Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Eric J. Hobsbawm (ч. 6)

For someone of my age living through the twentieth century was an absolutely unique lesson in the impact of genuine historical forces. In the thirty years after the Second World War the world and what it was like to live in it changed more rapidly and fundamentally than in any other period of comparable length in human history. Those as old as I in a few countries of the northern hemisphere are the first generation of humans to have actually lived as adults before this extraordinary launch of the spacecraft of collective humanity into orbits of unprecedented social and cultural upheaval, which the world is experiencing today. We are the first generation to have lived through the historic moment when the rules and conventions that had hitherto bound human beings together in families, communities and societies ceased to operate. If you want to know what it was like, only we can tell you. If you think you can go back, we can tell you, it can’t be done.

Age produces one kind of historical perspective, but I hope my life has helped me to project another: distance. The crucial difference between the historiography of the Cold War – let alone the snake-oil salesmen of the ‘war against terrorism’ – and that of the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century is that (except in Belfast) we are no longer expected to take sides as Catholics or Protestants, or even to take their ideas as seriously as they did. But history needs distance, not only from the passions, emotions, ideologies and fears of our own wars of religion, but from the even more dangerous temptations of ‘identity’. History needs mobility and the ability to survey and explore a large territory, that is to say the ability to move beyond one’s roots. That is why we cannot be plants, unable to leave their native soil and habitat, because no single habitat or environmental niche can exhaust our subject. Our ideal cannot be the oak or redwood, however majestic, but the migrant bird, at home in arctic and tropic, overflying half the globe. Anachronism and provincialism are two of the deadly sins of history, both equally due to a sheer ignorance of what things are like elsewhere, which even limitless reading and the power of imagination can only rarely overcome. The past remains another country. Its borders can be crossed only by travellers. But (except for those whose way of life is nomadic) travellers are, by definition, people away from their community.

Fortunately, as readers who have followed me so far know, all my life I have belonged to untypical minorities, starting with the enormous advantage of a background in the old Habsburg Empire. Of all the great multi-lingual and multi-territorial empires that collapsed in the course of the twentieth century, the decline and fall of the Emperor Franz Josef’s, being both long expected and observed by sophisticated minds, has left us by far the most powerful literary or narrative chronicle. Austrian minds had time to reflect on the death and disintegration of their empire, while it struck all the other empires suddenly, at least by the measure of the historical clock, even those in visibly declining health, like the Soviet Union. But perhaps the perceived and accepted multi-linguality, multi-confessionality and multi-culturality of the monarchy helped them to a more complex sense of historical perspective. Its subjects lived simultaneously in different social universes and different historical epochs. Moravia at the end of the nineteenth century was the background to Gregor Mendel’s genetics, Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Leoš Janáček’s Jenufa. I recall the occasion, some time in the 1970s, when I found myself in Mexico City at an international round table on Latin American peasant movements, and suddenly became aware of the fact that four of the five experts who made up the panel had been born in Vienna …

But even beyond this I recognize myself in E. M. Forster’s phrase about C.P. Cavafy, the anglophone Greek poet from my native Alexandria, who ‘stood at a slight angle to the universe’. For the historian, as for the photographer, this is a good way to stand.

For most of my life this has been my situation: typecast from a birth in Egypt, which has no practical bearing on my life-history, as someone from elsewhere. I have been attached to and felt at home in several countries and seen something of many others. However, in all of them, including the one into whose citizenship I was born, I have been, not necessarily an outsider, but someone who does not wholly belong to where he finds himself, whether as an Englishman among the central Europeans, a continental immigrant in Britain, a Jew everywhere – even, indeed particularly, in Israel – an anti-specialist in a world of specialists, a polyglot cosmopolitan, an intellectual whose politics and academic work were devoted to the non-intellectual, even, for much of my life, an anomaly among communists, themselves a minority of political humanity in the countries I have known. This has complicated my life as a private human being, but it has been a professional asset for the historian.

This has made it easy to resist what Pascal called ‘the reasons of the heart of which reason knows nothing’, namely emotional identification with some obvious or chosen group. As identity is defined against someone else, it implies not identifying with the other. It leads to disaster. That is exactly why in-group history written only for the group (‘identity history’) – black history for blacks, queer history for homosexuals, feminist history for women only, or any kind of in-group ethnic or nationalist history – cannot be satisfactory as history, even when it is more than a politically slanted version of an ideological sub-section of the wider identity group. No identity group, however large, is alone in the world; the world cannot be changed to suit it alone, nor can the past.

This is particularly urgent at the beginning of the new century, in the aftermath of the end of the short twentieth century. As old regimes disintegrate, old forms of politics fade away and new states multiply, the manufacture of new histories to suit new regimes, states, ethnic movements and identity groups becomes a global industry. As the human hunger for continuity with the past grows in an era designed as a continuous break with the past, the media society feeds it by inventing its versions of a box-office national history, ‘heritage’ and theme parks in ancient fancy dress. And even in democracies where authoritarian power no longer controls what can be said about past and present, the joint force of pressure groups, the threat of headlines, unfavourable publicity or even public hysteria impose evasion, silence and the public self-censorship of ‘political correctness’. Even today (2002) there is shock when a consistently anti-Nazi German writer of notable moral courage, Gunther Grass, chooses as the subject of a novel the tragedy of a sinking ship filled with German refugees fleeing from the advancing Red Army in the last stages of the Second World War.

III

The test of a historian’s life is whether he or she can ask and answer questions, especially ‘what if’ questions, about the matters of passionate significance to themselves and the world, as though they were journalists reporting things long past – and yet, not as a stranger but as one deeply involved. These are not questions about real history, which is not about what we might like, but about what happened, and could perhaps have happened otherwise but did not. They are questions about the present not the past, which is why they are important to those who live at the start of the new century, old or young. The First World War was not avoided, so the question whether it could have been is academic. If we say its casualties were intolerable (as most people agree) or that the German Europe that would have emerged from the Kaiser’s victory might have been a better proposition than the world of Versailles (as I hold), I am not suggesting it could have been different. And yet, I must fail the test, were I asked such a question even in theory about the Second World War. I can, with enormous effort, envisage the argument that Spain might have been better off if Franco’s coup had succeeded in 1936, avoiding the Civil War. I am prepared to concede, with regret, that Lenin’s Comintern was not such a good idea nor – this time without difficulty, for I was never a Zionist – Theodor Herzl’s project of a Jewish nation state. He would have done better to stay with the Neue Freie Presse as its star columnist. But if you ask me to entertain the proposition that the defeat of National Socialism was not worth the 50 million dead and the uncounted horrors of the Second World War, I simply could not. I look forward to an American world empire, whose long-term chances are poor, with more fear and less enthusiasm than I look back on the record of the old British Empire, run by a country whose modest size protected it against megalomania. What marks have I got in the test? If they are too low, then this book will not give readers much help as they go into the new century, mostly with a longer life ahead of them than the author.

Still, let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.

Notes

1. Overture

1. This and the following paragraphs are based on my mother’s letters to her sister during May 1915.

2. A Child in Vienne

1. I deliberately use the German names of these places since these were the ones we used, though all towns of any size in most of the empire ahd two or three names.

2. Nelly Hobsbaum to her sister Gretl, letter dated 23 March 1925.

3. Nelly Hobsbaum to her sister Gretl, letter dated 5 December 1928.

4. Berlin: Weimar Dies

1. James V. Bryson, My Life with Laemmle (Facto Books, London, 1980), pp. 56–7. Dronkwater had so little sense of Hollywood that he did the job for less than half what Laemmle’s agent was authorized to offer.

2. Most of the information about the school in the following pages is based on Heinz stallmann (ed.) Das Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium zu Schöneberg, 1890–1945. Geschichte einer Schue (privately printed, Berlin, 1965?), my own memorises and those of Fritz Lusting.

3. In 1929 the school had 388 Protestant, 48 Catholic, 35 Jewish and 6 other pupils. Stallmann, op. cit., p, 47.

4. Mimi Brown to Ernestine Grün, letter dated 3 December 1931, announcing her plans to leave England — for Ragusa (Dubrovnik)? For Berlin?

5. Berlin: Brown and Red

1. Stephan Hermlin, Abendlicht (Leipzig, 1979), pp. 32, 35, 52.

2. Karl Corino, ’Ditchung in eigener Sache’, Die Zeit, 4 October 1996, pp. 9–11.

3. Heinz Stallmann (ed.), Das Prinz-Heinrich-Gymnasium zu Schöneberg, 1890–1945. Geschichte einer Schule (privately printed, Berlin, 1965?) provides no information, except one mention of ’Leder’ in a list of fellow-pupils of 1926–35 by a contributor who graduated in 1935.

4. My information comes from Rellix Krolokowski, ’Erinnerungen: Kommunistische Schülerbewegung in der Weimarer Republik’, a texte which I was given, possibly by the author, during a visit to Leipzig in 1996.

5. Kommunistische Pennäler Fraktion (’Pennäler’=secondary-schoolstudents, from schoolboy slang ’Penne’=secondary school).

6. Tagebuch, 17 March 1935.

6. On the Island

1. Tagebuch, 8–11 November 1934. Much of this chapter is based on the material in this diary, which I kept from 10 April 1934 to 9 January 1936.

Tagebuch, 16 June 1935 and 17 August 1935.

3. see the social analysis of the British jazz-lovers in my The Jazz Scene (London, 1959; New York, 1933).

4. Josef Skvorecky, The Bass Saxophone (London, 1978).

5. Luckily for them, my first attempt to contact a Party branch, somewhere on the outskirts of Croydon, discovered from advertissements in the Daily Worker, had been abortive, I happened to land on a small group of critical comrades who listened with interest to my account of the last Party demonstration in Berlin, but insisted that the triumph of Hitler indicated errors by the KPD or perhaps even the Comintern. I could not answer them, but felt that being recruited to a unit criticizing the generals might not be the best may of rejoining the army of the world revolution. Not that the 5,000 or so British communists were much of an army compared to the German Communist Party of 1932.

6. Tagebuch, 4 June 1935: “Today I happen to look at Mama’s 1929 letters to me. She calls me. “darling”. I am astonished and vaguely disturbed that it is so long since anyone called me that, and try to imagine how it would be today if someone used the world.’

7. Tagebuch, 12 July 1935.

8. Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2001), cited in Neal Ascherson, “The Remains of der ’tag, New York Review of Books, 29 March 2001, p. 44.

7. Cambridge

1. Michael Straight, After Long Silence (London, 1983).

2. E. Hobsbawn and T. H. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, in the ’Past & Present’ Series, 1983). The book has remained in print since the original publication.

3. I am quoting what I wrote in 1937 about the celebrated English don George (’Dadie’) Rylands (Granta, 10 November 1937).

4. T. E. B. Howarth, Cambridge Between the Wars (London, 1978), p. 172.

5. Financial Times, The Business weekend magazine, 4 March 2000, p. 18.

6. I recorded this figure in ’Cambridge Cameo: Ties with the Past: Ryder and Amies’ by E.J.H. and J.H.D. (my friend Jack Dodd) in Granta, 26 May 1937.

7. My description of a Sheppard lecture in 1937 is quoted in Howarth, op. cit., p. 162.

8. E.J.H., ’Professor Trevelyan Lectures’, Granta, 17 October 1937.

H. S. Ferns, Reading from Left to Right: One Man’s Political History , Foreword by Malcolm Muggeridg (University of Toronto Press, 1983),p. 114.

8. Against Fascism and War

1. Cambridge University Club Bulletin, 18 October 1938.

2. ’The membership of the CUSC is still not much aver 450’, Weekly Bulletin of the Cambridge University Socialist Club No, 2, Autumn term 1936 (duplicated).

3. Spain Week Bulletin No, 1, n.d. (October 1938).

4. H. S. Ferns, Reading from Left to Right: One Man’s Political History , Foreword by Malcolm Muggeridg (University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 116.

5. CUSC Weekly Bulletin, 25 May 1937.

6. CUSC Faculty and Study Groups Bulletin, Lent Term, 1939.

7. Eric Hobsbawm, ’In Defence of the Thirties’ in Jim Philip, John Simpson and Nicholas Snowman (eds), The Best of Granta 1889–1966 (London, 1967), p. 119.

H. S. Ferns, op.cit., p. 113.

9. Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends (London, 1994), pp. 100–101.

9. Being Communist

1. Alessandro Bellassai, ’II caffé dell’ Unita. Pubblico e Privato nella Famiglia Comunista degli anni 50’, Societa e Storia XXII, No. 84, 1999, pp. 327–8.

2. Anthony Read and David Fisher, Operation Lucy: Most Secret Spy Ring of the Second World War (London, 1980), pp. 204–5.

3. Theodor Prager, Zwischen London und Moskaw: Bekenntnisse eines Revisionisten (Vienne, 1975), pp. 56–7.

4. B. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959), pp. 60–62.

5. Julius Braunthal, In Search of the Millennium (London, 1945), p. 39.

6. Agnes Heller, Der Affe auf dem Fahread (Berlin-Vienna, 1999), pp. 91–2.

7. How scarce real information in these fields was before the Cold War and how sceptically it was received by the eminent medieval numismatist who compiled it can be seen from Philip Grierson, Books on Soviet Russia 1917–1942: A Bibliography and a Guide to Reading (London, 1943).

8. Quoted in P. Malvezzi and G. Pirelli (eds), Lettere di Gondonnati a Morte della Resistenza Europea (Turh, 1954), p. 250. The name as transcribed in the book. ’Feuerlich’ should probahly be ’Feuerlicht’.

9. Zdenek Mlynar, Postscript to leopold Spira, Kommunismus Adieu: Eine ideologische Autobiographie (Vienna, 1992), p. 158.

10. Fritz Klein, Drinnen und Draussen: Ein Historiker in der D D R Erinnerungen (Frankfurt-am-Main, 2000), pp. 169–213.

11. Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, 1997), p. 20.

12. Ibid., pp. 128–9.

10. War

1. Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London, 2001), vol. II, p. 302.

2. Ibid., p. 298.

3. Theodor Prager, Zwischen London und Moskaw: Bekenntnisse eines Revisionisten (Vienna, 1975), p. 59.

4. Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Cambridge, MA, 1972), p. 55.

11. Cold War

1. Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (London, 2002), chapter 1.

2. In any case, if any such problem impinged on British immediately, it was not Soviet but American behaviour, namely the ruthless terms on which Washington made dependent the grant of its 1946 loan to Britain. (See R. Skidelsky, Keynes, vol. III.

3. It included Bernard Floud, who was later hounded into suicide as a suspected spy or recruiter of Soviet spies by the security services. (He was found dead by his son, Roderick Floud, an economic historian who later became my colleague at Birkbeck, and is now head of the London Guildhall University.) Ironically, as he told me, the CP functionary David Springhall had once tried to recruit him as an agent, and he had told him he had no authority to do so. In any case it is unlikely that a man who attended Party branch meeting after the war was engaged in the kind of activity which usually implied breaking contact with the Party.

4. On the day in August 1947 I went there I estimated the number of travellers to the ’green frontier’ at c. 500, of travellers back at c. 7–800. There were then three trains a day.

5. The words of a British prisoner of war, escaped from a camp in Poland, who fought his way back with the advancing Red Army. I owe citation to George Barnsby of Wolverhampton.

6. Professor Reinhard Koselleck.

7. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extrems ( paperback), p. 189.

8. Its title For a Lasting Peace and o People’s Democracy [sic] was usually shortened to ’Forfor’. It disappeared from sight in 1956.

9. R. W. Johnson, ’Do they eat people here much still? Rarement, Trés rarement’, London Review of Books, 14 december 2000, pp. 30–31. Hodgkin, whose heart was in the Third World, abandoned the delegacy during his travels in Africa, whither he had gone to extend its work. he returned to Oxford in the 1960s as a Fellow of Balliol College, which also elected the dean of Marxist historians, Christopher Hil, as Master. His widow, the Nobel Laureate (Chemistry) Dorothy Hodgkin, continued the family tradition, for in 1984 I found myself with her on a visit of solidarity to Bir Zeit University, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Palestine.

10. ’Academic Freedom’ in University Newsletter, Cambridge, November 1953, p. 2. I edited and wrote most of the ten issues of this Nesletter, ’published on behalf of a group of Communist graduates by the Cambridge Communist Party’ (i.e. the Graduate branch of the CP) which appeared between October 1951 and November 1954.

11. I am grateful to Nina Fishman for the relevant documents from the BBC archives, Controller, Talks to D.S.W., 20 September 1950 and G.22/48 circulated on 13 March 1948, THE TREATMENT OF COMMUNISM AND COMMUNIST SPEAKERS, NOTE BY THE DIRECTOR OF THE SPOKEN WORD. The director appears to have regarded the famous physicist, later Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society, P. Blackett, as a communist, presumably because of this hostility to nuclear warfare.

12. The guinea, a notional currency unit of £1 is, was a convenient way for shopkeepers to charge more. It disappeared with the decimalization of the currency.

13.W. C. Lubrenow, The Cambridge Apostles 1820–1914; Imagination and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge, 1998).

14. Alan Ryan, ’The Voice from the Hearth-Rug’, London Review of Books , 28 October 1999, p. 19.

15. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historiches Denken am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (1945–2000) (Göttingen, 2001) pp.29–30.

16. Robert Conquest’s pionering The Great Terror was not published until 1968.

17. See Hennessy, op. cit., p. 30.

12. Stalin and After

1. Ken Coates, ’How not to Reappraise the New Left’ in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds), The Socialist Register (Merlin Press, London, 1976), p. 112.

2. Thus in the rules of the British CP the right of members to take part in the ’formation of policy’ had been changed into the mere right to its ’discussion’.

3. Aldo Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti (Milan, 1996); Felix Tchouev, Conversations avec Molotov; 140 Entretiens avec le Bras Droit de Staline (Paris, 1995); Robert Levy, Anna Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley, 2000); K. Morgan, Harry Pollit (Manchester, 1993).

4. Letter from E.J. Hobsbawm, World News, 26 January 1957, p. 62.

5. See Eric Hobsbawm, ’The Historians’ Group of the communist Party’ in M. Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L, Morton (London, 1978), p. 42.

6. Francis Becket, Enemy Within The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London, 1995), p. 139.

7. It may be useful to cite the main part of this document. Here it is: All of us have for many years advocated Marxist ideas both in our special fiels and in political discussion in the Labour movement. We feel therefore that we have a respnsability to express our views as Marxists in the present crisis of intenational socialism. We feel that the uncritical support given by the Executive Commitee of the communist party to the Soviet action in hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact, anf failure by british Communists to think out political problems for themselves. We ahd hoped that the revelations made at the Twentieh congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet union would have made our leadership and press realisz that Marxist ideas will only be aceptable in the British labour movement if they arise from the truth about the world we live in. The exposure of grave crimes and abuses in the USSR and the recent revolt of workers and intellectuals against the pseudo-Communist bureaucracies and police systems of Poland and Hungary, have shown that for the past twelve years we have based our political analyses on a false presentation of the facts — not an out-of-date theory, for we still consider the Marxist method to be correct. If the left-wing and Marxist trend in our Labour movement is to win support, as it must for the achievement of socialism, this past must be utterly repudiated. This includes the repudiation of the latest outcome of this evil past, the Executive Commutee’s underwriting of the current errors of Soviet policy.

Sent to Daily Worker on 18 November 1956; published in the New Statesman and Tribute on 1 December 1956.

8. Eric Hobsbawm, ’The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’ in Cornforth, op, cit., p. 41.

9. Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party an Moscow 1920–1943 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 238–41.

10. Henry Pelling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (London, 1958).

11. See chapter 1, ’Problems of Communist History’, of my Revolutionaries (London, 1973).

12. See my Memoir of him in Proceedings of the British Academy 90 (1995), pp. 524–5.

13. Ibid., p. 539.

14. A recent version may be found in my book (with Antonio Pollito) The New Century (London, 2000), on pp. 158–61.

13. Watershed

1. Tony Gould, Insider Outsider: The life and Times of Colin MacInnes (London, 1983), p. 183.

2. Chambers Biographical Dictionary (1974 edn), art.: Darwin.

3. Francis Newton, The Jazz Scene (London, 1959), Introduction, p. 1.

4. It was published in the USA in 1960 by a small left-wing publishing house, republished in an updated edition by Penguin Books in 1961, and subsequently translated into French for a series edited by Fernand Braudel, into Italian and into Czech.

14. Under Cnicht

1. Richard Haslam in Country Life, 21 July 1983, p. 131.

2. As I write this chapter, my son Andy tells me for the first time of the occasion, presumably in the 1970s, when, after two other Croesor boys had left them, his friend told him apologetically: ’The others told me to beat you up, but I don’t want to. Could you pretend I did, when they show up?’ Even so, the friendship faded as the mother made him increasingly unwelcome in the farm.

15. The Sixties

1. For my contemporary judgement of the May events, see ’May 1968’, written later taht year in E.J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (London, 1999, and earlier editions), chapter 24.

2. MAGNUM PHOTOS: 1968 Magnum Throughout the World, texts by Eric Hobsbawm and Marc Weitzmann (Paris, 1998).

3. I did not consciously note this at the time, but the point is well taken by Yves Pagès, who has edited the complete record of the graffiti in the Sorbonne, collected and preserved by five university employees at the time. See No Copyright. Sorbonne 1968: Graffiti (Editions verticales, 1998), p. 11.

4. Quoted in H. Stuart Hughes, Sophisticated Rebels (Cambridge, MA and London, 1988), p. 6.

5. Alain Touraine, Le Mouvement de Mai ou le Communisme Utopique (Paris, 1968).

6. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Les Primitifs de la Révolte dans l’Europe Moderne (Paris, 1966).

7. This article is cahpter 22 in my Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London, 1973, and various editions since).

8. Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream (London, 2000), pp.n 118, 203–4, 208.

9. Ibid., p. 203.

10. Ibid., p. 196.

11. Carlo Feltrinelli, Senior Service (Milan, 1999), p. 314.

12. Rowbotham, op. cit., p. 196.

13. New Left Review, 1977.

16. A Watcher in Politics

1. Martin Jacques and Francis Mulhern (eds), The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981); Eric Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left (London, 1989).

2. ’Labour’s Lost Millions’, written after the 1983 British General Election, in Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rationam Left, p. 63.

3. Ibid., p. 65.

4. ’Out of the Wilderness’ (October 1987), Politics for a Rational Left ., p. 207.

5. Marxism Today, April 1985, pp. 21–36 and cover.

6. Geoff Mulgan in Marxism Today, November-December 1998 (Special Issue), pp. 15–16.

7. Leader in Marxism Today, Sptember 1991, p. 3.

8. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (UK paperback edition), pp. 481, 484.

9. ’After the Fall’ in R. Blackburn (ed.), After the Fall, The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London, 1991), pp. 122–3.

17. Among the Historians

1. For the substance of the following paragraphs, see also Eric Hobsbawm, ’75 Years of the Economic History Society: Some Reflections’ in that Pat Hudson (ed.), Liying Economic and Social History: Essays to MArk the 75th Anniversary of the Economic History Society (Glagow, 2001), pp. 136–40.

2. Information from Professor Zvi Razi, Postan’s biographer, to whom, as well as to the late Isaiah Berlin and Chimen abramsky, I also owe the data about his early life.

3. IX Congres International des Sciences Historiques: Paris 28 Aout-3 Septembre 1950, vol. II, ACTES (Paris, 1951), p. v,

4. Professor Van Dillen of Amsterdam, in Ibid., p. 142.

5. Jacques Le Goff in Past & Present 100, August 1983, p. 15.

6. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historisches Denken am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts: 1945–2000 (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 29, 30.

7. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Winter 1971), ’HIstorical Studies Today’. The French contributors, all linked to the Braudel empire, were Jacques Le Goff, Francois Furet and Pierre Goubert, the British — two of them linked to Past & Present — werer Lawrence Stone, Moses Finley and myself, the US ones mainly had links with Princeton and included Robert Darnton and the only specialist on a non-western region, Benjamin Schwarz of Harvard.

8. Ibid., p. 24.

9. For Braudel his obituary in Annales, 1986 n. I; for my own inaugural lecture: Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London, 1997), p. 64.

10. In Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973).

11. Lawrence Stone, ’The Revival of Narrative’, Past & Present 85, November 1979, pp. 9, 21.

12. Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio ed I verni [The cheese and the worms] (Turin, 1976). Curiously enough, though it was reviewed (by me) in the TLS ten years earlier, the more interesting, in my opinion, study of a case of beneficent witches, I Benandanti, had not then attracted attention.

13. See chapter 21 of my On History (London, 1997), originally published as ’The Historian Between the Quest for the Universal and the Quest for Identity’.

14. Pierre Bourdieu, Choses Dites (Paris, 1987), p. 38.

18. In the Global Village

1. Noel Annan, Our Age (London, 1990), p. 267 n.

2. The Estado, the local Times, wrote of a ’a packed auditorium…, ending with enthusiastic and prolonged applause’, Estado de Sao Paulo, 28 May 1975.

3. Julio Caro Baroja, quoted in E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London, 1995), p. I.

19. Marseillaise

1. See the biography of this remarkable figure by Annie Kriegel and S. Courtois, Engen Fried; Le Grand Secret du PCF (Paris, 1997). The relative roles of Moscow and Paris in the genesis of the Popular Front have been much discussed, but it now seems clear that its real innovation, the readiness by communists to extend the so-called ’United Front’ from other socialits to frankly non-socialist Liberals, and eventually to all antifascists, however opposed to communism, originated in France.

2. Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Les Intellocrates: Expédition en Haute Intelligentsia (Paris, 1981), p. 330.

3. On the French Revolution, see my Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (Rutgers, 1990) and ’Histoire et Illusion’ in Le Débat 89, march-April 1996, pp. 128–38.

20. From Franco to Berlusconi

1. Primitive reberls: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movemment in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester University Press, 1959).

2. E. J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Comtemporary Essays (London, 1973), ’Reflections on Anarchism’, p. 84.

3. Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: an Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, 1943), Preface, For obvious reasons the first edition, published during the Second World War, attracted little notice.

4. The results are in chapter 5 of Primitive Rebels and chapter 8 of Bandits (1968).

5. These form the basis for the present account of my first visit.

6. ’Franco in Rettrat’, New Statesman and Nation, 14 April 1951, p. 415. This article, which I wrote on my return, was described as ’some extracts from the notebook of an Englishman in Barcelona’.

7. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive rebels (1959 edn), Preface, p. v.

8. For a biography of this lifelong militant (1900–1973), ’always one of the most esteemed leaders of the Communist Federazione of Palermo’, see the article ’Sala, Michele’ in Franco Andreucci and Tommaso Detti (eds), Il movimento operaio italiano; dizionario biografico, vol. 4 (Rome, 1978).

9. ’The vast bulk of scholarly and sensible literature about Mafia appeared between 1890 and 1910, and the comparative dearth of modern analyses is much to be deplored’, Primitive Rebels, p. 31, fn 3.

10. Giorgio Napolitano and Eric Hobsbawm, Intervista sul PCI (Bari, 1975).

21. Third World

1. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’The Revolutionary Situation in Colombia’, The World Today (Royal Institute of International Affairs), June 1963, p. 248.

2. Andres Villaveces, ’A comparative Statistical Note on Homicide rates in Colombia’ in Charles Bergquist, Ricardo Penaranda and Gonzalo Sanchez G. ’eds), Violence in Colombia 1990–2000: Waging War and Negotiating Peace (Wilmington, Delaware, 2001), pp. 275–80.

3. Monsignor G. Guzman, Orlando Fals Borda and E. Umana Luna, La Violencia en Colombia 2 vols (Bogota, 1962, 1964).

4. Eduardo Pizarro Leongomez, Las FARC (1949–1966): De la Autodefensa a la Combinacion de Todas las Formas de Lucha (Bogota, 1991) p. 57.

5. E. J. Hobsbawm, Rebeldes Primitivos (Barcelona, 1968), p. 226.

6. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’Guerillas in Latin America’ in J. Saville and R. Miliband (eds), The Socialist Register, 1970, pp. 51–63; E. J. Hobsbawm ’Guerillas’ in Colin Harding and Christopher Roper (eds), Latin American Review of Books I (London, 1973), pp. 79–88.

7. See my ’What’s New in Peru’ and ’Peru: The Peculiar ’Revolution”’ in New York Review of Books, 21 May 1970 and 16 December 1971.

8. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’Chile: Year One’ in New York Review of Books, 23 September 1971.

9. International Herald Tribune and Pew Center Poll of ’opinion leaders’, International Herald Tribune, 20 december 2001, p. 6.

22. From FDR to Bush

1. This was close enough to the truth, but not literally correct. I am pretty sure that some of the teachers in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, where I was later to teach, continued to advertise their Marxism.

2. P. A. Baran and E. J. Hobsbawm, ’The Stages of Economic Growth’ in KYKLOS, vol XIV, 1961, Fasc. 2, pp. 234–42.

3. See F. Ianni and E. Reuss-Ianni, A Family Business: Kinships and Social Control in Organised Crime (New York, 1972).

4. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’The Economics of the Gangster’ in The Quaterly Review , No. 604, April 1955, pp. 243–56.

5. Quoted in S. Chapple and R. Garofalo, Rock’n Roll is Here to Pay: The History and Politiks of the Music Industry (Chicago, 1977), p. 251.

6. Studs Terkel, Division Street America (New York, 1967).

7. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Intervista sul Nuovo Secolo a Cura di Antonio Polito (Bari, 1999), p. 165.

23. Coda

1. See my summary of the world situation published in The Age of Extremes eight years earlier (paperback edition), chapter XIX, ’Towards the Millenium’ especially pp. 558–62.

1 How preposterous it was is indicated by the example of the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti who in 1933 had to undertake ‘self-criticism’ for having observed that, at least in Mussolini’s Italy, it was not possible to say that social democracy was ‘the main danger’.

2 At the time of writing the general opinion among historians is still that it was a young Dutch leftist making a spectacular protest in the hope of galvanizing the workers into action, and not a put-up job by the Nazis.

3 ‘The lines between the pro- and anti-fascist forces ran through each society.

Never has there been a period when patriotism, in the sense of automatic loyalty to a citizen’s national government, counted for less. When the Second World War ended, the governments of at least ten old European countries were headed by men who at its beginning (or, in the case of Spain, at the start of the Civil War) had been rebels, political exiles or, at the very least, who had regarded their own governments as immoral and illegitimate.’ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London, paperback, 1995), p. 144.

4 And the LSE needed less explanation. Founded by the great Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, devoted exclusively to the political and social sciences, led by the later architect of the British social security system, William Beveridge, with a faculty whose most prominent and charismatic teachers were nationally known socialists – Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney – it stood on some kind of left almost ex officio . That is what attracted foreigners from inside and outside the empire. If that was not what necessarily attracted its British students, overwhelmingly an elite of first-generation scholarship-winning boys and girls from London families on the borderline between working and lower middle classes, it was likely to influence them once they had arrived.

5 It may be worth mentioning in passing that none of my books was ever translated into Russian or any other Soviet language during the communist period, but then, the only ‘real socialist’ languages any of them were translated into before the fall of the Berlin Wall were Hungarian – fairly consistently – and Slovenian. However, my book on jazz was translated into Czech.

6 So was Professor Sven Ulric Palme of Stockholm University, who proposed me for my first honorary degree, crowned by a real laurel wreath, which our cleaning lady in Clapham later threw in the dustbin. (Swedish academia takes itself sufficiently seriously not to see anything out-of-the-way in a collection of middle-aged scholars in dark suits and laurel wreaths conversing, with glasses of champagne, as in a modern-dress production of Julius Caesar.)

7 ‘Trade unionism, with all its limitations, is never able to overlook the masses, because it organizes millions of them all the time, and has to mobilize them quite a lot of the time. But capturing the Labour Party for the left can be done in the short run without reference to the masses. It could, in theory, be achieved pretty well entirely by … a few tens of thousands of committed socialists and left Labour people by means of meetings, the drafting of resolutions and votes. The illusion of the early 1980s is that organization can replace politics,’ in Martin Jacques and Francis Mulhern (eds), The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981), p. 173.

8 I may have been the first to bring the term into the electoral debate.

9 The politics of this Burgundian town, immortalized in an interwar novel of that name by Gabriel Chevalier, turned on the proposed location of a public urinal – another characteristic feature of life in the Third Republic – disputed between right and left.

10 Topaze was inevitably in my mind, and made it difficult to keep a straight face when, many years later, the French government awarded me the ‘Palmes Academiques’.

11 However, for a few years before the rise of American and Australian tennis in the 1930s, France played a prominent role on the international tennis scene, through the ‘Four Musketeers’ – Cochet, Lacoste, Brugnon and Borotra – and one of the rare prominent sportswomen of the time, Suzanne Lenglen.

12 ‘Alors, vous avez bien connu mes prisons.’ The anecdote was told me by the publisher himself.

13 The first units formally recruited and organized for international volunteers, by the Italian Giustizia e Libertà group, date to the end of August; the Comintern’s International Brigades were set up rather later. Most of the original foreign units were composed of foreigners who were in Barcelona for a ‘People’s Olympiad’ at the moment of the generals’ insurrection. John Cornford (see chapter 8), who must have arrived in Barcelona at about the time I reached the frontier, decided to enlist ‘quite impulsively’ (Peter Stansky and William Abraham, Journey to the Frontier, London, 1966, p. 328) about a week later.

14 The name of Francesco Rosi’s 1976 film, based on a novel by the superb Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia.

Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a

division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in

Great Britain by Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, in 2002.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks

of Random House, Inc.

A portion of this book previously appeared in the

Chronicle of Higher Education.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hobsbawm, E. J. (Eric J.), 1917–

Interesting times : a twentieth-century life / Eric Hobsbawm.

p. cm.