Crossing Boundaries

Selected Writings

Albert O. Hirschman

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780942299847
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

During the last half century, Albert O. Hirschman has redefined the scope and limits of political economy. His contributions, as both a scholar and an economic advisor, have definitively shaped an innovative program for social change and economic development. Crossing Boundaries, a collection of Hirschman's most recent writings, forges new and unforeseen connections between the past and the present, between intellectual life and lived experience. With astonishing frankness and humor, Hirschman recounts some of the most compelling and formative moments of his life that have influenced his thinking about economic and social development, democracy and capitalism. He also reconsiders the key terms of his scholarship — concepts he is constantly rethinking, subverting, and reinventing.

CHAPTER THREE

Trespassing: Places and Ideas in the Course of a Life

Part One

The European Years

Let’s start from the beginning: Tell us something about your origins.

I was born in Berlin to a middle-class family of Jewish origin, but did not practice the Jewish religion. Actually, both my sisters and I were baptized as Protestants. At that time — I was born in 1915, during the First World War — it was a rather common thing among emancipated German Jews to be baptized in the Protestant church; but I think it is important to add that this did not mean there was any religious tension in our upbringing. During a certain period of my life I felt close to a primitive form of Christianity; that was when I was reading a great deal of Tolstoy. But I never went regularly to any Protestant church, and I was never confirmed. I did my secondary studies at the Französische Gymnasium in Berlin — an excellent school — and spent nine years of my life there, until graduation. Some three hundred years ago this school had been founded in Prussia for the Huguenots who had taken refuge there, fleeing religious persecution in France; later the school was run by the Prussian state. I received a good education there, mainly in French, but also in classical languages, such as Latin and Greek. However, English was not taught.

What did your father do?

He was a surgeon and specialized in neurosurgery. He was very devoted to his work. His family came from Eastern Germany and in fact my father had been born in the region of Poznan, the part of Germany that was ceded to Poland after World War I. He died of cancer in March 1933, just after Hitler took power. I must say that it was the coincidence of his death with the anti-democratic and anti-Semitic persecutions that made me decide to leave Germany and to go to France. My mother, however, remained in Germany. I chose France mainly because I spoke French rather well. France had been part of my education, one might say.

And your mother?

My mother came from a big family, a large tribe; she had many brothers and cousins. Before marrying my father, she had been married once before; strangely, her first husband’s name was also Hirschmann. My mother had studied history of art and history, the kinds of things a woman could study at the time, and had lived on her own in Strasbourg and Munich. In short, she was from an emancipated milieu. Then she returned to Berlin, where she married my father. His colleagues and friends were not only Jews; I remember that one of his closest friends was from El Salvador.

What was the atmosphere at home? What kinds of people visited your house?

My parents’ friends were mostly doctors and lawyers, but there were also some art dealers — among them I recall the Tannhausers, who were owners of a famous gallery (they later left their collection to the Guggenheim Museum). We lived in a nice apartment in a quarter of Berlin known as the Alte Westen, which adjoined the Tiergarten, Berlin’s famous central park. We did not have a garden, but the Greek Embassy was next to our house, and it had a courtyard where we were often allowed to play ball. Our apartment was very simple and lacked certain elements of modern comfort: we heated with coal, there was no running water except for a bathtub, and we washed in washbasins filled with pitchers of water. When I arrived in Paris, everything seemed suddenly much more modern. Anyway, we led the life of a middle-class family. In the summer we always went on vacation, first to Heringsdorf, a beach resort on the Baltic, when we were quite young, then to the North Sea, and still later to places in Switzerland and Austria, or even to the Dolomites, in Italy.

And your two sisters?

The eldest, Ursula, was only about one year older than me, and she was the person with whom I shared some of the most important events in my life, from 1915 to 1935, when she married her first husband, Eugenio Colorni, a philosopher and antifascist. From 1935 to 1938 Ursula lived in Italy, first with Colorni in Trieste, and then mostly in forced exile on the island of Ventotene until 1944, when Colorni was killed in Rome by the fascists. Her second husband was Altiero Spinelli, the European federalist. Spinelli died in 1986 and Ursula in 1991. She left a fine book of memoirs, published posthumously under the title Noi senza patria [We without a fatherland] [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993], in which she recounts many episodes of our family life and our adolescence.

Then I have another sister, Eva, who lives in Rome and is five years younger than me. When I left Germany I was eighteen years old and she was thirteen, but she is still my “little sister” even though she is now seventy-seven years old!

Which languages did you speak in the family? When did you learn English?

English was the fourth or fifth language I learned. The first was, of course, German, the second French, the third Italian, and then came English and Spanish.

And Yiddish?

No, I never learned it, I only know a few words.

But you spoke French at home?

No, we just spoke it with a French demoiselle whom we had hired in Paris and who lived with us for a year or so, to teach us the language.

Were politics discussed at home?

Yes, but it was hardly the principal topic. However, all of us started to speak about politics after 1930, because that year — I was fifteen years old — the Nazis won their first big election victory.

By the way, in the Französische Gymnasium I had some friends who were older than me and one in particular had a certain influence on me; he made me read Marx when I was fourteen years old. He was my mentor, and his name was Heinrich Ehrmann. In Germany, the figure of the mentor was important. In 1931 I joined the youth movement of the Social Democratic Party, as far as I remember as a result of conversations with Heinrich Ehrmann. From then on we have followed more or less the same itinerary: he also went first to France and in 1940 left for the United States, where he became a political scientist.

Tell us some more about how you joined the socialist youth movement. Was your sister Ursula the first to enter?

No, I joined first and she followed later.

Did you have any important teachers during this period of your life?

As I said before, I had a few important teachers. One was a teacher of religion who made me read Tolstoy’s short stories; he was an excellent person who later opposed the Nazis. Then I had an excellent teacher of German; he was Jewish, but remained in Germany. The German he spoke was extraordinary. I do not know how he managed to survive. He was totally devoted to teaching literature: “As to Goethe’s Faust,” he used to say, “it’s impossible to read it in school. If you want to learn it, come to my house and we’ll read it together.” We then formed a collective work group, an Arbeitsgemeinschaft. For an entire year, once a month, we assembled in his house.

Was your gymnasium coeducational?

No, it was only for boys, but I knew some girls through my sister. Although she was a year and a half older than me, we were in the same grade because, when the time had arrived to enroll her (she was then six and a half), my parents thought: “The boy can go to school too. Let’s see how he will manage.” I was five years old, but had no problems, and thus we remained in the same grade.

Which were your favorite subjects?

I liked history and geography, but I was also rather good at mathematics.

And classics?

I did fairly well in Latin, but I liked Greek better. I realized that it was a magnificent language, with a great literature; but four years of study was not enough. The story of Oedipus and of other Greek tragedies filled me with enthusiasm, but perhaps I was even more taken by other things I read.

Who were the first authors you read with passion?

I read quite a bit of history. At that time it was quite fashionable to read biographies — those by Emil Ludwig, for example — of great historical personalities. I was very interested in the detail of specific historical events. I loved Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, and the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I read all of Dostoyevsky’s novels, obviously in German, and those I failed to read I read later in France, still in German. I had become almost a Dostoyevsky expert.

In the period when you began reading Marx and joined the socialist youth movement, did you continue to like and read Dostoyevsky?

Certainly. I had also begun to read a lot of Nietzsche, though I was only sixteen years old at the time, and I asked myself insistently: How can I reconcile Marx and Nietzsche?

How did your family react to your decision to join the socialist youth movement?

Well, my parents were concerned by my decision to become a Socialist, but it was normal that they should have worried about it. My sister and I had entered the phase where children are frequently in conflict with their parents, and we decided to travel down our own road, in any event. On Sundays, we used to go to the countryside in our blue shirts and red kerchiefs — and on those occasions we might easily have encountered a gang of Nazis.

Did you ever run into such gangs? Did you ever provoke them?

No, only insults were exchanged.

And how did the meetings of the socialist youth groups take place?

We met once a week, in a place near the famous Sportpalast. We would discuss our program, and sometimes we participated in the meetings organized by the Social Democratic Party, for intance on May Day.

On such occasions did you have meetings with workers?

We were supposed to be a workers’ movement. In our group there were, of course, many “bourgeois” elements. For example, in our neighborhood there were many Mensheviks, or rather children of Mensheviks, grown and raised in Germany, but children of Russians. I knew one of these Russians. He was rather well known, his name was Raphael Rein; he was a prominent Menshevik who had been a member of the Bund, which was the Jewish Socialist Party of Poland. To be part of this party you had to have a Jewish name; so, he chose the name of Abramovich. He had spent some time in prison in czarist Russia, went into exile in Vienna, returned to Russia, and then left for Berlin at the beginning of the 1920s, when it became impossible for the Mensheviks to continue living in the Soviet Union.

Were there debates in your group about what was then occurring in the social democratic movement?

Certainly. That was exactly the moment when the socialist youth groups split because of the Tolerierungspolitik — that is, because of the party’s policy of tolerating (or supporting) the government of Chancellor Bruning. This split, I remember, took place preciselywhen Willy Brandt was a member of our group; he was my age and we both belonged to the left wing of the party. But we did not all agree on the advisability of a split, and some of us decided to stay within the old group and not to join the new one, the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei, or the SAP. This was the first time I experienced the conflict between “exit” and “voice,” and I had to choose whether to express my disagreement from within the party or from without.

In any event, the socialist youth group was primarily a discussion group?

Yes, and I decided to stick with it, in order to retain some possibility of influencing the choices of the party.

On a more personal level — if the question isn’t too indiscreet — did you have any important love affairs during this period?

No problem. I have some precise memories. During these years I had various amorous affairs, in connection with my political activity. (Our group had women too.) I remember in particular two girls with whom I had close relations during the Berlin period. One was the daughter of the Menshevik I mentioned before, the other came from a working-class family. This situation made the political activity even more pleasant.

What did you do together? Did you ever go dancing?

No, during that time, at most we marched together! Sometimes I would walk the girls...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• I. Melding the Public and Private Spheres: Taking Commensality Seriously
• II. Fifty Years After the Marshall Plan: Two Posthumous Memoirs and Some Personal Recollections
• III. Trespassing: Places and Ideas in the Course of a Life
• Bibliography