Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  As I lay in bed, surrounded by sound and paper, I concluded that the world of 2002 needs historians more than ever, especially sceptical ones. Perhaps reading the perambulations of an old member of the species through his lifetime may assist the young to face the darkening prospects of the twenty-first century not only with the requisite pessimism, but with a clearer eye, a sense of historical memory and a capacity to stand away from current passions and sales pitches.

  Here age helps. In itself, it makes me a statistical rarity, since in 1998 the number of human beings in the world aged eighty or above was estimated at 66 millions, which is roughly 1 per cent of the global population. Merely by virtue of long life, the history that belongs to books for others is part of the lives and memories of this tiny minority. For a potential reader just about to enter the age of higher education, that is to say born in the early or middle 1980s, most of the twentieth century belongs to a remote past from which little has survived into actual consciousness except historic costume dramas on film and videotape, and mental images of bits and pieces from the century which, for one reason or another, have become part of collective myth as episodes from the Second World War have become in Britain. Most of it belongs not to life but to the preparation of school examinations. The cold winter day when Adolf Hitler came to power in Berlin, which I remember vividly, is immeasurably distant for twenty-year-olds. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, during which I married, can have no human meaning in their lives, nor indeed in the lives of many of their parents, since no human being aged forty or less was even born when it occurred. These things are not, as they are for those of my age, part of a chronological succession of events that defines the shape of our private life in a public world, but at best a subject for intellectual understanding, at worst part of an indiscriminate set of things that happened ‘before my time’.

  Historians of my age are guides to a crucial patch of the past, that other country where they did things differently, because we have lived there. We may not know more about the history of the period than younger colleagues who write about our lifetime in the light of sources not then available to us or, in practice, to anybody. Least of all can we rely on memory, even when age has not eroded it. Unaided by written documentation, it is almost certain to get the facts wrong. On the other hand, we were there, and we know what it felt like, and this gives us a natural immunity to the anachronisms of those who were not.

  Living for over eighty years of the twentieth century has been a natural lesson in the mutability of political power, empires and institutions. I have seen the total disappearance of the European colonial empires, not least the greatest of all, the British Empire, never larger and more powerful than in my childhood, when it pioneered the strategy of keeping order in places like Kurdistan and Afghanistan by aerial bombardment. I have seen great world powers relegated to the minor divisions, the end of a German Empire that expected to last for a thousand years, and of a revolutionary power that expected to last for ever. I am unlikely to see the end of the ‘American century’, but it is a safe bet that some readers of this book will.

  What is more, those who are old have seen the fashions come and go. Since the end of the USSR it has become political orthodoxy and conventional wisdom that there is no alternative to a society of individualist capitalism, and political systems of liberal democracy, which are believed to be organically associated with it, have become the standard form of government almost everywhere. Before 1914 this was also widely believed, though not as widely as today. However, for most of the twentieth century any of these assumptions seemed quite implausible. Capitalism itself seemed on the edge of the abyss. Bizarre as it may seem today, between 1930 and 1960 level-headed observers assumed that the state-commanded economic system of the USSR under the Five-Year Plans, primitive and inefficient as even the most sympathetic visitors could see it was, represented a global alternative model to western ‘free enterprise’. There were as few votes in the word ‘capitalism’ then as in the word ‘communism’ today. Level-headed observers considered it might actually outproduce it. I am not surprised to find myself once again among a generation that distrusts capitalism, though it no longer believes in our alternative to it.

  For someone of my age living through the twentieth century was an absolutely unique lesson in the impact of genuine historical forces. In the thirty years after the Second World War the world and what it was like to live in it changed more rapidly and fundamentally than in any other period of comparable length in human history. Those as old as I in a few countries of the northern hemisphere are the first generation of humans to have actually lived as adults before this extraordinary launch of the spacecraft of collective humanity into orbits of unprecedented social and cultural upheaval, which the world is experiencing today. We are the first generation to have lived through the historic moment when the rules and conventions that had hitherto bound human beings together in families, communities and societies ceased to operate. If you want to know what it was like, only we can tell you. If you think you can go back, we can tell you, it can’t be done.

  II

  Age produces one kind of historical perspective, but I hope my life has helped me to project another: distance. The crucial difference between the historiography of the Cold War – let alone the snake-oil salesmen of the ‘war against terrorism’ – and that of the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century is that (except in Belfast) we are no longer expected to take sides as Catholics or Protestants, or even to take their ideas as seriously as they did. But history needs distance, not only from the passions, emotions, ideologies and fears of our own wars of religion, but from the even more dangerous temptations of ‘identity’. History needs mobility and the ability to survey and explore a large territory, that is to say the ability to move beyond one’s roots. That is why we cannot be plants, unable to leave their native soil and habitat, because no single habitat or environmental niche can exhaust our subject. Our ideal cannot be the oak or redwood, however majestic, but the migrant bird, at home in arctic and tropic, overflying half the globe. Anachronism and provincialism are two of the deadly sins of history, both equally due to a sheer ignorance of what things are like elsewhere, which even limitless reading and the power of imagination can only rarely overcome. The past remains another country. Its borders can be crossed only by travellers. But (except for those whose way of life is nomadic) travellers are, by definition, people away from their community.

  Fortunately, as readers who have followed me so far know, all my life I have belonged to untypical minorities, starting with the enormous advantage of a background in the old Habsburg Empire. Of all the great multi-lingual and multi-territorial empires that collapsed in the course of the twentieth century, the decline and fall of the Emperor Franz Josef’s, being both long expected and observed by sophisticated minds, has left us by far the most powerful literary or narrative chronicle. Austrian minds had time to reflect on the death and disintegration of their empire, while it struck all the other empires suddenly, at least by the measure of the historical clock, even those in visibly declining health, like the Soviet Union. But perhaps the perceived and accepted multi-linguality, multi-confessionality and multi-culturality of the monarchy helped them to a more complex sense of historical perspective. Its subjects lived simultaneously in different social universes and different historical epochs. Moravia at the end of the nineteenth century was the background to Gregor Mendel’s genetics, Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Leoš Janáček’s Jenufa. I recall the occasion, some time in the 1970s, when I found myself in Mexico City at an international round table on Latin American peasant movements, and suddenly became aware of the fact that four of the five experts who made up the panel had been born in Vienna …

  But even beyond this I recognize myself in E. M. Forster’s phrase about C.P. Cavafy, the anglophone Greek poet from my native Alexandria, who ‘stood at a slight angle to the universe’. For the historian, as for the photographer, this is a goo
d way to stand.

  For most of my life this has been my situation: typecast from a birth in Egypt, which has no practical bearing on my life-history, as someone from elsewhere. I have been attached to and felt at home in several countries and seen something of many others. However, in all of them, including the one into whose citizenship I was born, I have been, not necessarily an outsider, but someone who does not wholly belong to where he finds himself, whether as an Englishman among the central Europeans, a continental immigrant in Britain, a Jew everywhere – even, indeed particularly, in Israel – an anti-specialist in a world of specialists, a polyglot cosmopolitan, an intellectual whose politics and academic work were devoted to the non-intellectual, even, for much of my life, an anomaly among communists, themselves a minority of political humanity in the countries I have known. This has complicated my life as a private human being, but it has been a professional asset for the historian.

  This has made it easy to resist what Pascal called ‘the reasons of the heart of which reason knows nothing’, namely emotional identification with some obvious or chosen group. As identity is defined against someone else, it implies not identifying with the other. It leads to disaster. That is exactly why in-group history written only for the group (‘identity history’) – black history for blacks, queer history for homosexuals, feminist history for women only, or any kind of in-group ethnic or nationalist history – cannot be satisfactory as history, even when it is more than a politically slanted version of an ideological sub-section of the wider identity group. No identity group, however large, is alone in the world; the world cannot be changed to suit it alone, nor can the past.

  This is particularly urgent at the beginning of the new century, in the aftermath of the end of the short twentieth century. As old regimes disintegrate, old forms of politics fade away and new states multiply, the manufacture of new histories to suit new regimes, states, ethnic movements and identity groups becomes a global industry. As the human hunger for continuity with the past grows in an era designed as a continuous break with the past, the media society feeds it by inventing its versions of a box-office national history, ‘heritage’ and theme parks in ancient fancy dress. And even in democracies where authoritarian power no longer controls what can be said about past and present, the joint force of pressure groups, the threat of headlines, unfavourable publicity or even public hysteria impose evasion, silence and the public self-censorship of ‘political correctness’. Even today (2002) there is shock when a consistently anti-Nazi German writer of notable moral courage, Gunther Grass, chooses as the subject of a novel the tragedy of a sinking ship filled with German refugees fleeing from the advancing Red Army in the last stages of the Second World War.

  III

  The test of a historian’s life is whether he or she can ask and answer questions, especially ‘what if’ questions, about the matters of passionate significance to themselves and the world, as though they were journalists reporting things long past – and yet, not as a stranger but as one deeply involved. These are not questions about real history, which is not about what we might like, but about what happened, and could perhaps have happened otherwise but did not. They are questions about the present not the past, which is why they are important to those who live at the start of the new century, old or young. The First World War was not avoided, so the question whether it could have been is academic. If we say its casualties were intolerable (as most people agree) or that the German Europe that would have emerged from the Kaiser’s victory might have been a better proposition than the world of Versailles (as I hold), I am not suggesting it could have been different. And yet, I must fail the test, were I asked such a question even in theory about the Second World War. I can, with enormous effort, envisage the argument that Spain might have been better off if Franco’s coup had succeeded in 1936, avoiding the Civil War. I am prepared to concede, with regret, that Lenin’s Comintern was not such a good idea nor – this time without difficulty, for I was never a Zionist – Theodor Herzl’s project of a Jewish nation state. He would have done better to stay with the Neue Freie Presse as its star columnist. But if you ask me to entertain the proposition that the defeat of National Socialism was not worth the 50 million dead and the uncounted horrors of the Second World War, I simply could not. I look forward to an American world empire, whose long-term chances are poor, with more fear and less enthusiasm than I look back on the record of the old British Empire, run by a country whose modest size protected it against megalomania. What marks have I got in the test? If they are too low, then this book will not give readers much help as they go into the new century, mostly with a longer life ahead of them than the author.

  Still, let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.

  Notes

  1. Overture

  1. This and the following paragraphs are based on my mother’s letters to her sister during May 1915.

  2. A Child in Vienne

  1. I deliberately use the German names of these places since these were the ones we used, though all towns of any size in most of the empire ahd two or three names.

  2. Nelly Hobsbaum to her sister Gretl, letter dated 23 March 1925.

  3. Nelly Hobsbaum to her sister Gretl, letter dated 5 December 1928.

  4. Berlin: Weimar Dies

  1. James V. Bryson, My Life with Laemmle (Facto Books, London, 1980), pp. 56–7. Dronkwater had so little sense of Hollywood that he did the job for less than half what Laemmle’s agent was authorized to offer.

  2. Most of the information about the school in the following pages is based on Heinz stallmann (ed.) Das Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium zu Schöneberg, 1890–1945. Geschichte einer Schue (privately printed, Berlin, 1965?), my own memorises and those of Fritz Lusting.

  3. In 1929 the school had 388 Protestant, 48 Catholic, 35 Jewish and 6 other pupils. Stallmann, op. cit., p, 47.

  4. Mimi Brown to Ernestine Grün, letter dated 3 December 1931, announcing her plans to leave England — for Ragusa (Dubrovnik)? For Berlin?

  5. Berlin: Brown and Red

  1. Stephan Hermlin, Abendlicht (Leipzig, 1979), pp. 32, 35, 52.

  2. Karl Corino, ’Ditchung in eigener Sache’, Die Zeit, 4 October 1996, pp. 9–11.

  3. Heinz Stallmann (ed.), Das Prinz-Heinrich-Gymnasium zu Schöneberg, 1890–1945. Geschichte einer Schule (privately printed, Berlin, 1965?) provides no information, except one mention of ’Leder’ in a list of fellow-pupils of 1926–35 by a contributor who graduated in 1935.

  4. My information comes from Rellix Krolokowski, ’Erinnerungen: Kommunistische Schülerbewegung in der Weimarer Republik’, a texte which I was given, possibly by the author, during a visit to Leipzig in 1996.

  5. Kommunistische Pennäler Fraktion (’Pennäler’=secondary-schoolstudents, from schoolboy slang ’Penne’=secondary school).

  6. Tagebuch, 17 March 1935.

  6. On the Island

  1. Tagebuch, 8–11 November 1934. Much of this chapter is based on the material in this diary, which I kept from 10 April 1934 to 9 January 1936.

  Tagebuch, 16 June 1935 and 17 August 1935.

  3. see the social analysis of the British jazz-lovers in my The Jazz Scene (London, 1959; New York, 1933).

  4. Josef Skvorecky, The Bass Saxophone (London, 1978).

  5. Luckily for them, my first attempt to contact a Party branch, somewhere on the outskirts of Croydon, discovered from advertissements in the Daily Worker, had been abortive, I happened to land on a small group of critical comrades who listened with interest to my account of the last Party demonstration in Berlin, but insisted that the triumph of Hitler indicated errors by the KPD or perhaps even the Comintern. I could not answer them, but felt that being recruited to a unit criticizing the generals might not be the best may of rejoining the army of the world revolution. Not that the 5,000 or so British communists were much of an army compared to the German Communist Party of 1932.
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  6. Tagebuch, 4 June 1935: “Today I happen to look at Mama’s 1929 letters to me. She calls me. “darling”. I am astonished and vaguely disturbed that it is so long since anyone called me that, and try to imagine how it would be today if someone used the world.’

  7. Tagebuch, 12 July 1935.

  8. Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2001), cited in Neal Ascherson, “The Remains of der ’tag, New York Review of Books, 29 March 2001, p. 44.

  7. Cambridge

  1. Michael Straight, After Long Silence (London, 1983).

  2. E. Hobsbawn and T. H. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, in the ’Past & Present’ Series, 1983). The book has remained in print since the original publication.

  3. I am quoting what I wrote in 1937 about the celebrated English don George (’Dadie’) Rylands (Granta, 10 November 1937).

  4. T. E. B. Howarth, Cambridge Between the Wars (London, 1978), p. 172.

  5. Financial Times, The Business weekend magazine, 4 March 2000, p. 18.

  6. I recorded this figure in ’Cambridge Cameo: Ties with the Past: Ryder and Amies’ by E.J.H. and J.H.D. (my friend Jack Dodd) in Granta, 26 May 1937.

  7. My description of a Sheppard lecture in 1937 is quoted in Howarth, op. cit., p. 162.

  8. E.J.H., ’Professor Trevelyan Lectures’, Granta, 17 October 1937.

  H. S. Ferns, Reading from Left to Right: One Man’s Political History , Foreword by Malcolm Muggeridg (University of Toronto Press, 1983),p. 114.

  8. Against Fascism and War

  1. Cambridge University Club Bulletin, 18 October 1938.

  2. ’The membership of the CUSC is still not much aver 450’, Weekly Bulletin of the Cambridge University Socialist Club No, 2, Autumn term 1936 (duplicated).