Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Recounts the life of the celebrated historian known for his coverage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as his staunch Marxism, noting his early years in Egypt, Vienna, and Berlin; witness to critical WWII events, education at King's College, teaching career, extensive travels, and political views. 12,500 first printing.

Overture

One day in the autumn of 1994, my wife Marlene, who kept track of the London correspondence while I was teaching my course at the New School in New York, phoned me to say there was a letter from Hamburg she could not read, as it was in German. It came from a person who signed herself Melitta. Was it worth sending on? I knew no one in Hamburg, but without a moment’s hesitation I knew who had written it, even though something like three quarters of a century had passed since I had last seen the signatory. It could only be little Litta — actually she was my senior by a year or so — from the Seutter Villa in Vienna. I was right. She had, she wrote, seen my name in some connection in Die Zeit, the German liberal-intellectual weekly. She had immediately concluded that I must be the Eric with whom she and her sisters had played long, long ago. She had rummaged through her albums and come up with a photo which she enclosed. On it five small children posed on the summery terrace of the villa with our respective Fräuleins, the little girls — perhaps even myself — garlanded with .owers. Litta was there with her younger sisters Ruth and Eva (Susie, always known as Peter,was not yet born), I with my sister Nancy. Her father had marked the date on the back: 1922. And how was Nancy, Litta asked. How could she know that Nancy, three-and-a-half years my junior, had died a couple of years earlier? On my last visit to Vienna I had gone to the houses in which we had lived, and sent Nancy photographs of them. I had thought she was the only one who still shared a memory of the Seutter Villa. Now it came alive again.

I have that photo too. In the album of family photos which has ended up with me, the last survivor of my parents and siblings, the snapshots on the terrace of the Seutter Villa form the second iconographic record of my existence and the first of my sister Nancy, born in Vienna in 1920. My own first record appears to be a picture of a baby in a very large wicker pram, without adults or other context, which was, I assume, taken in Alexandria, where I was born in June 1917, to have my presence registered by a clerk at the British Consulate (incorrectly, for they got the date wrong and misspelled the surname). The diplomatic institutions of the United Kingdom presided over both my conception and my birth, for it was at another British Consulate, in Zurich, that my father and mother had been married, with the help of an of.cial dispensation personally signed by Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary, which allowed the subject of King George V, Leopold Percy Hobsbaum, to marry the subject of the Emperor Franz Josef, Nelly Grün, at a time when both empires were at war with one another, a con.ict to which my future father reacted with residual British patriotism, but which my future mother repudiated. In 1915 there was no conscription in Britain, but if there were, she told him, he should register as a Conscientious Objector.1 I would like to think that they were married by the consul who is the main .gure in Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties. I should also like to think that while they were waiting in Zurich for Sir Edward Grey to turn from more urgent matters to their wedding, they knew about their fellow-exiles in the city, Lenin, James Joyce and the Dadaists. However, they obviously did not, and almost certainly would not have been interested in them at such a time. They were plainly more concerned with their forthcoming honeymoon in Lugano.

What would have been my life if Fräulein Grün, aged eighteen, one of three daughters of a moderately prosperous Viennese jeweller, had not fallen in love with an older Englishman, fourth of eight children of an immigrant London Jewish cabinet-maker, in Alexandria in 1913? She would presumably have married a young man from the Jewish Mitteleuropean middle class, and her children would have grown up as Austrians. Since almost all young Austrian Jews ended up as emigrants or refugees, my subsequent life might not have looked very different — plenty of them came to England, studied here and became academics. But I would not have grown up or come to Britain with a native British passport.

Unable to live in either belligerent country, my parents returned via Rome and Naples to Alexandria, where they had originally met and got engaged before thewar, and where both had relatives —my mother’s uncle Albert, of whose emporium of Nouveautes plus staff I still have a photograph, and my father’s brother Ernest, whose name I bear and who worked in the Egyptian Post and Telegraph Service. (Since all private lives are raw material for historians as for novelists, I have used the circumstances of their meeting to introduce my history of The Age of Empires.) They moved to Vienna with their two-year-old son as soon as the war ended. That is why Egypt, to which I am shackled by the lifetime chains of of.cial documentation, is not part of my life. I remember absolutely nothing about it except, possibly, a cage of small birds in the zoo at Nouzha, and a corrupt fragment of a Greek children’s song, presumably sung by a Greek nursemaid. Nor have I any curiosity about my place of birth, the district known as Sporting Club, along the tramline from the centre of Alexandria to Ramleh, but then, there is not much to be said about it, according to E. M. Forster, whose stay in Alexandria almost coincided with my parents’. All he says about the tram station Sporting Club in his Alexandria, A History and a Guide is: ‘Close to the Grand Stand of the Race Course. Bathing beach on the left.’

Egypt thus does not belong in my life. I do not know when the life of memory begins, but not much of it goes back to the age of two. I have never gone there since the steamer Helouan left Alexandria for Trieste, then just transferred from Austria to Italy. I do not remember anything about our arrival in Trieste, meeting-point of languages and races, a place of opulent cafés, sea captains and the headquarters of the giant insurance company, Assicurazioni Generali, whose business empire probably de.nes the concept of ‘Mitteleuropa’ better than any other. Eighty years later I had occasion to discover it in the company of Triestine friends, and especially Claudio Magris, that marvellous memorializer of central Europe and the Adriatic corner where German, Italian, Slav and Hungarian cultures converge. My grandfather, who had come to meet us, accompanied us on the Southern Railway to Vienna. That is where my conscious life began. We lived with my grandparents for some months, while my parents looked for an apartment of their own.

My father, arriving with hard savings — nothing was harder than sterling in those days — in an impoverished country with a currency subsiding towards collapse, felt con.dent and relatively prosperous. The Seutter Villa seemed ideal. It was the first place in my life I thought of as ‘ours’.

Anyone who comes to Vienna by rail from the west still passes it. If you look out of the right-hand window as the train comes into the western outskirts of Vienna, by the local station Hu¨ tteldorf-Hacking, it is impossible to miss that con.dent broad pile on the hillside with its four-sided dome on a squat tower, built by a successful industrialist in the later days of the Emperor Franz Josef (1848—1916). Its grounds reached down to the Auhofstrasse, which led to the west along the walls of the old imperial hunting ground, the Lainzer Tiergarten, and from which it was reached by a narrow uphill street (the Vinzenz- Hessgasse, now Seuttergasse) at the bottom of which there was then still a row of thatched cottages.

The Seutter Villa of my childhood memories is largely the part shared by the old and young of the Hobsbaums (for so, in spite of the Alexandrian consular clerk, the name was spelled), who rented a flat on the first flor of the villa, and the Golds, who rented the ground-.oor apartment below us. Essentially this centred on the terrace at the side of the house, where so much of the social life of the generations of both these families was conducted. From this terrace a footpath — steep in retrospect — led down to the tennis courts at the bottom — they are now built over — past what seemed to a small boy a giant tree, but with branches low enough for climbing. I remember showing its secrets to a boy who had come to my school from a place called Recklinghausen in Germany. We had been asked to take care of him, because times were hard where he came from. I can remember nothing about him except the tree and his home-town in what is now the Land Nordrhein- Westfalen. He soon went back. Though I did not think of it as such, this must have been my first contact with the major events of twentiethcentury history, namely the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, via one of the children temporarily sent out of harm’s way to wellwishers in Austria. (All Austrians at that time saw themselves as Germans, and, but for a veto from the peacemakers after the First World War, would have voted to join Germany.) I also have a vivid memory of us playing in a barn full of hay somewhere in the grounds, but on my last visit to Vienna with Marlene we checked out the Villa and could .nd no place where it might have been. Curiously enough, I have no indoor memories of the place, though a vague impression that it was neither very light nor very comfortable. I cannot, for instance, recall anything about our own or the Golds’ apartments, except perhaps high ceilings.

Five, later six, children of pre-school age, or at best in the first years of primary school, in the same garden, are great cementers of inter-family relations. The Hobsbaums and the Golds got on well, in spite of their very different backgrounds — for (notwithstanding their name) the Golds do not seem to have been Jewish. At all events they remained and .ourished in Austria, that is to say in Hitler’s Greater German...