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 Austria
n 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 Pru
ssian 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.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 6
