Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  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 texti
le 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 t
he 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.