Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  The Hungarians I got to know best, too young for pre-war politics or resistance – Ivan Berend and his long-time collaborator George Ranki both returned from the Nazi camps in 1945 to high school – were reform communists, except for the brilliant Peter Hanak, young star of Hungarian Marxist history in 1955, insurgent in the revolution of 1956, and strongly anti-communist afterwards. But the post-’56 mood in Hungary was both modestly reformist and tolerant, even of some dissidence. Of all Party regimes Hungary probably came closest to normal intellectual life under communism, perhaps largely thanks to its wealth of intellectual talent, which it reinforced by good relations with its western émigrés. Some of its most remarkable non-political minds rejected emigration even in the worst times, such as the mathematical genius Erdös, who insisted on maintaining his Hungarian passport while also insisting on travelling round the world’s mathematics departments, never staying in any place for more than a few months, carrying all his worldly possessions with him in his suitcase. He managed this extraordinary and perhaps unique achievement by a private citizen at the height of the Cold War, thanks to the unanimous support of the international mafia of mathematicians. When, unable to talk number theory with him, I asked him, on an agreeable evening in Cambridge, why he wanted the permanent right to go back to Budapest, he said: ‘Is good mathematical atmosphere.’ Hungary, of course, was the only part of central Europe that had not lost most of its Jews.

  In some countries of ‘real socialism’, as for instance Poland, it was possible to avoid the Party in one’s dealings with colleagues and friends. Not so in the German Democratic Republic where nothing was outside its supervision, certainly not the contacts of its citizens with foreign communists. Moreover, there was no scope for dissidence there or even doubt about the line that came down from the commanding heights. In some ways, and not least for linguistic reasons, I therefore found it easiest to discover there what Party membership meant under socialism.

  East German communists, at least those within my knowledge, were and most remained believers, whether old KPD cadres from before 1933; youthful enthusiasts who joined in the ruined landscape of 1945 to build a new future, such as Fritz Klein, son of the editor-in-chief of one of the Weimar Republic’s most respected Conservative newspapers; second-generation communists such as my friend Siegfried Bünger, son of a worker from rural Mecklenburg; or Gerhard Schilfert, converted as a Soviet prisoner-of war, a man incapable of being other than sincerely convinced by and loyal to authority, old or new. (All these were historians.) In a way, they selected themselves. Those who could not stand the heat got out of the kitchen, which was really quite easy until the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

  I had little direct contact with the Old Guard, except with the Kuczynskis and, through my friend the painter Georg Eisler, with his admired father Hanns, partner of Brecht and official state composer of the GDR, whom I met in the unproletarian ambiance of the Waldorf Hotel. Hanns had abandoned his wife and son, whose exile had taken them from Vienna via Moscow and Manchester back to Vienna. A more recent wife, Lou, he lost to another communist veteran from Moscow, the brilliant and romantic charmer Ernst Fischer, son of a Habsburg general and postwar star of Austrian culture and the Austrian CP until it expelled him after the Prague Spring. I owe an intellectual debt to Fischer, acknowledged in my Age of Revolution. All remained in friendly contact, as Fischer did with his first wife, a handsome aristocratic girl from Bohemia who became a Soviet agent, whose revolutionary credentials went back to the German communist insurrection of 1921. The Leipzig-Viennese Eislers were almost the quintessential Comintern family. Aunt Elfriede (known to history as Ruth Fischer) had been the young communist believer in free love who moved Lenin to his criticism of casual sex (‘the glass of water theory’). Some years later, she emerged as part of the ultra-left leadership of the KPD before disappearing into expulsion and exile having picked the wrong side in Soviet and Comintern politics. She reappeared after the war in the USA, among other things as a denouncer of her brother Gerhart Eisler. He, also a defeated (but more moderate) leader of the KPD, had become a Comintern agent of importance in China, the USA and elsewhere. He was expelled from the USA, jumping ship en route in Britain, and returned to East Germany where, during the mania of late Stalinism, he was – or so it is claimed – cast as a potential and no doubt in due course self-confessed traitor in a show trial. Fortunately the East German regime, though occupied by the Soviet forces, never joined this murderous Stalinist fashion, though it is rarely given credit for such restraint. Gerhart Eisler spent the rest of his life in politically minor jobs in the GD R, such as head of the broadcasting services, gently fending off his nephew’s questions about his past. Had he written his memoirs, which he refused to do, they would have been as meaningless as those of most diplomats: his generation did not talk. Hollywood, where he spent his exile, suited Hanns, the musician, fat, witty, cynical, and far better at succeeding there than his partner Brecht, but he went back none the less and wrote the new state’s national anthem. One can hardly accuse them of having many illusions about the reality of Comintern communism, the USSR and least of all the GDR. They stayed, controlled and harassed by a rigid political hierarchy to whom they were from time to time denounced by rivals and ambitious juniors, constantly watched, even as they were publicly honoured, by the largest permanent policing system ever operated in a modern state, the Stasi. But they stayed.

  In one way the peculiar situation of the GDR made it easier. The East German regime suffered from the patent fact that it had no legitimacy, initially almost no support, and would have never in its lifetime won a freely contested election. The successor to the SED (Socialist Unity Party) has probably more genuine popular support today than when the old regime totted up the habitual 98 per cent of votes. To this extent East German communists were still, speaking globally, in embattled opposition, especially under the threat and temptation of their overpowering neighbour, the vastly larger Federal Republic. This justified measures which would otherwise have horrified communists, even allowing for their Party’s rejection of liberal democracy. One remembers Brecht’s bitter wisecrack about government dissolving the people and electing another. On that very occasion, 17 June 1953, my friend Fritz Klein, a devoted communist of twenty-nine, supported the Soviet intervention after the great workers’ revolt, because he thought the regime socially more just and politically more reliably anti-fascist than the Federal Republic. Similarly, in 1961 he supported the building of the Berlin Wall. ‘My view then,’ he writes, ‘was that it had to be accepted as the lesser evil, faced with the inevitable alternative: to abandon the still legitimate experiment of building a new society.’10 The most they could hope for was that the socialist society they were constructing would work and eventually win over the people. Without doubt the best and most intelligent East German Party members were both critics of the system and remained hopeful reformers to the end. But they were powerless. It was, of course, easier for Party members to abdicate their judgement and play it by the book (that is, at the top, ask for advice from Moscow) or simply do whatever the Party told them had to be done. And the Party was run by old hardliners from before 1933 or their successors of the next generation.

  The passions of the Cold War have presented the East European regimes as gigantic systems of terror and gulags. In fact, after the years of blood and iron under Stalin (who was in two minds whether he wanted a GDR at all), the GDR’s system of justice and repression, leaving aside the victims of the Berlin Wall, has been well described authoritatively by a Harvard historian as ‘continuously shabby but relatively unsanguinary’.11 It was a monstrous all-embracing bureaucracy which did not terrorize but rather constantly chivvied, rewarded and punished its subjects. The new society they were building was not a bad society: work and careers for all, universal education open at all levels, health, social security and pensions, holidays in a firmly structured community of good people doing a honest day’s work, the best of high culture accessible to
the people, open-air leisure and sports, no class distinctions. At its best it settled down into – Charles Maier’s words again – something between ‘socialism and Gemütlichkeit’, or a ‘Biedermeier collectivism’.12 The drawback, apart from the fact, unconcealable from its citizens, that it was far worse off than West Germany, was that it was imposed on its citizens by a system of superior authority, as by strict nineteenth-century parents on recalcitrant or at least unwilling minors. They had no control over their lives. They were not free. Since West German television was generally accessible the constant presence of compulsion and censorship was evident and resented. Nevertheless, as long as it looked permanent, it was tolerable enough.

  All this affected Party members as much as, perhaps more than, the rest. Their conversations were not only recorded by rivals or the omnipresent Stasi informers, but, if deemed unacceptable, brought demands for public self-criticism or demotion by dour but unconvincing functionaries from the self-contained ghetto of the national rulers, rigidly laying down the line. Dissidents were worried rather than harried into conformity. In the worst cases, they were nagged or extruded to the West, like Wolf Biermann, whom I remember visiting with Georg Eisler, in his room in a back court of East Berlin where he sang the protest songs that had already made him famous.

  Most Party members in the GDR, and almost certainly most Party intellectuals, believed in some kind of socialism to the end. It is hard to find among them, as among Soviet emigrants, reform communists who had become 100 per cent pro-American cold warriors. But they were increasingly downhearted. When did communists begin to suspect – or to believe – that the ‘really existing’ socialist economy, clearly inferior to the capitalist one, was not working at all?

  Markus Wolf, the head of GDR espionage, a man of visibly impressive ability, whom I got to know when a Dutch TV station organized a conversation between him and myself on the Cold War, told me that he had come to the conclusion in the late 1970s that the GDR system would not work. Even so, in the last moments of the GDR he came out publicly as a communist reformer – an unusual stance for an intelligence chief. In 1980 the Hungarian Janos Kornai’s book The Economics of Shortage already provided the classical analysis of the self-contradictory operations of Soviet-style economies. In the 1980s, a decade when these economies were visibly running down (unlike the post-Mao Chinese economy), communists in the Soviet bloc countries with elbow-room – Poland and Hungary – were already, it was clear, preparing for a shift. The hard-line regimes in Prague and Berlin had nothing to rely on except the potential intervention of the Soviet army, which was no longer on the cards since Gorbachev had taken over in the USSR. In Eastern Europe as in the West, Communist Parties were decomposing. Soon the Soviet Union itself would decompose. An historical epoch was ending. What was left of the old international communist movement lay beached like a whale on a shore from which the waters had withdrawn.

  Late in the 1980s, almost at the end, an East German dramatist wrote a play called The Knights of the Round Table. What is their future? wonders Lancelot. ‘The people outside don’t want to know any more about the grail and the round table … They no longer believe in our justice and our dream … For the people the knights of the round table are a pile of fools, idiots and criminals.’ Does he himself still believe in the grail? ‘I don’t know,’ says Lancelot. ‘I can’t answer the question. I can’t say yes or no …’ No, they may never find the grail. But is not King Arthur right when he says that what is essential is not the grail but the quest for it? ‘If we give up on the grail, we give up on ourselves.’ Only on ourselves? Can humanity live without the ideals of freedom and justice, or without those who devote their lives to them? Or perhaps even without the memory of those who did so in the twentieth century?

  10

  War

  I

  I arrived back in England just in time for the war to start. We had expected it. We, or at least I, had even feared it, though no longer in 1939. This time we knew we were already in it. Within a minute of the prime minister’s old, dry voice declaring war, we had heard the wavy sound of the sirens, which to this day brings back the memory of nocturnal bombs to any human being who lived through the Second World War in cities. We were even surrounded by the visible landscape of aerial warfare, the corrugated iron of shelters, the barrage balloons tethered like herds of silver cows in the sky. It was too late to be afraid. But what the outbreak of war meant for most young men of my generation was a sudden suspension of the future. For a few weeks or months we floated between the plans and prospects of our pre-war lives and an unknown destiny in uniform. For the moment life had to be provisional, or even improvised. None more so than my own.

  Until my return to England I had not really come to terms with the implications of the family’s emigration. I now discovered myself not only without a known future for an unpredictable period, but also without a clearly discernible present, unanchored and alone. The family home was gone, and so was the family. Outside Cambridge I had nowhere in particular to go, though I would not be short of comrades and friends to put me up, and I was always welcomed in the only available household of London relatives, the ever-reliable Uncle Harry’s. I had no girlfriend. In fact, for the next three years, when I came to London I lived a nomadic sort of existence sleeping in spare beds or on the floors of various flats in Belsize Park, Bloomsbury or Kilburn. From the moment I got called up, my only permanent base was in a few crates of books, papers and other belongings which the head porter of King’s allowed me to store in a shed. I packed them after my call-up. I thought of them reemerging after the war, with luck, like a Rip van Winkle whose life had stopped in 1939 and who now had to get used to a new world. What world?

  The war had begun to empty Cambridge. As the former staff of Granta had already dispersed, I asked the printers to close the journal down for the duration, thus formally burying an essential component of pre-war Cambridge. Research on my proposed topic of French North Africa was now pointless, though I went through the motions, background reading, hitchhiking to the British Museum when necessary and when the snowdrifts of an unusually freezing winter made it possible.

  What is more, since the line-change of the autumn of 1939, it was not the war we had expected, in the cause for which the Party had prepared us. Moscow reversed the line which the Comintern and all European Parties had pursued since 1935 and had continued to pursue after the outbreak of war, until the message from Moscow came through. Harry Pollitt’s refusal to accept the change demonstrated that the leadership of the British Party was openly split on the issue. Moreover, the line that the war had ceased to be anti-fascist in any sense, and that Britain and France were as bad as Nazi Germany, made neither emotional nor intellectual sense. We accepted the new line, of course. Was it not the essence of ‘democratic centralism’ to stop arguing once a decision had been reached, whether or not you were personally in agreement? And the highest decision had obviously been taken. Unlike the crisis of 1956 (see chapter 12) most Party members – even the student intellectuals – seemed unshaken by the Moscow decision, though several drifted out in the next two years. I am unable to remember or to reconstruct what I thought at the time, but a diary I kept for the first few months of my army service in 1940 makes it clear that I had no reservations about the new line. Fortunately the phoney war, the behaviour of the French government, which immediately banned the Communist Party, and the behaviour of both French and British governments after the outbreak of the Soviets’ winter war against Finland made it a lot easier for us to swallow the line that the western powers as imperialists were, if anything, more interested in defeating communism than in fighting Hitler. I remember arguing this point, walking on the lawn in the Provost’s garden in King’s with a sympathetic sceptic, the mathematical economist David Champernowne. After all, while all seemed quiet, if not somnolent, on the western front, the only plans of the British government for action envisaged sending western troops across Scandinavia to help the Finns. Indeed, one of
the comrades, the enthusiasic public school boy and boxing half-blue J. O. N. (‘Mouse’) Vickers – he actually looked more like a large weasel than a mouse, thin, quick and mobile – was due to be sent there with his unit when the Russso-Finnish war ended. For communist intellectuals Finland was a lifeline. I wrote a pamphlet on the subject at the time with Raymond Williams, the future writer, critic and guru of the left, then a new, militant and obviously high-flying recruit to the student Party. Alas, it has been lost in the course of the alarums and excursions of the century. I have been unable to rediscover a copy. And then, in February 1940, I was at last called up.