Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Read online

  What else did we know about the times we lived in? Vienna schoolchildren took it for granted that people had the choice between two parties – the Christian socials and the social democrats or Reds. Our simple materialist assumption was that if you were a landlord you voted for the first, if you were a tenant for the second. Since most Viennese were tenants, this naturally made Vienna a Red city. Until after the civil war of 1934 communists were so unimportant that a number of the most enthusiastic ones chose to be active in other countries where there was more scope for them – mainly Germany, such as the famous Eislers: the composer Hanns, the Comintern agent Gerhart, and their sister, the formidable Elfriede, better known as Ruth Fischer, who briefly became leader of the German Communist Party – but also in Czechoslovakia, such as Egon Erwin Kisch. (Many years later the painter Georg Eisler, Hanns’s son, became my best friend.) I cannot recall paying attention to the only communist in the circle of the former Grün sisters, who wrote under the pen-name Leo Lania, then a young man who declared Zola’s L’Oeuvre to be his favourite book and Eugene Onegin and Spartacus his favourite heroes in literature and history. Our family was, of course, neither Black nor Red, since the Blacks were anti-Semites and the Reds were for workers and not people of our class. Besides, we were English, so the matter did not concern us.

  And yet, moving from primary to secondary school, and from infancy towards puberty in the Vienna of the late 1920s, one acquired political consciousness as naturally as sexual awareness. In the summer of 1930 I made friends in Weyer, a village in Upper Austria where the doctors were vainly trying to deal with my mother’s lungs, with Haller Peter, the boy of the family from whom we rented lodgings. (By the tradition of bureaucratic states, when names were called for, surnames came before given names.) We fished and went robbing orchards together, an exercise I thought my sister would also enjoy, but which, as she admitted to me many years later, had terrified her. Since his father was a railwayman, the family was Red: in Austria, and especially in the countryside, it would not have occurred to any non-agricultural worker in those days to be anything else. Though Peter – about my age – was not visibly interested in public affairs, he also took it for granted that he was Red; and somehow, between lobbing stones at trout and stealing apples, I also concluded that I wanted to be one.

  Three years earlier I remember another summer holiday in a Lower Austrian village called Rettenegg, at a time situated vaguely in my private life, but firmly in history. As usual, my father did not join us, but remained at work in Vienna. But the summer of 1927 was the time when the workers of Vienna, outraged by the acquittal of rightwingers who had killed some socialists in an affray, went on to the streets en masse, and burned down the Palace of Justice on the Ringstrasse (the great circular boulevard which surrounds the old central city of Vienna), eighty-five of them being massacred in the process. My father had, it seems, been caught up in the riot, but got away safely. I have no doubt that the grown-ups must have discussed this intensively (not least, my mother), but I cannot say that it made the slightest impact on me, unlike the story that, once upon a time – namely in 1908, on a journey to Egypt, his ship had passed close to Sicily at the time of the great Messina earthquake. What I actually remember from that holiday was watching the local craftsman build a boat outside our lodgings and the pine forests up the mountain which I explored alone, until I reached a woodcutters’ site, where the men gave me some of their Sterz, the stiff cereal porridge on which they lived in the woods. On the way there I saw, for the first time in my life, the great black woodpecker, all one-and-a-half foot of it under the vivid red helmet, drumming against a stump in a clearing like a mad miniature hermit, alone under the stillness of the trees.

  Still, it would be too much to say that the summer at Weyer made me political. It is only in retrospect that my childhood can be seen as a process of politicization. At the time playing and learning, family and school defined my life, as they defined the lives of most Viennese children in the 1920s. Virtually everything we experienced came to us in these ways or fitted into one or another of these frameworks.

  Of the two networks which constituted most of my life, the family was by far the more permanent. It consisted of a larger Viennese clan, the relatives of my grandparents and a smaller Anglo-Austrian part, two Grün sisters, my mother and her younger sister Gretl, married to two Hobsbaum brothers, namely my father and the younger Sidney, who also lived in Vienna for much of the 1920s. As for school, one did not go there until the age of six. After that, as our addresses changed I passed through two primary schools and three Gymnasia, and my sister – who left Vienna before the age of ten – through two primary schools. In these circumstances school friendships tended to be temporary. Of all those I came to know at my five schools in Vienna, all but one were to disappear totally from my subsequent life.

  The family, on the other hand, was an operational network, tied together not only by the emotional bonds between mothers, children and grandchildren, and between sisters and brothers, but by economic necessity. What there was of the modern welfare state in the 1920s hardly touched middle-class families, since few of their members were employed for wages. Whom else could one call on for help? How could one not help relatives in need, even if one did not particularly like them? I don’t believe that this was specially characteristic of Jewish families, although my mother’s Viennese family undoubtedly had a sense that the mishpokhe, or at least the kinsmen and kinswomen living in Vienna, constituted a group, which met from time to time – always, as I recall from long and spectacularly boring sessions round tables placed together in some open-air café ś to take family decisions or just gossip. We were given ice-cream, but short pleasures do not compensate for lengthy tedium. If there was anything specifically Jewish about it, it was the assumption among all of them that the family was a network stretching across countries and oceans, that shifting between countries was a normal part of life, and that for people engaged in buying and selling – as so many members of Jewish families were – earning one’s living was an uncertain and unpredictable matter, especially in the era of catastrophe which had engulfed central Europe since the collapse of civilization in August 1914. As it turned out, no part of the Hobsbaum–Grün family was to need the safety net of the family system more than my parents, especially after my father’s death changed an economic situation of permanent crisis into one of catastrophe. But until then – in my case until the age of eleven plus – we children were barely aware of this.

  We were still in the era when taking a taxi seemed an extravagance that required special justification, even for relatively well-off people. We – or at least I – seemed to have all the usual possessions our friends had and do all the things they did. I can recall only one occasion when I had an inkling of how tough things were. I had just entered secondary school (Bundesgymnasium XIII, Fichtnergasse). The professor in charge of the new form – all teachers at a Gymnasium were automatically Herr Professor, just as we automatically were now addressed like adults as Sie and not like children as Du – had given us the list of books we needed to buy. For geography we needed the Kozenn-Atlas , a large and evidently rather expensive volume. ‘This is very dear. Is it absolutely necessary for you to have it?’ my mother asked in a tone which must clearly have communicated to me a sense of crisis, if only because the answer to her question was so obvious. Of course it was. How could Mummy not see this? The book was bought, but the sense that on this occasion, at least, a major sacrifice had been made has remained with me. Perhaps this is a reason why I still have that atlas on my shelves, a bit tattered and full of the graffiti and marginalia of someone in the early forms of secondary school, but still a good atlas, to which I refer from time to time.

  Perhaps other children of my age might have been more conscious of our material problems. As a boy I was not much aware of practical realities; and adults, insofar as their activities and interests did not overlap with my own, were not part of practical reality so far as I was concerned
. In any case I lived for much of the time in a world without clear boundaries between reality, the discoveries of reading and the creations of imagination. Even a child with a more hard-headed sense of reality, such as my sister, had no clear idea of our situation. Such knowledge simply was not supposed to be part of the world of our childhood. For instance, I had no idea what work my father did. Nobody bothered to tell children about these things, and in any case the ways in which people like my father and uncle earned their living were far from clear. They were not men with firmly describable occupations, like the figures on ‘Happy Families’ cards: doctors, lawyers, architects, policemen, shopkeepers. When asked what my father did, I would vaguely say, or write, ‘Kaufmann’ (merchant), knowing quite well that this meant nothing, and was almost certainly wrong. But what else was one to put?

  To a large extent, our – or at least my – lack of awareness of our financial situation was due to the reluctance, no, the refusal, of my Viennese family to acknowledge it. It was not that they insisted on the last resort of the middle class fallen on bad times, ‘keeping up appearances’. They were aware of how far they had fallen. ‘It really lifts the heart to see this in our impoverished and proletarianized times,’ my grandmother wrote to her daughter, marvelling at the smoothness and opulence of a nephew’s wedding, noting bitterly that the bridegroom had given his bride ‘a very beautiful and valuable ring, made by us’ in better days. That is before Grandpa Grün, his savings reduced in value by the great inflation of the early twenties to the price of a coffee and cake at the Café śIlion, returned in old age to the occupation of his youth as a commercial traveller, selling trinkets in provincial towns and alpine villages. Large swathes of the Austrian middle class were in a similar position, impoverished by war and postwar, getting used to tightened belts and a far more modest lifestyle than ‘in peacetime’ – i.e. before 1914. (Nothing since 1918 counted as peace.) They found having no money hard – harder, they thought, than the workers who were, after all, used to it. (Later, when I became an enthusiastic communist teenager my aunt Gretl shook her head over my refusal to accept what, to her, was this self-evident proposition.) Not that the English husbands of Grün daughters were better off. Two of them were spectacularly unfitted for the jungle of the market economy: my father and Wilfred Brown, a handsome wartime internee who married the oldest sister, Mimi. Even my uncle Sidney, the only Hobsbaum brother to earn a living in business, spent most of the decade extracting himself from the ruins of one failed project only to plunge into the next, equally doomed, enterprise.

  At bottom my Viennese family found any other way of life than that before 1914 inconceivable, and carried on with it, against the odds. Thus my mother, even when unable to pay the grocery bills, let alone the rent and utilities, always employed servants. Nor were these old retainers, such as Helene Demuth, who is buried with the Karl Marxes in Highgate Cemetery. They were and remained the quintessential ‘servant problem’ of middle-class ladies, an endless succession of young women from agencies who stayed a month or two, ranging from the rare ‘eine Perle’ (a pearl), to the clumsy arrival straight from the country, who had never seen a gas-stove, let alone a telephone. When my mother visited England for the first time in 1925, to take care of her sister Mimi who was then ill in Barrow-in-Furness, she wrote to her other sister, impressed not only with the efficiency, equanimity and lack of fuss with which households were run (so different from Vienna Jewish families …), but that it was done without servants. ‘Here you find ladies who do everything themselves, and have children, and even do all the laundry themselves, and still remain ladies.’2

  Even so, she never seriously considered the British option. ‘As someone with years of experience of being broke,’ she wrote to her sister who complained of money troubles in Berlin,

  let me give you one major piece of advice, which I urge you to take seriously. Try not ever to admit that you could do without a maid!! In the long run you can’t manage without one anyway, and so it is best to start with the assumption that a maid is just as much a necessity as food or a roof over your head. What you save is nothing compared to the loss in health, comfort, and above all the state of your nerves: and the worse things get, the more you need them. True, just lately I wondered whether to give Marianne notice – not that I could do it before Christmas, it’s too late, and she was always so good – but the only reason I did was that I’m ashamed that she should see that I can’t pay the grocer etc. And, deep down I know perfectly well it is best to grow a thick skin and to keep her. 3

  Of all this we knew or understood nothing except that the parents had rows, possibly with increasing frequency – but whose parents do not have rows? – and, in the central European winters, that the rooms were icy. (Had we lived in Britain in the era of coal-fired fireplaces, very nearly the most inefficient form of indoor heating invented, this would not necessarily have been due to lack of money to buy winter fuel.)

  Firm and cohesive, partly because of the very precariousness of its material base, the family divided the world, and therefore my life, into two parts: inside and outside. In effect, so far as we children were concerned, the family and its close friends constituted, or determined, the world of adults that I knew as people and not merely as service providers or, as it were, stage extras on the filmset of our life. (It also determined which children would remain permanently part of our lives and we of theirs, like the Gold girls, or the daughter of the Szanas.) The adults I knew consisted almost entirely of relatives, or of the friends of parents and relatives. Thus I have no memory as a person, of the dentist my mother took me to, even though the experience of going there was only too unforgettable, for he was not someone she ‘knew’. On the other hand I remember Doktor Strasser as a real person, presumably because the family knew him and his family. Curiously enough, teachers do not appear to have belonged to the world of individual adults until my last year in Vienna, and only became people with whom I had personal relations, in Berlin.

  School was strictly outside. And ‘outside’, lacking adults as real persons, consisted essentially of other children. The world of children, whether ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, was one which the adults did not really understand, just as we did not really understand what they were about. At best, each side of the generation gap accepted what the other side did as ‘how like children’ or ‘that’s what grown-ups do’. Only puberty, arriving in my last year in Vienna, began to undermine the walls between these separate spheres.

  Of course the two spheres overlapped. My reading, especially my English reading, was largely supplied by adults, although I found Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper which well-meaning relatives sent from London both boring and incomprehensible. On the other hand from an early age I gobbled up the German books on birdlife and animals which I received as presents, and after primary school, plunged into the publications of Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde, a society for the popularization of the – mainly biological and evolutionary – natural sciences, to which they subscribed for me. We were taken to the theatre from an early age to plays we might enjoy, but which adults also admired – say, to Schiller’s William Tell (but not to Goethe’s Faust), and the works of the early nineteenth-century Viennese popular playwrights – the charming sentimental magic plays of Raimund, the savagely funny comedies of the great Johann Nestroy, whose bitter wit we did not yet understand. But we would be sent with other primary schoolchildren to the morning sessions of films at the local cinema, the long-gone Maxim-Bio, to see shorts of Chaplin and Jackie Coogan, and, more surprisingly, Fritz Lang’s rather longer Nibelungen epic. In my Viennese experience adults and children did not go to the movies together. Again, intellectual children would naturally make their choice among the books on their parents’ and relatives’ shelves, perhaps influenced by what they heard at home, perhaps not. To this extent the generations shared some tastes. On the other hand, the reading material selected for children by our elders was not, in general, supposed to be of serious interest to
adults. Conversely, of all adults with whom we had any dealings, only teachers (who disapproved) were even aware of the passionate interest of thirteen-year-olds in the pocket-sized adventures of detectives with invariably English names which circulated in our classes under such titles as Sherlock Holmes the World Detective – no connection with the original – Sexton Blake, Frank Allen, the Avenger of the Disinherited and the most popular of all, the Berlin detective Tom Shark, with his buddy Pitt Strong, who operated out of the Motzstrasse, familiar to readers of Christopher Isherwood, but as remote to Viennese boys as Holmes’s Baker Street.

  Children in the Vienna of the mid-twenties still learned to write the old Gothic script by scratching letters on slates framed in wood, and wiping them with small sponges. Since most post-1918 school texts were in the new roman print, we obviously also learned to read and later write that way, but I cannot remember how. By the time one entered secondary education at the age of eleven one was obviously expected to have acquired the three Rs, but what else we learned in primary school is less clear. Plainly, I found it interesting, since I look back on my elementary schooldays with pleasure, recalling all manner of stories about Vienna and trips into the semi-rural neighbourhood to search for trees, plants and animals. I suppose all this came under the pedagogic heading ‘Heimatkunde’, which, since the German word Heimat notoriously has no exact English equivalent, can best be translated as ‘knowledge of where we come from’. I can see now that it was not a bad preparation for a historian, since the great events of conventional history in and around Vienna were only an incidental part of what Viennese children learned about their habitat. Aspern was not only the name of the battle the Austrians won against Napoleon (neighbouring Wagram, which they decisively lost, was not in the collective memory), but a place in the remote zone beyond the Danube, not yet part of the city, where people went to swim in the lagoons left by the old course of the river, and explored wildernesses of martens and waterfowl. The Turkish sieges of Vienna were important because they had brought coffee into the city as part of the Turkish booty, and therefore our Kaffeehäuser. Of course we had the enormous advantage that the official history of the old imperial Austria had disappeared from sight, except as buildings and monuments, and the new Austria of 1918 had no history yet. It is political continuity that tends to reduce school history to the canonical succession of dates, monarchs and wars. The only historical event I recall celebrating at school in the Vienna of my childhood was the centenary of Beethoven’s death. The teachers themselves knew that in the new era school also had to be different, but they were not yet clear just how. (As my school songbook put it at the time – 1925 – ‘the new methods of teaching having not yet been entirely clarified’.) I was to discover the ‘1066 and all that’ type of history in the secondary Gymnasium, not yet emancipated from traditional pedagogy. Naturally this was unexciting. German, geography, Latin and eventually Greek (which I had to give up on coming to England) seemed much more to my taste, but not, alas, mathematics and the physical sciences.