Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  This was undoubtedly due to what the Hitler regime recognized in Schönbrunn (generally known as ‘der Chef’ or ‘the boss’) as the anti-hierarchical and socially suspect spirit of Weimar. The boat club was one expression of it. The stress on student self-government and participation in disciplinary cases was another. The unforgettable camping and youth-hostelling class journeys through the Mark Brandenburg and Mecklenburg were a third. (Not for nothing had Dr Schönbrunn, equally qualified to teach German, Latin, Greek and mathematics, published a work with the title, whose tone is virtually untranslatable into non-German languages, Jugendwandern als Reifung zur Kultur (Youth Ripening into Culture by Hiking). I did not, personally, warm to this smallish man with sharp eyes behind rimless glasses and a receding hairline, who wore plus-fours when he joined his charges on a Wandertag or school journey. (But then, as every reader of the Tintin books knows, this was in Europe the era of plus-fours.) He dismissed my admiration for Karl Kraus and his journal Die Fackel with the phrase: ‘Der Fackelkraus, ein eitler Schwätzer’ (‘vain and garrulous’), which, in retrospect, is not 100 per cent off target. He criticized my prose style, which he regarded as excessively mannered.

  Perhaps I would have forgiven him, had I known that he was an admirer of the architecture of the ‘neue Sachlichkeit’ (new sobriety) and regarded both its uncluttered lines and ‘the conscious austerity of modern creative writing … as signs of a return to a new classicism’, an apollonian spirit welcome to a teacher of ancient Greek. He chose the communist Ludwig Renn’s novel Krieg (War) as an example of this new classicism. (He had of course, like most of our teachers, served in the 1914 war.) Still, if I did not exactly like him, I respected him. And I unquestionably benefited from his efforts, finally successful in the year before I came to the Grunewaldstrasse, ‘finally to get truly modern works into the school library’.

  Several of these works shaped my life. In a large encyclopedic guide to contemporary German writing I discovered the poems (as distinct from the songs and plays) of Bertolt Brecht. And it was to the school library that an exasperated master – his name was Willi Bodsch, and I remember nothing else about him – referred me when I announced my communist convictions. He told me firmly (and correctly): ‘You clearly do not know what you are talking about. Go to the library and look up the subject.’ I did so, and discovered the Communist Manifesto …

  What I learned in the formal schoolroom lessons is less clear. I can see that they were not a particularly central part of school experience, except as occasions for observing, manipulating and sometimes testing the nerves and authority of a group of ill-understood adults. Most of them seemed to me to be almost caricatures of German schoolmasters, square, with glasses and (when not bald) crew-cut, and to be rather old – they were mostly in their late forties or early fifties. All of them sounded like passionate conservative German patriots. No doubt those who were not kept a low profile, but most of them probably were. None more so than the George Groszian figure of Professor Emil Simon, whose Greek lessons we became expert at side-tracking, either by asking what Wilamowitz would have thought of the passage (good for at least ten minutes of panegyric about the greatest of German classical scholars) or, more reliably, stimulating his reminiscences of the world war. This would invariably lead us from construing Homer’s Odyssey to a monologue about the experience of the frontline soldier, an officer’s duty, the need for postwar order, Russian barbarism, the horrors of the October Revolution and the Cheka, Lenin’s praetorian guard of Lettish riflemen and the like, plus a reminder that, contrary to what ignorant workers might think, Spartacus, far from of proletarian origins, had been a person of high social status before he was enslaved. It was, as I now recognize many decades later, an early version of the thesis used in the 1980s in mitigation of the Third Reich, namely that it had been necessary to defend an ordered society against bolshevism, and in any case the horrors of the Hitler era had been anticipated and were inspired by the horrors of Red Russia. So far as I know Emil Simon was not a Nazi, but merely a German conservative reminding himself of better days, such as might be heard in middle-class bars round the Stammtisch (the regulars’ table). Irrespective of our politics, we made fun of him and pitied his son, a pale, fragile boy who sat in the front row of the class and carried the triple burden of being Emil’s son, his pupil, and the witness to our ridicule of him.

  In any case, life was too interesting to concentrate essentially on school work. I did not at this time have particularly brilliant school reports. The truth is, teachers and at least this pupil talked past one another. I learned absolutely nothing in the history lessons given by a small, fat old man, ‘Tönnchen’ (‘little barrel’) Rubensohn, except the names and dates of all the German emperors, all of which I have since forgotten. He taught them by dashing round the form pointing a ruler at each of us with the words: ‘Quick, Henry the Fowler – the dates.’ I now know that he was as bored by this exercise as we were. He was, in fact, the most distinguished scholar in the school, author of a monograph on the mystery cults of Eleusis and Samothrace, a contributor to Pauly-Wissowa, the great encyclopedia of classical antiquity and a recognized classical archaeologist in the Aegean and papyrus expert long before the war. Perhaps I should have discovered this in the sixth form where education was no longer based on compulsory memorization. Until then the main effect of his teaching was to turn at least one potential future historian off the subject. It is not surprising that in Berlin I learned by absorption rather than instruction. But, of course, I did learn.

  The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and, as I now know, was bound to fail. The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me, as deleted texts are still waiting to be recovered by experts, somewhere on the hard disks of computers. I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness which I do not feel towards Communist China, because I belong to the generation for whom the October Revolution represented the hope of the world, as China never did. The Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle symbolized it. But what exactly made the Berlin schoolboy a communist?

  To write an autobiography is to think of oneself as one has never really done before. In my case it is to strip the geological deposits of three quarters of a century away and to recover or to discover and reconstruct a buried stranger. As I look back and try to understand this remote and unfamiliar child, I come to the conclusion that, had he lived in other historical circumstances, nobody would have forecast for him a future of passionate commitment to politics, though almost every observer would have predicted a future as some kind of intellectual. Human beings did not appear to interest him much, either singly or collectively; certainly much less than birds. Indeed, he seems to have been unusually remote from the affairs of the world. He had no personal reasons for rejecting the social order and did not feel himself suffer even from the standard anti-Semitism of central Europe, since, fair-haired and blue-eyed, he was not identified as ‘Der Jude’ but as ‘Der Engländer’. To be blamed for the Treaty of Versailles could be tough in a German school, but it was not demeaning. The activities to which I gravitated spontaneously at a school where I felt unquestionably happy had nothing to do with politics: the literary society, the boat club, natural history, the marvellous school journeys through the Mark Brandenburg and Mecklenburg, camping or staying the night in youth hostels on straw palliasses while, full of joy and passion, we talked half the night away. About what? About everything, from the nature of truth to who we were, from sex and more sex, to literature and art, from jokes to destiny. But not about the politics of the day. At least that is how I remember those unforgettable nights. Certainly I cannot recall political discussions, let alone disagreements, with my two closes
t friends, Ernst Wiemer and Hans-Heinz Schroeder, the classroom poet – he died in Russia during the war. What I had in common with them is unclear. I merely note that, on the graduation photograph of my class in 1936, they were among the only four of the twenty-three young men and two masters who had their Abitur recorded in open-necked shirts. Certainly it was not politics. While the one may not actually have been nationalist, our common subject was the nonsense poetry of Christian Morgenstern and the world in general. I did not disagree with the other’s conventionally Prussian admiration for Frederick the Great, who may indeed also be admired on other grounds, but I certainly did not share the views that made him collect models of the soldiers of his armies.

  In short, if I were to make the mental experiment of transposing the boy I was then into another time and/or place – say, into the England of the 1950s or the USA of the 1980s – I cannot easily see him plunging, as I did, into the passionate commitment to world revolution.

  And yet, the mere fact of imagining this transposition demonstrates how unthinkable it was in the Berlin of 1931–3. It has indeed been imagined. Fred Uhlman, a few years older than me when he left Germany, a refugee lawyer who took to painting sad pictures of the bleak Welsh countryside, wrote a quasi-autobiographical novella later made into a film (Reunion ) about the dramatic impact of the new Hitler regime on the school friendship of a Jewish boy, unconscious of impending cataclysm, and a young ‘Aryan’ aristocrat at a South German Gymnasium not unlike my own. Perhaps this was a possible scenario in Stuttgart, but in the crisis-saturated atmosphere of the Berlin of 1931–3, such a degree of political innocence was inconceivable. We were on the Titanic, and everyone knew it was hitting the iceberg. The only uncertainty was about what would happen when it did. Who would provide a new ship? It was impossible to remain outside politics. But how could one support the parties of the Weimar Republic who no longer even knew how to man the lifeboats? They were entirely absent from the presidential elections of 1932, which were fought between Hitler and the communist candidate Ernst Thälmann and old imperial Field Marshal Hindenburg, supported by all non-communists as the only way of holding up the rise of Hitler. (Within a few months he was to call Hitler to power.) But for someone like myself there was really only one choice. German nationalism, whether in the traditional form of the PHG or in the form of Hitler’s National Socialism was not an option for an Engländer and a Jew, though I could understand why it appealed to those who were neither. What was there left but the communists, especially for a boy who arrived in Germany already emotionally drawn to the left?

  As I entered the school year 1932–3, the sense that we were living in some sort of final crisis, or at least a crisis destined for some cataclysmic resolution, became overpowering. The presidential election of May 1932, the first of several in that ominous year, had already eliminated the parties of the Weimar Republic. The last of its governments, under Brüning, had fallen shortly after and given way to a clique of aristocratic reactionaries governing entirely by presidential decree, for the administration of Franz von Papen had virtually no support in the Reichstag, let alone even the makings of a majority. The new government immediately sent a small detail of soldiers to dismiss the government of the largest German state, Prussia, where a Social-Democratic–Centre Party coalition had maintained something like democratic rule. The ministers went like lambs, as Papen, trying to bring Hitler into his government, revoked a recent ban on the wearing of their uniforms by Nazi stormtroopers. Their deliberately provocative parades now became part of the normal street scene. Every day saw battles between the uniformed protection squads of the various parties. In July alone eighty-six were killed, mainly in clashes between Nazis and communists, and the number of those seriously injured ran into hundreds. Hitler, playing for higher stakes, forced a general election in July. The Nazis were returned with almost 14 million votes (37.5 per cent) and 230 seats – barely fewer than the combined strength of the Weimar parties (Social Democrats, Catholics and the now virtually invisible Democrats) and the communists with over 5 million and eighty-nine seats. For practical purposes the Weimar Republic was dead. Only the form of its funeral remained to be determined. But until there was agreement between the President, the army, the reactionaries and Hitler (who insisted on the Chancellorship or nothing), its corpse could not be buried.

  This was the situation in which the school year began. If I remember my first year in Berlin in colour, my memories of the last six months are in darkening shades of grey with touches of red. The change was not only political but personal.

  For as 1932 advanced, our prospects in Berlin dimmed. We became victims not of Hitler but of the ‘Great Crisis’ or, more specifically, of a new law vainly trying to stem the rising flood of unemployment by obliging foreign film companies (and no doubt other foreign enterprises) to employ a minimum of 75 per cent of German citizens. Sidney was dispensable. At least that is the most plausible explanation of what happened. Nothing came of the Polish proposal, but in the autumn of 1932, the Berlin job having evidently come to an end, Sidney took Gretl and Peter, then just seven, to Barcelona – whether on a mission for Universal, or with some local prospects in mind, I cannot say. I suspect that there were no firm prospects of permanence, for if there had been, the whole family would have moved. As it was, Nancy and I were left in Berlin for the time being to continue our schooling, until the outlook became clearer. It was the end of the new house and garden in Lichterfelde, an upmarket suburb to which we had moved from the Aschaffenburgerstrasse, next to someone in the music world who actually had the luxury of a small but genuinely private swimming-pool. Nancy and I moved in with the third of the Grün sisters, our peripatetic aunt Mimi, whose life had brought her, via various failed enterprises in English provincial towns (‘we have too few debts to make bankruptcy worth while and just have to carry on’ 4) to a sublet apartment by the railway line in Halensee, a Berlin district by the far end of the Kurfürstendamm. There, as always, she took paying guests, offering the English ones German lessons. That is where we spent our last months in Berlin and saw in the Third Reich.

  This was probably the only time in our lives that my sister Nancy and I lived together outside a family setting, for Mimi, living from hand to mouth as always and anyway unused to children – she never had any herself – hardly counted as such. I can only guess how the absence of any effective parental authority in these last months in Berlin affected Nancy, but I am fairly certain that my political activities would have been a good deal more constricted if Sidney and Gretl had stayed in Berlin. Being three and a half years older than my sister, I felt responsible for her. There was no one else now. I had never previously bothered about how she went to school, but only about the daily trauma of being forced to cycle from Lichterfelde to the Gymnasium on a machine of which I felt ashamed as only a teenager can, namely my dying mother’s present, the black repainted secondhand bike with the bent frame. (I would arrive half an hour early at the bike-shed and sneak out late, afraid of being seen on it.) Now, however, we went to and came back from school together, for Halensee was a long way from Wilmersdorf (the PHG and the Barbarossaschule were virtually neighbours). Presumably we did so by tram, but I only recall the endless footslog during the dramatic four-day Berlin transport strike of early November. We were two youngsters alone. When she reached her twelfth birthday, I felt it was my duty to ‘enlighten’ her (as the German phrase went), namely to tell her about the facts of life, which she claimed she did not yet know. She may have been too polite to tell me she knew them already, or at any rate the part concerning women’s periods, which were then the most immediately relevant to a girl reaching puberty. I cannot say that those months brought us closer together than two siblings who have gone through the same traumatic experiences are anyway. We had very little in common except these traumas, and my intellectualism and lack of interest in the world of people gave me a protection she lacked. I did not recognize this then. She did not share my interests or my life, increasingly
dominated by politics. I did not even know what her life at school was, who were her friends or if she had any. I suppose we gossiped about Mimi and the paying guests, played cards in the evening, and sent letters to Spain. I elaborated stories for young Peter on the basis of a combination of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle and Christian Morgenstern’s ‘Nasobem’, the animal that walks on its noses.

  I seem to remember the Friedrichsruher Strasse only in grey or artificial light, presumably because in those months we were away from it for most of the day. In the evening we all met in the sitting room, which contained the original tenant’s bookcase, which allowed me, for the first time, to read Thomas Mann (Tristan) and a short novel by Colette. Mimi, familiar with these situations, showed a genuine interest in the lives of her lodgers and went through her usual social repertoire, palmistry and other forms of character- and fortune-telling, and conversation about the reality of psychic phenomena with examples. She had – it is one of the few concrete details of life in Halensee that sticks in my mind – tried to save money by buying potatoes by the sackful for cooking, sending me down to the cellar from time to time to fetch up the necessary supply. As always, she lived on a financial knife-edge. As time went on they began to sprout, and had to be peeled with care to conceal this.

  5

  Berlin: Brown and Red

  Meanwhile my revolutionary inclinations moved from theory to practice. The first person who attempted to give more precision to them was an older social-democratic boy, Gerhard Wittenberg. With him I passed the initiation ritual of the typical socialist intellectual of the twentieth century, namely the shortlived attempt to read and understand Karl Marx’s Capital, starting on page one. It did not last long – at this stage of my life anyway – and, while we remained friends, I was attracted neither by German (as distinct from Austrian) social democracy nor by Gerhard’s Zionism, which led him, after Hitler came to power, to emigrate to a kibbutz in Palestine, and eventually – so I understand – to be killed on a return trip to Germany on a mission to rescue Jews. (Zionist militants in those days were, of course, overwhelmingly socialists, mostly of various Marxist convictions.)