Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  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.