Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  The fourth difference was that the communist intellectuals were not cultural dissidents. Culturally the major divide was not, as in the era of rock music, between generations, but the basically political conflict between those who accepted and those who rejected what the Nazis called ‘cultural bolshevism’, that is to say almost everything that made the fourteen years of the Weimar Republic such an extraordinary era in the history of the arts and sciences. In Berlin, at least, we shared this culture with our seniors, for pre-Stalinist communism, while distinguishing sharply between writers and artists with the ‘right’ and those with the ‘wrong’ line, did not yet reject the men and women of the cultural avant-garde who had so patently hailed the October Revolution and shared the KPD’s distaste for the Republic of Ebert and Hindenburg. ‘Socialist Realism’ was still below the horizon. An admiration for Brecht, the Bauhaus and George Grosz did not separate parents and children, but it did separate the right from a sort of cultural popular front that stretched from the social-democratic authorities of Prussia and Berlin to the furthest outskirts of anarchist bohemia. It also united liberals with the left. The chief reason why in its day the German Democratic Republic had a far more liberal legislation on birth control and abortion than the western Federal Republic was that, in the days of Weimar, legalizing abortion, prohibited by the German Civil Code, had been a major campaigning issue for the KPD. I look at my surviving copy of the Schulkampf , and there it is still, together with announcements of meetings by the medical men so long associated with sexual emancipation.

  Reconstructing my experience of the last months of the Weimar Republic, how can I disentangle memory from what I now know as a historian, what I now think after a lifetime of political reflections and debates about what the German left should or should not have done? Then I knew no more of what was happening between the triumph of the Nazis at the elections of 30 July 1932 and Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 than I read in the Vossische Zeitung. In any case, I did not really react to the news politically or critically, but as a romantic partisan, or a football supporter. The Berlin transport strike, which took place shortly before the last democratic election of the Republic in early November 1932, was then, and has been ever since, the subject of bitter polemics. It was successfully called, against the official (social-democratic) unions by the communist RGO (Red Union Opposition) and, since the National Socialists were anxious not to lose contact with the workers, supported by the Nazi union organization. It is not surprising that this temporary common front between red and brown in the dying weeks of the Republic has had a bad press, and is still quoted against the Weimar communists. It certainly demonstrates the irrationality of a party which, knowing that the entry of Hitler into government might be imminent, continued to treat the social democrats as its main adversary. As it happened the principal immediate consequences of the strike were, probably, to help the communist vote to rise quite sharply in the election on 6 November, and to contribute to the dramatic decline of the Nazi vote in that election – but both were soon forgotten. And yet I cannot remember either discussing the issue with anyone during the strike, or being worried about it, or even thinking about it. It was ‘our’ strike. Hence we were for it. We knew that we were the main enemy of the Nazis and their main target. Hence the idea that we could be accused of lending a helping hand to Hitler was absurd. Where was the problem?

  Nevertheless there was a problem. Even as youthful believers in the inevitability of world revolution we knew, or must have known in the last months of 1932, that it was not going to happen just then. We were certainly not aware that by 1932 the international communist movement had been reduced to almost its lowest point since the establishment of the Comintern, but we knew that defeat was what faced us in the short run. Not we but someone else was making a bid for power. Indeed, neither the rhetoric nor the practical strategy of the KPD envisaged anything like an imminent takeover. (On the contrary, the Party was making serious preparations for illegality, though, as it turned out, nowhere near serious enough: its leader Ernst Thälmann was caught in the first months of the new regime and imprisoned in one of the new concentration camps.) What is more, once Hitler was in power, there was no more room for illusion. So what exactly was in the mind of teenage would-be militants like me?

  Certainly the knowledge that we were essentially a global movement comforted us. The triumphant USSR of the first Five-Year Plan stood behind us. Somewhere even further east, the Chinese revolution was on the march. That there was Storm over Asia (to quote the title of Pudovkin’s great film) made communists at that time probably more acutely aware of Asia than anyone else. That was the time when China became, for Bertolt Brecht and André śMalraux, the quintessential locale of revolution, and the test of what it meant to be a revolutionary. It is probably not fortuitous that the only specific newspaper headline which I recall from those days (apart from the obvious ones announcing Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor and the Reichstag fire) is one reporting the mutiny of a Dutch warship, the Seven Provinces, off Java a few days after Hitler took power. It was not the drama of insurrection we expected to experience, but that of persecution. In our minds – at least in mine – the image before us was that of danger, capture, resistance to interrogation, defiance in defeat. Ideally we imagined ourselves in the role that would be played in real life within less than a year by Georgi Dimitrov, defying Göring at the Reichstag fire trial. But always with the confidence, derived from Marxism, that our victory was already inscribed in the text of the history books of the future.

  So much for the image. What of the reality? Until a few days before Hitler’s appointment I cannot recall undertaking any actual communist activity other than going to the meetings of the SSB cell. No doubt, like all of us, my spirits were lifted by the sharp setback for the Nazis at the elections of 6 November, and by our own impressive advance, but I am quite certain that I had no understanding of the meaning of the Papen government’s fall, and the activities of the shortlived new government of General Schleicher, the last Chancellor before Hitler, or of the December crisis within the Nazi Party, when Hitler eliminated the second most important, or at least prominent, member of his party, Gregor Strasser. On the other hand, there was nothing problematic about the increasing aggressiveness and deliberately provocative tactics of the brownshirts, and their tacit toleration by the public authorities. On 25 January 1933 the KPD organized its last legal demonstration, a mass march through the dark hours of Berlin converging on the headquarters of the Party, the Karl Liebknechthaus on the Bülowplatz (now Rosa Luxemburg-Platz), in response to a provocative mass parade of the SA on the same square. I took part in this march, presumably with other comrades from the SSB, although I have no specific memory of them.

  Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation. Unlike sex, which is essentially individual, it is by its nature collective, and unlike the sexual climax, at any rate for men, it can be prolonged for hours. On the other hand, like sex it implies some physical action – marching, chanting slogans, singing – through which the merger of the individual in the mass, which is the essence of the collective experience, finds expression. The occasion has remained unforgettable, although I can recall no details of this demonstration. I can only remember endless hours of marching, or rather alternately shuffling and waiting, in the freezing cold – Berlin winters are hard – between shadowy buildings (and policemen?) along the dark wintry streets. I cannot remember red flags and slogans, but if there were any – and there must have been some – they were lost in the grey mass of the marchers. What I can remember is singing, with intervals of heavy silence. We sang – I still have the tattered pamphlet with the texts of the songs, ticks against my favourites: the ‘Internationale’, the peasant war song ‘Des Geyers schwarzer Haufen’, the sentimental graveyard doggerel of ‘Der kleine Trompeter’, which (I am told) the lead
er of the GDR, Erich Honecker, wanted played at his funeral, ‘Dem Morgenrot entgegen’, the Soviet Red Airmen’s Song, Hanns Eisler’s ‘Der rote Wedding’, and the slow, solemn, hieratic ‘Brüder zur Sonne zur Freiheit’. We belonged together. I returned home to Halensee as if in a trance. When, in British isolation two years later, I reflected on the basis of my communism, this sense of ‘mass ecstasy’ (Massenekstase, for I wrote my diary in German) was one of the five components of it – together with pity for the exploited, the aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system, ‘dialectical materialism’, a little bit of the Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem and a good deal of intellectual anti-philistinism.6 But in January 1933 I did not analyse my convictions.

  Five days later Hitler was appointed Chancellor. I have already described the experience of reading the news headline somewhere on the way back from school with my sister. I can see it still, as in a dream. It is now known that he resisted the Conservatives’ proposal to ban the Communist Party immediately, partly because this might provoke a desperate attempt at public resistance by the Party, mainly because it strengthened the Nazi argument that only its paramilitaries, the SA, preserved the country from bolshevism, and to lend a national rather than partisan character to the enormous Nazi demonstration on the day of the transfer of power. (It is impossible to imagine that anyone, including themselves, took seriously the call for a general strike which the KPD leadership claimed to have issued on 30 January, presumably to go on record as not having given in without a gesture.) Indeed the SA and SS (at that time much less prominent) were soon authorized to act as auxiliary police, and began to organize their own concentration camps – as yet without official state authorization.

  The new government avoided giving the Reichstag, or anyone in it, even the faintest chance of expressing an opinion, by dissolving it immediately and calling for new elections at the soonest possible constitutional moment, 5 March. Within days a suitable Emergency Decree for the Protection of the German People restricted press freedom and provided for ‘protective custody’. On 24 February the brownshirt and blackshirt paramilitary forces of the Nazi Party were enrolled as ‘auxiliary police’. On that day the police raided the Party headquarters, claiming to find great quantities of treasonable materials, though actually nothing of significance was discovered. Such were the conditions under which the last nominally free multiparty elections of the Weimar Republic were to be held. And then, less than a week before the vote, an utterly unexpected joker was slipped into the cards already stacked against the opposition. On the night of 27 February the Reichstag building was burned down. Whoever did it, the Nazis immediately exploited the occasion to such spectacular effect that most antifascists came to believe that they must have planned the fire.2 An emergency decree on the next day suspended freedom of speech, association and the press as well as privacy of post and telephone services. For good measure, the decree also allowed the autonomy of the Länder by the right of the Reich government to intervene to restore order. Göring had already begun to round up communists and other undesirables. They were dragged into improvised prisons, beaten up, tortured and in some cases even killed. By April 25,000 were in ‘protective custody’ in Prussia alone.

  The immediate reaction of the SSB, or at least my part of it, was to bring the duplicating apparatus to my aunt’s flat. I like to think it may have been the very one on which the last issues of the Schulkampf had been produced. The comrades concluded that, since I was a British subject, I would be less at risk; or perhaps that the police would be less likely to raid our flat. I kept it under my bed for some weeks, a largish brown wooden case of that now antediluvian type where specially typed stencils had to be placed on a permeable inked surface, and each leaf had to be printed singly. Then someone came to take it away. I don’t think any printing was done on it while it was in my charge, for if there had been any, even my undomestic aunt would have protested at the almost inevitable spreading of fatty ink in my bedroom. It was that sort of machine.

  Presumably a more efficient printing press must have been used to produce the leaflets which we were supposed to use for the election campaign. I suppose taking part in that campaign was the first piece of genuinely political work I did. It was also my introduction to a characteristic experience of the communist movement: doing something hopeless and dangerous because the Party told us to. True, we might have wanted to help in the campaign in any case, but, given the situation, we did what we did as a gesture of our devotion to communism, that is to say to the Party. Much in the way that I, finding myself alone in a tram with two SA men, and justifiably scared, refused to conceal or take off my badge. We would go into the apartment buildings and, starting on the top floor, push the leaflets into each flat until we came out of the front door, panting with the effort and looking for signs of danger. There was an element of playing at the Wild West in this – we were the Indians rather than the US cavalry – but there was enough real danger to make us feel genuine fear as well as the thrill of risk-taking. A year or so later I described it in my diary as ‘a light, dry feeling of contraction, as when you stand before a man ready to punch you, waiting for the blow’. What might happen if a door opened on a hostile face, if a brown uniform came down the stairs, if our exits to the street were blocked? Distributing election appeals for the KPD was no laughing matter, especially in the days after the Reichstag fire. Nor was voting for it, although over 13 per cent of the electorate still did so on 5 March. We had a right to be scared, for we were risking not only our own skins, but our parents’.

  The Party was officially banned. The unofficial concentration camps became official. Dachau, the first, was set up on the same day that the new Reichstag (now minus the banned communists) passed an Enabling Act which handed total control to the Hitler regime and abolished itself. Then, in late March, my sister and I heard that we were to go to England. Whatever plans Uncle Sidney had in Barcelona had not come off. Hitler had just announced a boycott of Jewish businesses in early April, and as I said good-bye to my friends, I arranged for one of them – probably Gerhard Wittenberg – to send me news of it. (He gave me the address of the kibbutz organization he would join on emigrating to Palestine.) Then we left. Aunt Mimi had also decided on yet another migration. Her Berlin venture had not been more successful than usual, and my sister’s and my going removed a vital element in her income. I have a vague memory that Nancy was supposed to join Gretl and little Peter – could it have been in Barcelona? – from where they would follow Sidney and me to England. It was another disorientating move in the uprooted life of a displaced child. Sidney came for me. Political as my primary passion was by then, I still arranged that the old bike with the bent frame, the present from my mother that had caused me so much embarrassed teenage anguish, should be lost when the Hobsbaum effects were packed for storage.

  I was not to return to Berlin for some thirty years, but I never forgot it and never will.

  6

  On the Island

  I

  The most unexpected thing about coming to Britain was the sheer size of London, then still by far the largest city in the western world, a vast shapeless polyp of streets and buildings stretching its tentacles into the countryside. Even after seventy years of metropolitan-based life, the size and incoherence of this city still astonishes me. In my first years in Britain I never ceased to marvel at the distances I traversed in it as a matter of course: by bike, north and south, to school in Marylebone from the heights of Crystal Palace, and later from Edgware; by car east and west, driving my uncle between Ilford and Isleworth, never out of sight of rows of buildings.

  Somewhere among these ‘hundred thousand streets beneath the sky’ (as the gifted but alcoholic communist writer Patrick Hamilton called his London novel of the 1930s) the Hobsbaum family had to find a footing. We were subjects of King George V, and therefore – as I still have to remind interviewers and other enquirers – not in any sense refugees or victims of National Socialism. How
ever, in every other respect we were immigrants from central Europe, even provisional immigrants – for we did not reclaim our Berlin possessions from storage until 1935 – in a country unknown to all of us except Uncle Sidney, and even he had not lived in it since the Great War. Apart from relatives we did not know a soul. We were not even former emigrants returning to their native country, for the future situation of the Hobsbaums remained as cloudy as it had been until 1933. The first place after Berlin where all the family came together in the spring of 1933 was in one of Mimi’s multiple ventures into the world of guest-houses, this time in Folkestone. It could have stood for any of so many temporary staging-posts on the endless migrations of the twentieth-century uprooted. A German refugee lady expressed incidental appreciation of the charm and physique of a Swiss teenage boy, evidently about to go to school somewhere in England. A German refugee of my age, on the way to a Zionist agricultural training camp, tried to teach me a little judo. A grey figure from Carpathian Europe, one Salo Flohr, stranded by Alekhine’s refusal to accept his challenge for the world chess title, played chess with Uncle Sidney, while waiting to travel to Moscow to confront the Soviets’ Mikhail Botvinnik. Flohr never made it to the top, but was to become a well-known figure in the Soviet chess world and, presumably, one of the few people for whom emigration to Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s was not a disaster. There, on sunny mornings on the lawn, I discovered English lyric poetry through the Golden Treasury and read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass for the first time. For, already at school in London, I joined all of them in Folkestone for a few weeks, while I prepared to sit the examination of the London Matriculation in unknown or strange subjects, conducted in a language I had hardly used outside the household.