis came back with 107 seats, second only to the social democrats. What remained of Weimar was ruled by emergency decree. Between the summer of 1930 and February 1932 the Reichstag was in session for barely ten weeks, all told. And as unemployment rose, so, ineluctably, did the forces of some kind of radical-revolutionary solution: National Socialism on the right and communism on the left. These were the circumstances in which I came to Berlin in the summer of 1931.
I joined Nancy and seven-year-old Peter in Sidney and Gretl’s flat in the Aschaffenburgerstrasse, rented from one of the many financially hard-pressed elderly widows of good family. I can remember very little about this apartment except that it was light and that the dinner conversation of the adults with their evening guests could be overheard from the room I slept in. Sidney and Gretl had a reasonably active social life, what with business acquaintances, relatives and Viennese friends visiting or living in Berlin, for little and impoverished interwar Austria was too small a scene for Viennese talent. We were too young to take much part in this. We took the Vossische Zeitung, a newspaper my aunt appreciated chiefly for the cultural pages, which she cut out. I have vivid memories of great cinemas and the elaborate luxury automobiles parked outside – Maybachs, Hispano-Suizas, Isotta-Fraschinis, Cords.
Within a few days of my arrival Uncle Sidney found a place for me within walking distance of the flat and Nancy’s neighbouring Barbarossaschule, at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium in Schöneberg, in time to join the Obertertia (upper third form). Unlike Austrian and British secondary schools, German ones numbered downwards: one started in the Sexta (sixth form) and graduated with the leaving certificate (Abitur) from the Oberprima (upper first form). Of all the thirteen years I spent at seven educational establishments before going up to Cambridge, the nineteen or so months at the PHG have left the deepest impression on my life. It was the medium through which I experienced what I knew even then to be a decisive moment in the history of the twentieth century. Moreover, I experienced it, not as the child of Austria (even though I just reached puberty in my last year in Vienna), but at the Columbus-like moment of adolescence when passion and intelligence discover the world for the first time, and the very experience of living is unforgettable. Many years later an old friend brought me together with the then German ambassador to the UK, Günther von Hase, who, when my name had come up in conversation, immediately recalled me as having been in his form. And I, in turn, had immediately identified the name as that of a remembered face in the classroom in which both of us had sat – and that only for a few months in a long life, in which it is pretty certain neither of us had given any thought to the other since 1933. We were merely classmates, not in any sense friends. But we were there together at a time in our lives and in history which one does not forget. The very names revived it. In the low-lying landscape of my school years the PHG stands out like a sierra. For the first years after Berlin, life in England held no real interest.
Was my Berlin school really as important as it seems to me in retrospect? The artillery of Weimar bombarded an expectant fourteen-year-old from all sides. School did not teach me the songs which still mean ‘Berlin’ to me – those from the Brecht–Weill Dreigroschenoper to the bronze voice of Ernst Busch singing Erich Weinert’s ‘Stempellied’ (‘Song of the Dole’). The great events of the times – the fall of the Brüning government, the three national elections of 1932, the Papen and Schleicher governments, Hitler taking power, the Reichstag fire – did not reach me through school, but through street posters, and via the daily paper and the periodicals at home (though, curiously, I have less memory of the radio news in Berlin than in Vienna). Those monuments of Weimar design and Weimar content, the books of the Malik Verlag, I remember them from the stands in the book department of the KaDeWe, the great department store on the Tauentzienstrasse, which is one of the few continuities with the Berlin of my youth: full of authors such as B. Traven, Ilya Ehrenburg, Arnold Zweig and, in a different mode, Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger.
Much of it, obviously, must have reached me through home. Uncle Sidney was enjoying one of his occasional spells of economic sunshine working for Universal Films, which as the producer of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the movie of Erich Remarque’s celebrated antiwar novel, was at the epicentre of Weimar cultural politics. The Nazis had organized demonstrations against it and demanded that it should be banned. More than this: its boss, ‘Uncle’ Carl Laemmle, was the only Hollywood tycoon who came from Germany and had personal knowledge of what was going on there, because he returned for an annual visit to keep in touch. And he did. He was far from a highbrow, but to the informed eye the movies for which Universal was best known – All Quiet apart – the horror pictures such as Frankenstein and Dracula, clearly showed the influence of the German expressionist avant-garde.
Who knows how Sidney got into the movie business? Sometime in 1930 he had succeeded in talking himself into some kind of a job at Universal. It was uncertain and insecure. But while it lasted, it was recognized – if only by the personal gift by Uncle Carl himself of a signed copy of his biography, by the hand of an English litératteur and forgotten minor poet in the Georgian mode, John Drinkwater. (Laemmle had picked him after H. G. Wells had refused him because he was told that Drinkwater, of whom he had naturally not heard, had written a biography of Abraham Lincoln.) The book sold 164 bona fide copies in England.1 Our copy has not survived the peripeties of the Hobsbawm family in the twentieth century.
What his precise functions in the company were, I never knew. A letter from my grandmother reports an offer to give him a job in the Paris office in the autumn of 1931, which he refused, because Gretl said the children (my sister and myself) had hardly had a chance to get used to the new schools in Berlin. Fate is determined by such short-term family decisions. What would our lives have been if we had gone to Paris in 1931? One of the jobs he certainly did was to fit out the expedition to shoot the film S.O.S. Eisberg, a polar adventure with Luis Trenker, a veteran of snow-and-rock pictures, and the air-ace Ernst Udet, who was earning his living as a stunt flyer until German rearmament gave him a distinguished place in Hitler’s air force. Technical advice came from members of the Alfred Wegener expeditions, one of whom came to the house and told me about the theory of continental drift, and how he had all his toes frozen off in the Greenland winter. On at least one other occasion he promoted Hollywood products distributed in Europe – more specifically, Frankenstein in the Polish market. His campaign, of which he was proud, included the word-of-mouth rumour (for the benefit of the then very large Jewish public) that Boris Karloff, whose real name was an undramatic Pratt, was merely a lightly gentilized Boruch Karloff. He certainly had some connection with Poland, for at one time in the summer of 1932 there was some question of a permanent posting to Poland, and Sidney tried to prepare us for the very different life there. We would live in Warsaw. The Poles, he told me, were touchy people with a strong sense of honour, and a tendency to fight duels. I never had the chance to check out his information.
Nevertheless, on reflection, home was not anchored in Berlin as school was. As will be clear by now, the Hobsbawm household lived, not in Berlin, but in a transnational world, where people like us still – though the 1930s were to make it much more difficult – moved from country to country in search of a living. We might have roots in England or Vienna, but Berlin was merely one stop on the complicated route that might take us almost anywhere in Europe west of the USSR. Nor did home in Berlin – three addresses and two different forms of household in eighteen months – have the continuity of school. My window on the world at its moment of crisis was the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium.2
It was a perfectly conventional school in the conservative Prussian tradition, founded in 1890 to meet the needs of a rapidly growing middle-class area. Prince Henry, whose name it bore, a brother of Emperor William II, was a naval figure, which may explain why the school rightly prided itself on its boat club on the Little Wannsee (a model of its boat-house ‘in the Spreewald style’ had won a gold medal at the Brussels World Exposition of 1908). Rightly, because, while providing good training it was not, unlike its British equivalents, particularly interested in competitive races and it provided a wonderful opportunity for junior and senior boys to meet on equal terms. The club had somehow acquired a meadow, known as ‘unser Gut’ (our estate) on the small fishery-protected Sakrower See, accessible only by special permission through a narrow waterway. Groups of friends made up crews to row there or meet there at weekends, to talk, look at the summer skies and swim across the green waters before returning to the evening city. For the first and only time in my life I could see the point of a sports club. An old boy of the school, Dr Wolfgang Unger, a physician at the Spandau hospital, kept an eye on the training of new recruits. I understand that, after being removed from his hospital post on racial grounds in 1934, he committed suicide, unwilling to leave his country, Germany.
A Prussian school with military connections was naturally Protestant in spirit, deeply patriotic and conservative. Those of us who did not fit this pattern – whether as Catholics, Jews, foreigners, pacifists or leftwingers, felt ourselves as a collective minority, even though in no measurable way an excluded minority.3 Nevertheless it was not a Nazi school. (Few of the boys I knew showed much enthusiasm for Hitler and the Brownshirts, except Kube, the unusually dense son of a man who was Hitler’s Gauleiter of Brandenburg, and who made it his business to get a literature teacher at the school fired on the grounds that he ‘favoured’ the surviving Jewish students and taught chiefly the degraded literature of the Weimar Republic. He was to become the notorious boss of occupied Belorussia during the war, until eventually assassinated by his patriotic local mistress.) On the contrary. Whatever sympathy the school might have had for the national revival promised by Hitler did not survive the forcible purging, not long after I left for England, of the highly respected and popular headmaster, Oberstudiendirektor Dr Walter Schönbrunn, a political undesirable under the new regime. He was replaced by an imposed and bitterly resented Kommissarischer Leiter. One can hardly call the PHG of the 1930s a centre of dissidence, but it is characteristic that Franz Marc’s ‘Tower of Blue Horses’ – I remember it well from the school hallway – banned as ‘degenerate art’ by the new authorities, was rescued from a storeroom by one form and hung in its own classroom. Pupils protested against the dismissal of Professor ‘Sally’ Birnbaum, the popular mathematics and science teacher: signatures were collected all over the school for a petition to retain him. In the winter of 1936–7 the entire lower first form still made a collective visit to his home in the Rosenheimerstrasse. (He survived in Berlin until 1943 when he and his wife were loaded on to 36. Osttransport, destination, presumably, Auschwitz.) Indeed, there is some evidence that the school went out of its way to treat Jewish students and teachers well, at least while they remained. However politically unacceptable to a would-be teenage revolutionary, who would never have dreamed of wearing the peaked school cap (rather in the yachtsman’s style with a soft top), it was a decent school.
This was undoubtedly due to what the Hitler regime recognized in Schönbrunn (generally known as ‘der Chef’ or ‘the boss’) as the anti-hierarchical and socially suspect spirit of Weimar. The boat club was one expression of it. The stress on student self-government and participation in disciplinary cases was another. The unforgettable camping and youth-hostelling class journeys through the Mark Brandenburg and Mecklenburg were a third. (Not for nothing had Dr Schönbrunn, equally qualified to teach German, Latin, Greek and mathematics, published a work with the title, whose tone is virtually untranslatable into non-German languages, Jugendwandern als Reifung zur Kultur (Youth Ripening into Culture by Hiking). I did not, personally, warm to this smallish man with sharp eyes behind rimless glasses and a receding hairline, who wore plus-fours when he joined his charges on a Wandertag or school journey. (But then, as every reader of the Tintin books knows, this was in Europe the era of plus-fours.) He dismissed my admiration for Karl Kraus and his journal Die Fackel with the phrase: ‘Der Fackelkraus, ein eitler Schwätzer’ (‘vain and garrulous’), which, in retrospect, is not 100 per cent off target. He criticized my prose style, which he regarded as excessively mannered.
Perhaps I would have forgiven him, had I known that he was an admirer of the architecture of the ‘neue Sachlichkeit’ (new sobriety) and regarded both its uncluttered lines and ‘the conscious austerity of modern creative writing … as signs of a return to a new classicism’, an apollonian spirit welcome to a teacher of ancient Greek. He chose the communist Ludwig Renn’s novel Krieg (War) as an example of this new classicism. (He had of course, like most of our teachers, served in the 1914 war.) Still, if I did not exactly like him, I respected him. And I unquestionably benefited from his efforts, finally successful in the year before I came to the Grunewaldstrasse, ‘finally to get truly modern works into the school library’.
Several of these works shaped my life. In a large encyclopedic guide to contemporary German writing I discovered the poems (as distinct from the songs and plays) of Bertolt Brecht. And it was to the school library that an exasperated master – his name was Willi Bodsch, and I remember nothing else about him – referred me when I announced my communist convictions. He told me firmly (and correctly): ‘You clearly do not know what you are talking about. Go to the library and look up the subject.’ I did so, and discovered the Communist Manifesto …
What I learned in the formal schoolroom lessons is less clear. I can see that they were not a particularly central part of school experience, except as occasions for observing, manipulating and sometimes testing the nerves and authority of a group of ill-understood adults. Most of them seemed to me to be almost caricatures of German schoolmasters, square, with glasses and (when not bald) crew-cut, and to be rather old – they were mostly in their late forties or early fifties. All of them sounded like passionate conservative German patriots. No doubt those who were not kept a low profile, but most of them probably were. None more so than the George Groszian figure of Professor Emil Simon, whose Greek lessons we became expert at side-tracking, either by asking what Wilamowitz would have thought of the passage (good for at least ten minutes of panegyric about the greatest of German classical scholars) or, more reliably, stimulating his reminiscences of the world war. This would invariably lead us from construing Homer’s Odyssey to a monologue about the experience of the frontline soldier, an officer’s duty, the need for postwar order, Russian barbarism, the horrors of the October Revolution and the Cheka, Lenin’s praetorian guard of Lettish riflemen and the like, plus a reminder that, contrary to what ignorant workers might think, Spartacus, far from of proletarian origins, had been a person of high social status before he was enslaved. It was, as I now recognize many decades later, an early version of the thesis used in the 1980s in mitigation of the Third Reich, namely that it had been necessary to defend an ordered society against bolshevism, and in any case the horrors of the Hitler era had been anticipated and were inspired by the horrors of Red Russia. So far as I know Emil Simon was not a Nazi, but merely a German conservative reminding himself of better days, such as might be heard in middle-class bars round the Stammtisch (the regulars’ table). Irrespective of our politics, we made fun of him and pitied his son, a pale, fragile boy who sat in the front row of the class and carried the triple burden of being Emil’s son, his pupil, and the witness to our ridicule of him.
In any case, life was too interesting to concentrate essentially on school work. I did not at this time have particularly brilliant school reports. The truth is, teachers and at least this pupil talked past one another. I learned absolutely nothing in the history lessons given by a small, fat old man, ‘Tönnchen’ (‘little barrel’) Rubensohn, except the names and dates of all the German emperors, all of which I have since forgotten. He taught them by dashing round the form pointing a ruler at each of us with the words: ‘Quick, Henry the Fowler – the dates.’ I now know that he was as bored by this exercise as we were. He was, in fact, the most distinguished scholar in the school, author of a monograph on the mystery cults of Eleusis and Samothrace, a contributor to Pauly-Wissowa, the great encyclopedia of classical antiquity and a recognized classical archaeologist in the Aegean and papyrus expert long before the war. Perhaps I should have discovered this in the sixth form where education was no longer based on compulsory memorization. Until then the main effect of his teaching was to turn at least one potential future historian off the subject. It is not surprising that in Berlin I learned by absorption rather than instruction. But, of course, I did learn.
The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and, as I now know, was bound to fail. The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me, as deleted texts are still waiting to be recovered by experts, somewhere on the hard disks of computers. I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness which I do not feel towards Communist China, because I belong to the generation for whom the October Revolution represented the hope of the world, as China never did. The Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle symbolized it. But what exactly made the Berlin schoolboy a communist?
To write an autobiography is to think of oneself as one has never really done before. In my case it is to strip the geological deposits of three quarters of a century away and to recover or to discover and reconstruct a buried stranger. As I look back and try to understand this remote and unfamiliar child, I come to the conclusion that, had he lived in other historical circumstances, nobody would have forecast for him a future of passionate commitment to politics, though almost every observer would have predicted a future as some kind of intellectual. Human beings did not appear to interest him much, either singly or collectively; certainly much less than birds. Indeed, he seems to have been unusually remote from the affairs of the world. He had no personal reasons for rejecting the social order and did not feel himself suffer even from the standard anti-Semitism of central Europe, since, fair-haired and blue-eyed, he was not identified as ‘Der Jude’ but as ‘Der Engländer’. To be blamed for the Treaty of Versailles could be tough in a German school, but it was not demeaning. The activities to which I gravitated spontaneously at a school where I felt unquestionably happy had nothing to do with politics: the literary society, the boat club, natural history, the marvellous school journeys through the Mark Brandenburg and Mecklenburg, camping or staying the night in youth hostels on straw palliasses while, full of joy and passion, we talked half the night away. About what? About everything, from the nature of truth to who we were, from sex and more sex, to literature and art, from jokes to destiny. But not about the politics of the day. At least that is how I remember those unforgettable nights. Certainly I cannot recall political discussions, let alone disagreements, with my two closest friends, Ernst Wiemer and Hans-Heinz Schroeder, the classroom poet – he died in Russia during the war. What I had in common with them is unclear. I merely note that, on the graduation photograph of my class in 1936, they were among the only four of the twenty-three young men and two masters who had their Abitur recorded in open-necked shirts. Certainly it was not politics. While the one may not actually have been nationalist, our common subject was the nonsense poetry of Christian Morgenstern and the world in general. I did not disagree with the other’s conventionally Prussian admiration for Frederick the Great, who may indeed also be admired on other grounds, but I certainly did not share the views that made him collect models of the soldiers of his armies.
In short, if I were to make the mental experiment of transposing the boy I was then into another time and/or place – say, into the England of the 1950s or the USA of the 1980s – I cannot easily see him plunging, as I did, into the passionate commitment to world revolution.
And yet, the mere fact of imagining this transposition demonstrates how unthinkable it was in the Berlin of 1931–3. It has indeed been imagined. Fred Uhlman, a few years older than me when he left Germany, a refugee lawyer who took to painting sad pictures of the bleak Welsh countryside, wrote a quasi-autobiographical novella later made into a film (Reunion ) about the dramatic impact of the new Hitler regime on the school friendship of a Jewish boy, unconscious of impending cataclysm, and a young ‘Aryan’ aristocrat at a South German Gymnasium not unlike my own. Perhaps this was a possible scenario in Stuttgart, but in the crisis-saturated atmosphere of the Berlin of 1931–3, such a degree of political innocence was inconceivable. We were on the Titanic, and everyone knew it was hitting the iceberg. The only uncertainty was about what would happen when it did. Who would provide a new ship? It was impossible to remain outside politics. But how could one support the parties of the Weimar Republic who no longer even knew how to man the lifeboats? They were entirely absent from the presidential elections of 1932, which were fought between Hitler and the communist candidate Ernst Thälmann and old imperial Field Marshal Hindenburg, supported by all non-communists as the only way of holding up the rise of Hitler. (Within a few months he was to call Hitler to power.) But for someone like myself there was really only one choice. German nationalism, whether in the traditional form of the PHG or in the form of Hitler’s National Socialism was not an option for an Engländer and a Jew, though I could understand why it appealed to those who were neither. What was there left but the communists, especially for a boy who arrived in Germany already emotionally drawn to the left?
As I entered the school year 1932–3, the sense that we were living in some sort of final crisis, or at least a crisis destined for some cataclysmic resolution, became overpowering. The presidential election of May 1932, the first of several in that ominous year, had already eliminated the parties of the Weimar Republic. The last of its governments, under Brüning, had fallen shortly after and given way to a clique of aristocratic reactionaries governing entirely by presidential decree, for the administration of Franz von Papen had virtually no support in the Reichstag, let alone even the makings of a majority. The new government immediately sent a small detail of soldiers to dismiss the government of the largest German state, Prussia, where a Social-Democratic–Centre Party coalition had maintained something like democratic rule. The ministers went like lambs, as Papen, trying to bring Hitler into his government, revoked a recent ban on the wearing of their uniforms by Nazi stormtroopers. Their deliberately provocative parades now became part of the normal street scene. Every day saw battles between the uniformed protection squads of the various parties. In July alone eighty-six were killed, mainly in clashes between Nazis and communists, and the number of those seriously injured ran into hundreds. Hitler, playing for higher stakes, forced a general election in July. The Nazis were returned with almost 14 million votes (37.5 per cent) and 230 seats – barely fewer than the combined strength of the Weimar parties (Social Democrats, Catholics and the now virtually invisible Democrats) and the communists with over 5 million and eighty-nine seats. For practical purposes the Weimar Republic was dead. Only the form of its funeral remained to be determined. But until there was agreement between the President, the army, the reactionaries and Hitler (who insisted on the Chancellorship or nothing), its corpse could not be buried.
This was the situation in which the school year began. If I remember my first year in Berlin in colour, my memories of the last six months are in darkening shades of grey with touches of red. The change was not only political but personal.
For as 1932 advanced, our prospects in Berlin dimmed. We became victims not of Hitler but of the ‘Great Crisis’ or, more specifically, of a new law vainly trying to stem the rising flood of unemployment by obliging foreign film companies (and no doubt other foreign enterprises) to employ a minimum of 75 per cent of German citizens. Sidney was dispensable. At least that is the most plausible explanation of what happened. Nothing came of the Polish proposal, but in the autumn of 1932, the Berlin job having evidently come to an end, Sidney took Gretl and Peter, then just seven, to Barcelona – whether on a mission for Universal, or with some local prospects in mind, I cannot say. I suspect that there were no firm prospects of permanence, for if there had been, the whole family would have moved. As it was, Nancy and I were left in Berlin for the time being to continue our schooling, until the outlook became clearer. It was the end of the new house and garden in Lichterfelde, an upmarket suburb to which we had moved from the Aschaffenburgerstrasse, next to someone in the music world who actually had the luxury of a small but genuinely private swimming-pool. Nancy and I moved in with the third of the Grün sisters, our peripatetic aunt Mimi, whose life had brought her, via various failed enterprises in English provincial towns (‘we have too few debts to make bankruptcy worth while and just have to carry on’ 4) to a sublet apartment by the railway line in Halensee, a Berlin district by the far end of the Kurfürstendamm. There, as always, she took paying guests, offering the English ones German lessons. That is where we spent our last months in Berlin and saw in the Third Reich.
This was probably the only time in our lives that my sister Nancy and I lived together outside a family setting, for Mimi, living from hand to mouth as always and anyway unused to children – she never had any herself – hardly counted as such. I can only guess how the absence of any effective parental authority in these last months in Berlin affected Nancy, but I am fairly certain that my political activities would have been a good deal more constricted if Sidney and Gretl had stayed in Berlin. Being three and a half years older than my sister, I felt responsible for her. There was no one else now. I had never previously bothered about how she went to school, but only about the daily trauma of being forced to cycle from Lichterfelde to the Gymnasium on a machine of which I felt ashamed as only a teenager can, namely my dying mother’s present, the black repainted secondhand bike with the bent frame. (I would arrive half an hour early at the bike-shed and sneak out late, afraid of being seen on it.) Now, however, we went to and came back from school together, for Halensee was a long way from Wilmersdorf (the PHG and the Barbarossaschule were virtually neighbours). Presumably we did so by tram, but I only recall the endless footslog during the dramatic four-day Berlin transport strike of early November. We were two youngsters alone. When she reached her twelfth birthday, I felt it was my duty to ‘enlighten’ her (as the German phrase went), namely to tell her about the facts of life, which she claimed she did not yet know. She may have been too polite to tell me she knew them already, or at any rate the part concerning women’s periods, which were then the most immediately relevant to a girl reaching puberty. I cannot say that those months brought us closer together than two siblings who have gone through the same traumatic experiences are anyway. We had very little in common except these traumas, and my intellectualism and lack of interest in the world of people gave me a protection she lacked. I did not recognize this then. She did not share my interests or my life, increasingly dominated by politics. I did not even know what her life at school was, who were her friends or if she had any. I suppose we gossiped about Mimi and the paying guests, played cards in the evening, and sent letters to Spain. I elaborated stories for young Peter on the basis of a combination of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle and Christian Morgenstern’s ‘Nasobem’, the animal that walks on its noses.
I seem to remember the Friedrichsruher Strasse only in grey or artificial light, presumably because in those months we were away from it for most of the day. In the evening we all met in the sitting room, which contained the original tenant’s bookcase, which allowed me, for the first time, to read Thomas Mann (Tristan) and a short novel by Colette. Mimi, familiar with these situations, showed a genuine interest in the lives of her lodgers and went through her usual social repertoire, palmistry and other forms of character- and fortune-telling, and conversation about the reality of psychic phenomena with examples. She had – it is one of the few concrete details of life in Halensee that sticks in my mind – tried to save money by buying potatoes by the sackful for cooking, sending me down to the cellar from time to time to fetch up the necessary supply. As always, she lived on a financial knife-edge. As time went on they began to sprout, and had to be peeled with care to conceal this.
5
Berlin: Brown and Red
Meanwhile my revolutionary inclinations moved from theory to practice. The first person who attempted to give more precision to them was an older social-democratic boy, Gerhard Wittenberg. With him I passed the initiation ritual of the typical socialist intellectual of the twentieth century, namely the shortlived attempt to read and understand Karl Marx’s Capital, starting on page one. It did not last long – at this stage of my life anyway – and, while we remained friends, I was attracted neither by German (as distinct from Austrian) social democracy nor by Gerhard’s Zionism, which led him, after Hitler came to power, to emigrate to a kibbutz in Palestine, and eventually – so I understand – to be killed on a return trip to Germany on a mission to rescue Jews. (Zionist militants in those days were, of course, overwhelmingly socialists, mostly of various Marxist convictions.)
The person who recruited me to a communist organization was also older than me. How we got in touch I cannot remember, but it is not unlikely that there would have been talk about the Englishman in the Untersekunda (lower second form) who announced his red convictions. As I remember him, Rudolf (Rolf) Leder was dark, saturnine and with a taste for leather jackets, and clearly took the Party’s idealized version of the Soviet bolshevik cadre as his model. He lived with his parents in Friedenau, and I can still visualize the two or three shelves on the narrow side of his small room on which he kept his books about communism and the Soviet Union. He must have lent me some – who else could I have borrowed them from – since I read several Soviet novels of the 1920s. None of them suggested a particularly utopian view of life in revolutionary Russia. In this they were like all Soviet fiction written before the Stalin era. Yet when I suggested to Rolf – I can still remember that conversation – that communism must run into problems because of Russia’s backwardness, he bristled: the USSR was beyond criticism. Through him I bought the special edition of a volume of documents and photographs celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution, Fünfzehn Eiserne Schritte (Fifteen Iron Steps). I have it still in its simple sand-coloured hardcover designed by John Heartfield, and on the flyleaf a quotation in my youthful hand (naturally in the German version) from Lenin’s ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder. Together with the half-decayed paper booklet of Unter roten Fahnen: Kampflieder giving the texts of revolutionary songs, it is the oldest record of my political commitment.
Rolf Leder was a man who saw himself as out of place in the bourgeois environment of our school. He had, he claims in his autobiography, joined the Young Communists on the street not much more than a year before he recruited me, and was proud to have won acceptance in the streetwise milieu of young Berlin working-class reds by ‘proving himself’ in the ‘time of latent civil war’ when the comrades faced the cops and the brownshirt stormtroopers. 1 However, he did not suggest that I should join the KJV but a distinctly less proletarian organization, the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (SSB), designed specifically to hold secondary-school students. I did so, and he went his own way. I never saw him again after I left Berlin. He died in 1996.
Yet our lives remained curiously intertwined. Many years later, in a West German work on writers and communism, I discovered that a rather prominent member of the literary establishment in the German Republic, the poet Stephan Hermlin, was actually called Rudolf Leder. He had, I later discovered from his autobiography, stayed on illegally in Germany, refusing his family’s offer to send him to Cambridge, suffering some months’ imprisonment in a concentration camp. In 1935 he had been in France, he fought in Spain and later in the French Resistance, before returning to the Soviet-occupied zone in 1946 and a distinguished literary career in what was to become the GDR. From what I have read of his work, I think he was a good rather than an outstanding poet, probably better as a translator and adapter of other poets, and his brief, allusive memoir Abendlicht is widely admired. On the other hand, as a prominent figure on the cultural scene under a philistine and authoritarian regime he behaved well, protesting and protecting, and using his friendship with Honecker against the Stasi (secret police). This is an instance when the old German phrase ‘Guter Mensch, schlechter Musikant’ (‘good guy, bad musician’) should be read not as a disparagement of the artist but as praise for the public man. I wrote him a letter, presumably care of the Writers’ Union, to ask whether he was the Leder I had known, and received a brief answer, saying he was, but he could not remember me. Nor did he react later, when friends in Berlin mentioned me to him. However, the brief connection between two Berlin schoolboys in 1932, both of whom, in different ways and countries, became well-known figures on the cultural left, seems to fascinate both journalists and readers in post-1989 East Germany. At all events I have frequently found myself asked about it.
There is a curious coda to the episode of Rudolf Leder. Shortly before his death, Karl Corino, a West German literary bloodhound hostile to Stephan Hermlin, followed the trail of his public biography, and discovered that most of it was romance sometimes only tangentially connected with reality. 2 He had not abandoned a wealthy, cultured, art-collecting and music-loving household of the Anglo-German high bourgeoisie for the struggle of the workers. His father was a Romanian and later stateless businessman, married to a Galician immigrant to Britain (and therefore with a British passport), who had known a brief era of financial glory in the inflation years, followed by collapse. The father had not served in the First World War, nor died in a concentration camp, but in 1939 had reached safety in London. Hermlin himself had not been in a concentration camp, even briefly. He had not been to Spain. There was no evidence of work in the French Resistance. And so on. It was a highly effective and, in spite of the evident bias of the author and some of his sources, a convincing hatchet-job.
Of course Leder is not the only autobiographical writer who has cast himself (or herself) in a more romantic or important role in the affairs of the world, and modified the scenario of his life accordingly. Especially if we accept the investigator’s evidence that much of his actual life before the return to Berlin in 1946, including his school career, had been disappointing. After all, for most of the time he did not so much invent as embellish or turn intention into reality. He had, indeed, left his job in Tel Aviv (the official Hermlin did not insist on the brief emigration to Palestine) declaring that he was going to join the Brigades in Spain, and he might well have gone there but for an operation whose consequences were almost fatal; and by the time he could leave Palestine, his wife was pregnant. His father had, after all, been a millionaire briefly, who did collect art, and had had his wife painted by Max Liebermann and himself by Lovis Corinth. Moreover, the career of any frontier-crossing German Jewish refugee in the 1930s and 1940s provides plenty of opportunities to improve reality on forms to be filled and questionnaires to be answered, and plenty of incentive to do so. And there is no question that, from sometime before I knew him in 1932, he had been a communist, and remained devoted to the Party until it ceased to exist with the end of the GDR, and that he had paid a price for his communism. Curiously, this brings our lives together again. For if Corino is right, Leder got himself formally expelled from his Gymnasium for writing an inflammatory article in the January 1932 issue of the paper published by the Sozialistischer Schülerbund, to which he was about to recruit me, the suitably named Der Schulkampf (Struggle in the School). If this had happened at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium in the school years between 1931 and 1933, it is inconceivable that I would not have heard about it. Most likely he was expelled from another Gymnasium , and only joined the PHG in 1932–3 after that. Both of us were thus birds of passage in our school. How and why he left it, I cannot say. 3 He certainly did not graduate.
The organization I joined has only a shadowy place in the history of German or any other communism, unlike its inspirer, Olga Benario. This dynamic young woman, daughter of a prosperous bourgeois family in Munich, had been converted to revolution after the shortlived Munich Soviet republic of 1919, in which a young teacher, Otto Braun, with whom she was to be linked for some years, had taken part. In 1928, at the head of a team of young communists, she broke into the Berlin courtroom where Otto Braun was being tried for high treason and liberated him. Both were spirited away and, now permanently illegal, joined the Comintern and Red Army operational services. In Moscow Benario was to be attached as adviser to Luis Carlos Prestes, a Brazilian officer who had led a group of military rebels for some years in a celebrated long march through the backwoods of his country and was now about to join and lead the Brazilian Communist Party. She married him, helped to plan and took part with him in the disastrous insurrection of 1935, was captured and returned to Hitler’s Germany by the Brazilian government. In 1942 she was killed in Ravensbruck concentration camp. Meanwhile Otto Braun had gone east rather than west to become the only European actually to take part (with a marked lack of enthusiasm for Mao Ze Dong) in the Long March of the Chinese Red Armies. Retired in East Berlin, he published his memoirs in the 1980s. When I joined the SSB to serve the world revolution, I was unaware of the historic bonds that would link the organization to some of its most dramatic battles, although I had no doubt that those who became communists in the Berlin of 1932 faced a future of danger, persecution and insurrection.
A less dramatic aspect of Benario’s devotion to world revolution was the SSB itself.4 This organization seems to have originated in Neukölln, one of the reddest districts of working-class Berlin, with politically organized social-democratic and communist working-class pupils in the so-called Aufbauschulen – the schools supported by the Prussian government, where selected children would make the transition to full secondary education and eventually the Abitur. Arriving in Neukölln as a dynamic new agit-prop cadre in 1926, Benario inspired school Young Communists to form a ‘communist secondary fraction’ (Kopefra)5 in the Aufbauschulen on the analogy of the already existing ‘student fractions’ (Kostufra). Since these schools contained students from both working-class parties, it was decided to form a wider association covering both, the SSB. Inevitably, when social democrats became ‘social fascists’ for the Communist International, not much of this spirit of unity remained. The SSB had become a dependency of the Communist Party. By 1928 it had also extended outside the red areas of Berlin, with groups in Zentrum and Westen – that is to say in middle-class schools such as mine – and indeed into other parts of Germany. It also published the newly founded Schulkampf.
By the time I joined it in the autumn of 1932, the SSB was pretty well on its last legs, largely, it seems, because financial cuts during the economic crisis made life increasingly difficult for the Aufbauschulen, which were still its main support. Several groups ceased to exist in the second half of 1932, or met only irregularly. Co-ordinated action was no longer possible. Even in the strongholds of the cause, such as the Karl-Marx-Schule in Neukölln, the atmosphere at the end of 1932 was depressed and resigned. The Schulkampf is said to have ceased publication after May 1932, but I assume that this meant in printed form, since I still possess a later copy of it, patently duplicated by comrades who were not very skilled at handling duplicators. However, my small West Berlin cell of the association showed no signs of discouragement.
We met first in the apartment of the parents of one of our members, then fairly regularly in the backroom of a communist pub situated close to Halensee. The grassroots history of both the German and the French labour movements, neither of which had a strong temperance component, can be largely written in terms of the bars, in the front rooms of which comrades met to lift a glass of wine or (as in Berlin) beer, while more serious meetings were going on round the table in the back rooms. Of course drinks could be ordered in the front room and taken to the back, but the practice was discouraged. As a proper organization we had an Orglei (organizational leader), a boy called Wolfheim – first name Walter, I think – and a Polei (political leader or commissar), Bohrer, whom I recall as chubby. German and Russian communist organizations preferred syllabic abbreviations to initials, as in Komintern, Kolkhoz and Gulag and the use of second names gave meetings a certain formality. The only other member of the cell who has remained in my memory is a handsome and stylish Russian called Gennadi (‘Goda’) Bubrik, who came to meetings in a Russian shirt and whose father worked for one of the Russian agencies in Berlin. I assume we must have discussed the situation in our various schools and potential recruits or ‘contacts’, but by late 1932 national politics was incomparably more urgent than the problems with a reactionary master in, say, the Unterprima of the Bismarck Gymnasium. So the political situation undoubtedly dominated our agenda, Bohrer indicating ‘the line’ we were to follow.
What did we think? It is now generally accepted that the policy which the KPD pursued, following the Comintern line, in the years of Hitler’s rise to power, was one of suicidal idiocy. It rested on the assumption that a new round of class confrontation and revolutions was approaching after the breakdown of the temporary stabilization of capitalism in the middle twenties, and that the chief obstacle to the necessary radicalization of the workers under communist leadership was the domination of most labour movements by the moderate social democrats. These assumptions were not in themselves implausible, but, especially after 1930, the view that social democracy was therefore a greater danger than the rise of Hitler, indeed, that it could be described as ‘social fascism’, bordered on political insanity.1 Indeed, it went against the instincts, the common sense, as well as the socialist tradition of both socialist and communist workers (or schoolchildren), who knew perfectly well that they had more in common with one another than with Nazis. What is more, by the time I came to Berlin it was patent that the major political issue in Germany was how to stop Hitler’s rise to power. Indeed, even the ultra-sectarian Party line made an, albeit empty, concession to reality. On our lapels we wore not the hammer and sickle, but the ‘antifa’ badge – a call for common action against fascism, though of course only with the workers, not with their power-corrupted and class-betraying leaders. Both socialists and communists knew, if only from the Italian example, that their destruction was the chief aim of a fascist regime. Conservatives, or even elements in the centre, might consider fitting Hitler into a coalition government, which, underestimating him, they hoped they might control. Socialists and communists knew perfectly well that compromise and coexistence with National Socialism were impossible both for it and for them. Our way of minimizing the Nazi danger – and, like all others, we also underestimated it grossly – was different. We thought that, if they got into power, they would soon be overthrown by a radicalized working class under the leadership of the KPD, already an army of three to four hundred thousand. Had not the communist vote increased almost as fast as the Nazi vote since 1928? Was it not continuing to rise sharply in the last months of 1932, as the Nazi vote fell? But we had no doubt that before then the wolves of a fascist regime would be loosed against us. And so they were: the original concentration camps of the Third Reich were designed primarily to hold communists.
Excuses for the lunacies of the Comintern line may no doubt be found, even though there were socialists and dissident or silenced communists who opposed it. Seventy-odd years later, and with the historian’s professional hindsight, one is less sanguine about the possibility of stopping Hitler’s rise to power by means of a union of all antifascists than we came to be later in the 1930s. In any case, by 1932 a parliamentary majority of the centre-left was no longer possible even in the doubly improbable case that the communists had been willing to join it, and that the social democrats, let alone the Catholic Centre Party, had accepted them. The Weimar Republic went with Brüning. Hitler could indeed have been stopped by the President, the Reichswehr and the assorted authoritarian reactionaries and businessmen who took over then, and who certainly did not want what they got after 30 January 1933. Indeed, Hitler and the momentum of the rise of the swastika was stopped by them after the Nazis’ electoral triumph in the summer of 1932. There was nothing inevitable about the events which led to his appointment as Chancellor. But by this time there was nothing either social democrats or communists could have done about it.
Nevertheless, in retrospect the Comintern line made no sense. Were we in any sense critical of it? Almost certainly not. Radical, once-for-all change was what we wanted. Nazis and communists were parties of the young, if only because young men are far from repelled by the politics of action, loyalty and an extremism untained by the low, dishonest compromises of those who think of politics as the art of the possible. (National Socialism did not leave much public scope for women, and at this stage, alas, its passionate support for women’s rights did not attract more than a minority of exceptional women to an overwhelmingly male communist movement.) Indeed, the militant Young Communist Leagues were the Comintern’s chief catspaws in pushing the often reluctant adult leadership of the Parties into the extremes of the ‘class against class’ policy. The Nazis were certainly our enemies on the streets, but so were the police, and the chiefs of police of Berlin, whose men had killed some thirty men on May Day 1929, were social democrats. The KPD had made this incident into an emblem of social-democratic class betrayal. And who could respect the institutions of Weimar law and government, which were essentially those of the empire, without the Kaiser?
We were thus recognizably like the young ultras of 1968, but with four major differences. First, we were not a minority of radical dissidents in societies that had never been more prosperous and with political systems of unquestioned stability. In the economically storm-tossed and politically brittle Germany of 1932 those who radically rejected the status quo were the majority. Second, unlike the 1968 student radicals, we – right or left – were not protesters but engaged in an essentially revolutionary struggle for political power; more exactly, disciplined political mass parties seeking sole state power. Whatever was to come after, taking power was the first, indispensable step. Third, comparatively few of us on the ultra left were intellectuals, if only because even in a well-schooled country like Germany over 90 per cent of young people never got even a secondary education. And among the intellectual youth, we on the left were a modest minority. The bulk of secondary students were almost certainly on the right, though – as in my own school – not necessarily on the National Socialist right. Among the university students support for Hitler was notoriously strong.
The fourth difference was that the communist intellectuals were not cultural dissidents. Culturally the major divide was not, as in the era of rock music, between generations, but the basically political conflict between those who accepted and those who rejected what the Nazis called ‘cultural bolshevism’, that is to say almost everything that made the fourteen years of the Weimar Republic such an extraordinary era in the history of the arts and sciences. In Berlin, at least, we shared this culture with our seniors, for pre-Stalinist communism, while distinguishing sharply between writers and artists with the ‘right’ and those with the ‘wrong’ line, did not yet reject the men and women of the cultural avant-garde who had so patently hailed the October Revolution and shared the KPD’s distaste for the Republic of Ebert and Hindenburg. ‘Socialist Realism’ was still below the horizon. An admiration for Brecht, the Bauhaus and George Grosz did not separate parents and children, but it did separate the right from a sort of cultural popular front that stretched from the social-democratic authorities of Prussia and Berlin to the furthest outskirts of anarchist bohemia. It also united liberals with the left. The chief reason why in its day the German Democratic Republic had a far more liberal legislation on birth control and abortion than the western Federal Republic was that, in the days of Weimar, legalizing abortion, prohibited by the German Civil Code, had been a major campaigning issue for the KPD. I look at my surviving copy of the Schulkampf , and there it is still, together with announcements of meetings by the medical men so long associated with sexual emancipation.
Reconstructing my experience of the last months of the Weimar Republic, how can I disentangle memory from what I now know as a historian, what I now think after a lifetime of political reflections and debates about what the German left should or should not have done? Then I knew no more of what was happening between the triumph of the Nazis at the elections of 30 July 1932 and Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 than I read in the Vossische Zeitung. In any case, I did not really react to the news politically or critically, but as a romantic partisan, or a football supporter. The Berlin transport strike, which took place shortly before the last democratic election of the Republic in early November 1932, was then, and has been ever since, the subject of bitter polemics. It was successfully called, against the official (social-democratic) unions by the communist RGO (Red Union Opposition) and, since the National Socialists were anxious not to lose contact with the workers, supported by the Nazi union organization. It is not surprising that this temporary common front between red and brown in the dying weeks of the Republic has had a bad press, and is still quoted against the Weimar communists. It certainly demonstrates the irrationality of a party which, knowing that the entry of Hitler into government might be imminent, continued to treat the social democrats as its main adversary. As it happened the principal immediate consequences of the strike were, probably, to help the communist vote to rise quite sharply in the election on 6 November, and to contribute to the dramatic decline of the Nazi vote in that election – but both were soon forgotten. And yet I cannot remember either discussing the issue with anyone during the strike, or being worried about it, or even thinking about it. It was ‘our’ strike. Hence we were for it. We knew that we were the main enemy of the Nazis and their main target. Hence the idea that we could be accused of lending a helping hand to Hitler was absurd. Where was the problem?
Nevertheless there was a problem. Even as youthful believers in the inevitability of world revolution we knew, or must have known in the last months of 1932, that it was not going to happen just then. We were certainly not aware that by 1932 the international communist movement had been reduced to almost its lowest point since the establishment of the Comintern, but we knew that defeat was what faced us in the short run. Not we but someone else was making a bid for power. Indeed, neither the rhetoric nor the practical strategy of the KPD envisaged anything like an imminent takeover. (On the contrary, the Party was making serious preparations for illegality, though, as it turned out, nowhere near serious enough: its leader Ernst Thälmann was caught in the first months of the new regime and imprisoned in one of the new concentration camps.) What is more, once Hitler was in power, there was no more room for illusion. So what exactly was in the mind of teenage would-be militants like me?
Certainly the knowledge that we were essentially a global movement comforted us. The triumphant USSR of the first Five-Year Plan stood behind us. Somewhere even further east, the Chinese revolution was on the march. That there was Storm over Asia (to quote the title of Pudovkin’s great film) made communists at that time probably more acutely aware of Asia than anyone else. That was the time when China became, for Bertolt Brecht and André śMalraux, the quintessential locale of revolution, and the test of what it meant to be a revolutionary. It is probably not fortuitous that the only specific newspaper headline which I recall from those days (apart from the obvious ones announcing Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor and the Reichstag fire) is one reporting the mutiny of a Dutch warship, the Seven Provinces, off Java a few days after Hitler took power. It was not the drama of insurrection we expected to experience, but that of persecution. In our minds – at least in mine – the image before us was that of danger, capture, resistance to interrogation, defiance in defeat. Ideally we imagined ourselves in the role that would be played in real life within less than a year by Georgi Dimitrov, defying Göring at the Reichstag fire trial. But always with the confidence, derived from Marxism, that our victory was already inscribed in the text of the history books of the future.
So much for the image. What of the reality? Until a few days before Hitler’s appointment I cannot recall undertaking any actual communist activity other than going to the meetings of the SSB cell. No doubt, like all of us, my spirits were lifted by the sharp setback for the Nazis at the elections of 6 November, and by our own impressive advance, but I am quite certain that I had no understanding of the meaning of the Papen government’s fall, and the activities of the shortlived new government of General Schleicher, the last Chancellor before Hitler, or of the December crisis within the Nazi Party, when Hitler eliminated the second most important, or at least prominent, member of his party, Gregor Strasser. On the other hand, there was nothing problematic about the increasing aggressiveness and deliberately provocative tactics of the brownshirts, and their tacit toleration by the public authorities. On 25 January 1933 the KPD organized its last legal demonstration, a mass march through the dark hours of Berlin converging on the headquarters of the Party, the Karl Liebknechthaus on the Bülowplatz (now Rosa Luxemburg-Platz), in response to a provocative mass parade of the SA on the same square. I took part in this march, presumably with other comrades from the SSB, although I have no specific memory of them.
Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation. Unlike sex, which is essentially individual, it is by its nature collective, and unlike the sexual climax, at any rate for men, it can be prolonged for hours. On the other hand, like sex it implies some physical action – marching, chanting slogans, singing – through which the merger of the individual in the mass, which is the essence of the collective experience, finds expression. The occasion has remained unforgettable, although I can recall no details of this demonstration. I can only remember endless hours of marching, or rather alternately shuffling and waiting, in the freezing cold – Berlin winters are hard – between shadowy buildings (and policemen?) along the dark wintry streets. I cannot remember red flags and slogans, but if there were any – and there must have been some – they were lost in the grey mass of the marchers. What I can remember is singing, with intervals of heavy silence. We sang – I still have the tattered pamphlet with the texts of the songs, ticks against my favourites: the ‘Internationale’, the peasant war song ‘Des Geyers schwarzer Haufen’, the sentimental graveyard doggerel of ‘Der kleine Trompeter’, which (I am told) the leader of the GDR, Erich Honecker, wanted played at his funeral, ‘Dem Morgenrot entgegen’, the Soviet Red Airmen’s Song, Hanns Eisler’s ‘Der rote Wedding’, and the slow, solemn, hieratic ‘Brüder zur Sonne zur Freiheit’. We belonged together. I returned home to Halensee as if in a trance. When, in British isolation two years later, I reflected on the basis of my communism, this sense of ‘mass ecstasy’ (Massenekstase, for I wrote my diary in German) was one of the five components of it – together with pity for the exploited, the aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system, ‘dialectical materialism’, a little bit of the Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem and a good deal of intellectual anti-philistinism.6 But in January 1933 I did not analyse my convictions.
Five days later Hitler was appointed Chancellor. I have already described the experience of reading the news headline somewhere on the way back from school with my sister. I can see it still, as in a dream. It is now known that he resisted the Conservatives’ proposal to ban the Communist Party immediately, partly because this might provoke a desperate attempt at public resistance by the Party, mainly because it strengthened the Nazi argument that only its paramilitaries, the SA, preserved the country from bolshevism, and to lend a national rather than partisan character to the enormous Nazi demonstration on the day of the transfer of power. (It is impossible to imagine that anyone, including themselves, took seriously the call for a general strike which the KPD leadership claimed to have issued on 30 January, presumably to go on record as not having given in without a gesture.) Indeed the SA and SS (at that time much less prominent) were soon authorized to act as auxiliary police, and began to organize their own concentration camps – as yet without official state authorization.
The new government avoided giving the Reichstag, or anyone in it, even the faintest chance of expressing an opinion, by dissolving it immediately and calling for new elections at the soonest possible constitutional moment, 5 March. Within days a suitable Emergency Decree for the Protection of the German People restricted press freedom and provided for ‘protective custody’. On 24 February the brownshirt and blackshirt paramilitary forces of the Nazi Party were enrolled as ‘auxiliary police’. On that day the police raided the Party headquarters, claiming to find great quantities of treasonable materials, though actually nothing of significance was discovered. Such were the conditions under which the last nominally free multiparty elections of the Weimar Republic were to be held. And then, less than a week before the vote, an utterly unexpected joker was slipped into the cards already stacked against the opposition. On the night of 27 February the Reichstag building was burned down. Whoever did it, the Nazis immediately exploited the occasion to such spectacular effect that most antifascists came to believe that they must have planned the fire.2 An emergency decree on the next day suspended freedom of speech, association and the press as well as privacy of post and telephone services. For good measure, the decree also allowed the autonomy of the Länder by the right of the Reich government to intervene to restore order. Göring had already begun to round up communists and other undesirables. They were dragged into improvised prisons, beaten up, tortured and in some cases even killed. By April 25,000 were in ‘protective custody’ in Prussia alone.
The immediate reaction of the SSB, or at least my part of it, was to bring the duplicating apparatus to my aunt’s flat. I like to think it may have been the very one on which the last issues of the Schulkampf had been produced. The comrades concluded that, since I was a British subject, I would be less at risk; or perhaps that the police would be less likely to raid our flat. I kept it under my bed for some weeks, a largish brown wooden case of that now antediluvian type where specially typed stencils had to be placed on a permeable inked surface, and each leaf had to be printed singly. Then someone came to take it away. I don’t think any printing was done on it while it was in my charge, for if there had been any, even my undomestic aunt would have protested at the almost inevitable spreading of fatty ink in my bedroom. It was that sort of machine.
Presumably a more efficient printing press must have been used to produce the leaflets which we were supposed to use for the election campaign. I suppose taking part in that campaign was the first piece of genuinely political work I did. It was also my introduction to a characteristic experience of the communist movement: doing something hopeless and dangerous because the Party told us to. True, we might have wanted to help in the campaign in any case, but, given the situation, we did what we did as a gesture of our devotion to communism, that is to say to the Party. Much in the way that I, finding myself alone in a tram with two SA men, and justifiably scared, refused to conceal or take off my badge. We would go into the apartment buildings and, starting on the top floor, push the leaflets into each flat until we came out of the front door, panting with the effort and looking for signs of danger. There was an element of playing at the Wild West in this – we were the Indians rather than the US cavalry – but there was enough real danger to make us feel genuine fear as well as the thrill of risk-taking. A year or so later I described it in my diary as ‘a light, dry feeling of contraction, as when you stand before a man ready to punch you, waiting for the blow’. What might happen if a door opened on a hostile face, if a brown uniform came down the stairs, if our exits to the street were blocked? Distributing election appeals for the KPD was no laughing matter, especially in the days after the Reichstag fire. Nor was voting for it, although over 13 per cent of the electorate still did so on 5 March. We had a right to be scared, for we were risking not only our own skins, but our parents’.
The Party was officially banned. The unofficial concentration camps became official. Dachau, the first, was set up on the same day that the new Reichstag (now minus the banned communists) passed an Enabling Act which handed total control to the Hitler regime and abolished itself. Then, in late March, my sister and I heard that we were to go to England. Whatever plans Uncle Sidney had in Barcelona had not come off. Hitler had just announced a boycott of Jewish businesses in early April, and as I said good-bye to my friends, I arranged for one of them – probably Gerhard Wittenberg – to send me news of it. (He gave me the address of the kibbutz organization he would join on emigrating to Palestine.) Then we left. Aunt Mimi had also decided on yet another migration. Her Berlin venture had not been more successful than usual, and my sister’s and my going removed a vital element in her income. I have a vague memory that Nancy was supposed to join Gretl and little Peter – could it have been in Barcelona? – from where they would follow Sidney and me to England. It was another disorientating move in the uprooted life of a displaced child. Sidney came for me. Political as my primary passion was by then, I still arranged that the old bike with the bent frame, the present from my mother that had caused me so much embarrassed teenage anguish, should be lost when the Hobsbaum effects were packed for storage.
I was not to return to Berlin for some thirty years, but I never forgot it and never will.
6
On the Island
I
The most unexpected thing about coming to Britain was the sheer size of London, then still by far the largest city in the western world, a vast shapeless polyp of streets and buildings stretching its tentacles into the countryside. Even after seventy years of metropolitan-based life, the size and incoherence of this city still astonishes me. In my first years in Britain I never ceased to marvel at the distances I traversed in it as a matter of course: by bike, north and south, to school in Marylebone from the heights of Crystal Palace, and later from Edgware; by car east and west, driving my uncle between Ilford and Isleworth, never out of sight of rows of buildings.
Somewhere among these ‘hundred thousand streets beneath the sky’ (as the gifted but alcoholic communist writer Patrick Hamilton called his London novel of the 1930s) the Hobsbaum family had to find a footing. We were subjects of King George V, and therefore – as I still have to remind interviewers and other enquirers – not in any sense refugees or victims of National Socialism. However, in every other respect we were immigrants from central Europe, even provisional immigrants – for we did not reclaim our Berlin possessions from storage until 1935 – in a country unknown to all of us except Uncle Sidney, and even he had not lived in it since the Great War. Apart from relatives we did not know a soul. We were not even former emigrants returning to their native country, for the future situation of the Hobsbaums remained as cloudy as it had been until 1933. The first place after Berlin where all the family came together in the spring of 1933 was in one of Mimi’s multiple ventures into the world of guest-houses, this time in Folkestone. It could have stood for any of so many temporary staging-posts on the endless migrations of the twentieth-century uprooted. A German refugee lady expressed incidental appreciation of the charm and physique of a Swiss teenage boy, evidently about to go to school somewhere in England. A German refugee of my age, on the way to a Zionist agricultural training camp, tried to teach me a little judo. A grey figure from Carpathian Europe, one Salo Flohr, stranded by Alekhine’s refusal to accept his challenge for the world chess title, played chess with Uncle Sidney, while waiting to travel to Moscow to confront the Soviets’ Mikhail Botvinnik. Flohr never made it to the top, but was to become a well-known figure in the Soviet chess world and, presumably, one of the few people for whom emigration to Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s was not a disaster. There, on sunny mornings on the lawn, I discovered English lyric poetry through the Golden Treasury and read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass for the first time. For, already at school in London, I joined all of them in Folkestone for a few weeks, while I prepared to sit the examination of the London Matriculation in unknown or strange subjects, conducted in a language I had hardly used outside the household.
In fact, except for me, and for my indomitable aunt Mimi, coming to England in 1933 turned out to be yet another of many failed attempts by the Hobsbaum–Grüns to find a landfall in the stormy seas of the interwar world. Gretl died in 1936, a little older than my mother but still in her thirties. In 1939, after a few years of variable success, Sidney, aged fifty, abandoned the struggle to make a living in England and emigrated to Chile, taking Nancy and Peter with him. Santiago, where he remarried, remained his home. Nancy, whose life really began in South America with the war, returned to Britain with her husband, Victor Marchesi, in 1946, but as a naval officer’s wife continued the peripatetic life for some years and ended it as a retired British settler in Menorca. Peter, qualified as a chemical engineer in Canada, spent most of his life as an expatriate oil company executive and ended it in Spain. Only my future was decided for good in 1935 by the decision to sit the Cambridge scholarship exam, and my aunt Mimi’s, not much later, when she fell in love with an available site in an enchanting and protected corner of a South Downs valley a short bus ride from Brighton, on which she realized her life’s ambition, a place of her own, namely the collection of sheds and stalls she built into the Old Vienna Café. There she died herself, defiantly red-haired, in 1975 at the age of eighty-two, leaving the modest proceeds of the sale of her property to Nancy and myself. It was the only money either of us ever inherited from Gruns or Hobsbaums.
Not that I felt like someone preparing for what turned out to be the long life of a British academic, although I hoped, even at the age of seventeen, that ‘my future will lie in Marxism, in teaching or in both’ (I knew well enough that it did not lie in poetry, although ‘with practice I could develop quite an acceptable prose style’).1 Spiritually, I still lived in Berlin: a newly isolated teenager uprooted from an environment in which he had felt happy and at home, both culturally and politically. My diary keeps referring back to the friends and comrades, the opinions of my old headmaster, the dramatic political experiences I had left behind. That, no doubt, was the chief reason why I began to keep my diary in German. I did not want to forget. In mid-1935 the visit of a recent German socialist emigre ś śwho tried to involve me in the activities of her group – I suspect it was the one called Neubeginnen (‘a new start’) – reminded me of how isolated my life really was. She (‘in short ‘‘the modern woman’’ of my dreams’) was ‘part of a world to which I once belonged for a few months and whose existence, living behind the stage settings of my ideas, I have almost forgotten’.2
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