For Berlin, like Manhattan (with which it liked to compare itself in the Weimar years), was politically a city left of centre. It lacked a historically rooted indigenous bourgeois patriciate, and was therefore more welcoming to the Jews. (The aristocratic tradition of Prussian court, army and state looked down on bourgeois of any description.) It was a bullshit-detecting city sceptical of claims to social superiority, nationalist rhetoric and sentimentality. In spite of Dr Goebbels, who made it his business to wrest it from the Reds on Hitler’s behalf, it never became a Nazi city at heart. Unlike the dialect of Vienna, spoken in one way or another by everyone from emperor to dustman, the Berlin dialect, a speeded-up, wisecracking urban adaptation of the plattdeutsch language of the north German plain, was primarily a demotic idiom separating the people from the toffs, though well understood by all. The mere insistence on specific Berliner grammatical forms which, correct in dialect, were patently incorrect in school German, was enough to keep it separate from educated talk. Naturally the middle-class pupils of my classical Gymnasium took to it with enthusiasm, as the pupils of prestigious Paris lycées take to the plebeian argot of their city, and after the end of the GDR, inhabitants of the former East Berlin, resentful but proud, liked to distinguish themselves from the Western rulers of their part of Germany by insisting on ‘berlinering’, i.e. talking the broadest dialect. It was a confident, brash, in-your-face idiom, into which I also plunged with enthusiasm, even though to this day the native inflection of my German hints at Vienna. Even today the sound, now rare on the street, of pure Berlinerisch, brings back to me the historic moment that decided the shape both of the twentieth century and of my life.
I came to Berlin in the late summer of 1931, as the world economy collapsed. Within weeks of my arrival, Britain, its axis for the past century, abandoned both the gold standard and free trade. In central Europe catastrophe had been expected since the Americans called in their loans and it had occurred earlier that summer when two major banks had collapsed. Financial cataclysm did not have much direct impact on a displaced teenager, but unemployment, already rising steeply – it hit 44 per cent of the German labour force in 1932 – reached into our own family. My cousin Otto, who had lived with Sidney and Gretl and still visited them from time to time, had lost his job, and reacted by becoming a communist. He was not the only one: in 1932 85 per cent of the membership of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) was unemployed. Younger than him, I was naturally impressed by someone so tall, handsome, successful with women, and now wearing a badge with the Russian initials of the Young Communist International. I suppose he was the first communist I had ever knowingly met: in Austria there were hardly any, and joining the Communist Party was therefore not something that would come to young men’s minds until after the civil war of 1934 had discredited the social-democrat leaders.
The collapse of the world economy was up to a point something young persons of the middle class read about, rather than experienced directly. But the world economic crisis was like a volcano, generating political eruptions. That is what we could not escape, because it dominated our skyline, like the occasionally smoking cones of the real volcanoes which tower over their cities – Vesuvius, Etna, Mont Pelée. Eruption was in the air we breathed. Since 1930 its symbol was familiar: the black swastika in a white circle on red ground.
It is difficult for those who have not experienced the ‘Age of Catastrophe’ of the twentieth century in central Europe to see what it meant to live in a world that was simply not expected to last, in something that could not really even be described as a world, but merely as a provisional way-station between a dead past and a future not yet born, unless perhaps in the depth of revolutionary Russia. Nowhere was this more palpable than in the dying days of the Weimar Republic.
Nobody had really wanted Weimar in 1918, and even those who accepted, or even actively supported it, thought of it as at most a second-best compromise: better than social revolution, bolshevism or anarchy (if they were on the moderate right), better than the Prussian Empire (if they were on the moderate left). It was anybody’s guess whether it would outlast the catastrophes of its first five years: a penal peace treaty almost unanimously resented by Germans of all political stripes, failed military coups and terrorist assassins on the extreme right, failed local Soviet republics and insurrections on the extreme left, French armies occupying the heartland of German industry, and on top of all this, the (to most people) incomprehensible, and even to this day unparalleled, phenomenon of the galloping Great Inflation of 1923. For a few years in the middle 1920s it looked briefly as though Weimar might work. The Mark was stabilized – it remained stable until the war and again from 1948 until its demise – the most powerful economy of Europe, recovered from the war, had regained its dynamism, and for the first time political stability seemed in sight. It did not, it could not, survive the Wall Street Crash and the Great Slump. In 1928 the lunatic ultra-right had seemed virtually extinct. In the elections of that year Hitler’s Nazi Party was reduced to 2.5 per cent and twelve seats in the Reichstag, actually less than the increasingly enfeebled Democrat Party, the most loyal supporters of Weimar. Two years later the Nazis came back with 107 seats, second only to the social democrats. What remained of Weimar was ruled by emergency decree. Between the summer of 1930 and February 1932 the Reichstag was in session for barely ten weeks, all told. And as unemployment rose, so, ineluctably, did the forces of some kind of radical-revolutionary solution: National Socialism on the right and communism on the left. These were the circumstances in which I came to Berlin in the summer of 1931.
I joined Nancy and seven-year-old Peter in Sidney and Gretl’s flat in the Aschaffenburgerstrasse, rented from one of the many financially hard-pressed elderly widows of good family. I can remember very little about this apartment except that it was light and that the dinner conversation of the adults with their evening guests could be overheard from the room I slept in. Sidney and Gretl had a reasonably active social life, what with business acquaintances, relatives and Viennese friends visiting or living in Berlin, for little and impoverished interwar Austria was too small a scene for Viennese talent. We were too young to take much part in this. We took the Vossische Zeitung, a newspaper my aunt appreciated chiefly for the cultural pages, which she cut out. I have vivid memories of great cinemas and the elaborate luxury automobiles parked outside – Maybachs, Hispano-Suizas, Isotta-Fraschinis, Cords.
Within a few days of my arrival Uncle Sidney found a place for me within walking distance of the flat and Nancy’s neighbouring Barbarossaschule, at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium in Schöneberg, in time to join the Obertertia (upper third form). Unlike Austrian and British secondary schools, German ones numbered downwards: one started in the Sexta (sixth form) and graduated with the leaving certificate (Abitur) from the Oberprima (upper first form). Of all the thirteen years I spent at seven educational establishments before going up to Cambridge, the nineteen or so months at the PHG have left the deepest impression on my life. It was the medium through which I experienced what I knew even then to be a decisive moment in the history of the twentieth century. Moreover, I experienced it, not as the child of Austria (even though I just reached puberty in my last year in Vienna), but at the Columbus-like moment of adolescence when passion and intelligence discover the world for the first time, and the very experience of living is unforgettable. Many years later an old friend brought me together with the then German ambassador to the UK, Günther von Hase, who, when my name had come up in conversation, immediately recalled me as having been in his form. And I, in turn, had immediately identified the name as that of a remembered face in the classroom in which both of us had sat – and that only for a few months in a long life, in which it is pretty certain neither of us had given any thought to the other since 1933. We were merely classmates, not in any sense friends. But we were there together at a time in our lives and in history which one does not forget. The very names revived it. In the low-lying landscape of my school years the PHG st
ands out like a sierra. For the first years after Berlin, life in England held no real interest.
Was my Berlin school really as important as it seems to me in retrospect? The artillery of Weimar bombarded an expectant fourteen-year-old from all sides. School did not teach me the songs which still mean ‘Berlin’ to me – those from the Brecht–Weill Dreigroschenoper to the bronze voice of Ernst Busch singing Erich Weinert’s ‘Stempellied’ (‘Song of the Dole’). The great events of the times – the fall of the Brüning government, the three national elections of 1932, the Papen and Schleicher governments, Hitler taking power, the Reichstag fire – did not reach me through school, but through street posters, and via the daily paper and the periodicals at home (though, curiously, I have less memory of the radio news in Berlin than in Vienna). Those monuments of Weimar design and Weimar content, the books of the Malik Verlag, I remember them from the stands in the book department of the KaDeWe, the great department store on the Tauentzienstrasse, which is one of the few continuities with the Berlin of my youth: full of authors such as B. Traven, Ilya Ehrenburg, Arnold Zweig and, in a different mode, Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger.
Much of it, obviously, must have reached me through home. Uncle Sidney was enjoying one of his occasional spells of economic sunshine working for Universal Films, which as the producer of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the movie of Erich Remarque’s celebrated antiwar novel, was at the epicentre of Weimar cultural politics. The Nazis had organized demonstrations against it and demanded that it should be banned. More than this: its boss, ‘Uncle’ Carl Laemmle, was the only Hollywood tycoon who came from Germany and had personal knowledge of what was going on there, because he returned for an annual visit to keep in touch. And he did. He was far from a highbrow, but to the informed eye the movies for which Universal was best known – All Quiet apart – the horror pictures such as Frankenstein and Dracula, clearly showed the influence of the German expressionist avant-garde.
Who knows how Sidney got into the movie business? Sometime in 1930 he had succeeded in talking himself into some kind of a job at Universal. It was uncertain and insecure. But while it lasted, it was recognized – if only by the personal gift by Uncle Carl himself of a signed copy of his biography, by the hand of an English litératteur and forgotten minor poet in the Georgian mode, John Drinkwater. (Laemmle had picked him after H. G. Wells had refused him because he was told that Drinkwater, of whom he had naturally not heard, had written a biography of Abraham Lincoln.) The book sold 164 bona fide copies in England.1 Our copy has not survived the peripeties of the Hobsbawm family in the twentieth century.
What his precise functions in the company were, I never knew. A letter from my grandmother reports an offer to give him a job in the Paris office in the autumn of 1931, which he refused, because Gretl said the children (my sister and myself) had hardly had a chance to get used to the new schools in Berlin. Fate is determined by such short-term family decisions. What would our lives have been if we had gone to Paris in 1931? One of the jobs he certainly did was to fit out the expedition to shoot the film S.O.S. Eisberg, a polar adventure with Luis Trenker, a veteran of snow-and-rock pictures, and the air-ace Ernst Udet, who was earning his living as a stunt flyer until German rearmament gave him a distinguished place in Hitler’s air force. Technical advice came from members of the Alfred Wegener expeditions, one of whom came to the house and told me about the theory of continental drift, and how he had all his toes frozen off in the Greenland winter. On at least one other occasion he promoted Hollywood products distributed in Europe – more specifically, Frankenstein in the Polish market. His campaign, of which he was proud, included the word-of-mouth rumour (for the benefit of the then very large Jewish public) that Boris Karloff, whose real name was an undramatic Pratt, was merely a lightly gentilized Boruch Karloff. He certainly had some connection with Poland, for at one time in the summer of 1932 there was some question of a permanent posting to Poland, and Sidney tried to prepare us for the very different life there. We would live in Warsaw. The Poles, he told me, were touchy people with a strong sense of honour, and a tendency to fight duels. I never had the chance to check out his information.
Nevertheless, on reflection, home was not anchored in Berlin as school was. As will be clear by now, the Hobsbawm household lived, not in Berlin, but in a transnational world, where people like us still – though the 1930s were to make it much more difficult – moved from country to country in search of a living. We might have roots in England or Vienna, but Berlin was merely one stop on the complicated route that might take us almost anywhere in Europe west of the USSR. Nor did home in Berlin – three addresses and two different forms of household in eighteen months – have the continuity of school. My window on the world at its moment of crisis was the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium.2
It was a perfectly conventional school in the conservative Prussian tradition, founded in 1890 to meet the needs of a rapidly growing middle-class area. Prince Henry, whose name it bore, a brother of Emperor William II, was a naval figure, which may explain why the school rightly prided itself on its boat club on the Little Wannsee (a model of its boat-house ‘in the Spreewald style’ had won a gold medal at the Brussels World Exposition of 1908). Rightly, because, while providing good training it was not, unlike its British equivalents, particularly interested in competitive races and it provided a wonderful opportunity for junior and senior boys to meet on equal terms. The club had somehow acquired a meadow, known as ‘unser Gut’ (our estate) on the small fishery-protected Sakrower See, accessible only by special permission through a narrow waterway. Groups of friends made up crews to row there or meet there at weekends, to talk, look at the summer skies and swim across the green waters before returning to the evening city. For the first and only time in my life I could see the point of a sports club. An old boy of the school, Dr Wolfgang Unger, a physician at the Spandau hospital, kept an eye on the training of new recruits. I understand that, after being removed from his hospital post on racial grounds in 1934, he committed suicide, unwilling to leave his country, Germany.
A Prussian school with military connections was naturally Protestant in spirit, deeply patriotic and conservative. Those of us who did not fit this pattern – whether as Catholics, Jews, foreigners, pacifists or leftwingers, felt ourselves as a collective minority, even though in no measurable way an excluded minority.3 Nevertheless it was not a Nazi school. (Few of the boys I knew showed much enthusiasm for Hitler and the Brownshirts, except Kube, the unusually dense son of a man who was Hitler’s Gauleiter of Brandenburg, and who made it his business to get a literature teacher at the school fired on the grounds that he ‘favoured’ the surviving Jewish students and taught chiefly the degraded literature of the Weimar Republic. He was to become the notorious boss of occupied Belorussia during the war, until eventually assassinated by his patriotic local mistress.) On the contrary. Whatever sympathy the school might have had for the national revival promised by Hitler did not survive the forcible purging, not long after I left for England, of the highly respected and popular headmaster, Oberstudiendirektor Dr Walter Schönbrunn, a political undesirable under the new regime. He was replaced by an imposed and bitterly resented Kommissarischer Leiter. One can hardly call the PHG of the 1930s a centre of dissidence, but it is characteristic that Franz Marc’s ‘Tower of Blue Horses’ – I remember it well from the school hallway – banned as ‘degenerate art’ by the new authorities, was rescued from a storeroom by one form and hung in its own classroom. Pupils protested against the dismissal of Professor ‘Sally’ Birnbaum, the popular mathematics and science teacher: signatures were collected all over the school for a petition to retain him. In the winter of 1936–7 the entire lower first form still made a collective visit to his home in the Rosenheimerstrasse. (He survived in Berlin until 1943 when he and his wife were loaded on to 36. Osttransport, destination, presumably, Auschwitz.) Indeed, there is some evidence that the school went out of its way to treat Jewish students and teachers
well, at least while they remained. However politically unacceptable to a would-be teenage revolutionary, who would never have dreamed of wearing the peaked school cap (rather in the yachtsman’s style with a soft top), it was a decent school.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 7
