Hobsbawm

History and Politics

Gregory Elliott

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781783716784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the early rumblings of the French revolution, at the start of the long nineteenth century, to the fall of the Soviet bloc at the close of the short twentieth century, historian Eric Hobsbawm is possibly the foremost chronicler of the modern age. Hobsbawm was a chronicler of revolutions, labour history, Empire, and conflicts; whose writings have informed the historical consciousness of scholars and general readers alike. From colonialism to capitalism, his trilogy of histories, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire, evidence his skill for identifying the plurality of forces at play in major historical events. Tracing his intellectual and political journey, and encompassing the extraordinary historical events that marked his life, Gregory Elliot fills an analytical gap on Hobsbawm's scholarship and Marxist historiography.

1
FORMATIVE EXPERIENCES, REFOUNDING MOMENTS

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

‘Little bits of all the world were to be found in Eric’, observed a Cambridge contemporary, subsequently general secretary of the Ceylonese Communist Party, in 1939.¹ At all events, much of Europe – and more besides – contributed to the making of E. J. Hobsbawm.

He was born in Alexandria, in June 1917, to Jewish parents – an anglophile Austrian mother, one of three daughters of a Viennese jeweller, and a British father, one of eight children of a London cabinet-maker. Once the First World War had ended, the family moved to Vienna, capital of a federation created out of the debris of the Habsburg Empire. ‘[N]ot only a state which did not want to exist, but a predicament which could not last’,² the first Austrian republic did not survive for long, political polarisation between Catholic reactionaries and reformist socialists exploding into civil war in 1934, with the winning clerical side ceding to a feted Anschluss four years later. Meanwhile, for the duration of Hobsbawm’s residence, if English parentage on the paternal side afforded a measure of protection against the city’s notorious anti-Semitism, the conventional middle-class lifestyle of non-observant, assimilated Jewry turned out to be unsustainable amid the great post-war inflation. His father, ‘spectacularly unsuited for the jungle of the market economy’, died in 1929, at the age of 48, leaving the family ‘temporarily destitute’.³ A mother who declined to dispense with the services of a maid she could ill afford, followed her husband to the grave two-and-a-half years later, aged 36. The sacrifice involved in the purchase of an atlas needed for geography classes at his Gymnasium; recourse to a Jewish charity for an indispensable new pair of shoes; acute embarrassment over the reconditioned second-hand bike given as a birthday present – such childhood memories convey something of the constant insecurity, bordering on poverty, that marked these years. The bike was disposed of as soon as was decently possible; the Kozenn-Atlas, like his mother’s copy of Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Humanity, has been preserved. As has another maternal bequest, consisting in a ‘simple principle’: ‘never do anything, or seem to do anything that might suggest that you are ashamed of being a Jew’.⁴

Decisive Years

Following his mother’s death in July 1931, Hobsbawm transferred to Berlin to live with his aunt and uncle, who had found a job there with Universal Films (the Hollywood studio that had made Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front the previous year). This was ‘the city in which I spent the two most decisive years of my life’.⁵ ‘It is difficult’, Hobsbawm writes,

for those who have not experienced the ‘Age of Catastrophe’ of the twentieth century in central Europe to see what it meant to live in a world that was simply not expected to last, in something that could not really even be described as a world, but merely as a way-station between a dead past and a future not yet born, unless perhaps in the depths of revolutionary Russia. Nowhere was this more palpable than in the dying days of the Weimar Republic.⁶

By then, the respite from the mass misery and despair of 1918–23 provided by the stabilisation of the mid 1920s had evaporated. The collapse of the world economy at the close of the decade, devastating workers and demoralising the middle classes, had electrified politics in a country where resentment of the punitive provisions imposed by the Entente at Versailles was well-nigh universal. In the burgeoning ranks of the ascendant far right, a revanchist nationalism super-charged by anti-Semitism targeted ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ as the proximate cause of Germany’s woes – and its eradication, at home and abroad, as the precondition of imperial regeneration. After fourteen inglorious years that belied its cultural splendours – the Kulturbolschewismus detested by National Socialism – Weimar, whose legitimacy had never been accepted by the right, and which was rejected with equal vehemence by the far left as ‘a restoration of economic, social, political and legal injustice’⁷ – the Reich without the Hohenzollerns – would fall victim to counter-revolution.

‘What could young Jewish intellectuals have become under such circumstances?’, Hobsbawm mused four decades later:

Not liberals of any kind, since the world of liberalism (which included social democracy) was precisely what had collapsed. As Jews we were precluded by definition from supporting parties based on confessional allegiance, or on a nationalism which excluded Jews, and in both cases on anti-semitism. We became either communists or some equivalent form of revolutionary marxists, or if we chose our own versions of blood-and-soil nationalism, Zionists. But even the great bulk of young intellectual Zionists saw themselves as some sort of revolutionary marxist nationalists. There was virtually no other choice. We did not make a commitment against bourgeois society and capitalism, since it patently seemed to be on its last legs. We simply chose a future rather than no future, which meant revolution. The great October revolution and Soviet Russia proved that such a new world was possible, perhaps that it was already functioning.⁸

The choice, so it seemed at the apocalyptic time, was ‘between ruin and revolution – for Left or Right – between no future and a future’.⁹ German social-democracy, more nearly resembling Jaroslav Hasek’s ‘Party of Moderate and Peaceful Progress Within the Limits of the Law’ than its Austrian counterpart, manifestly failed to fit the bill.

Discovery of The Communist Manifesto in the library of the Prinz-Heinrichs Gymnasium attended by Hobsbawm imparted some intellectual underpinning to political conviction. Translation of theory into practice came with his recruitment into a communist secondary-school students’ organisation, the Sozialistischer Schulerbund (SSB), in the autumn of 1932. Hobsbawm recalls ‘no signs of discouragement’ in his cell in West Berlin, as it shouldered the task of helping to halt Hitler’s rise to power. What he realises to have been the ‘suicidal idiocy’ of its parent organisation’s ultra-sectarian line of 1928–33 – the ‘class against class’ dictated by the Comintern but eagerly embraced by the German Communist Party (KPD) – had it that social-democracy alone stood between the working class and its revolutionary radicalisation. Hence – fatal conceit of the ‘Third Period’ – even were a perfect storm on the streets to be blowing from the right, and the Nazis to prevail courtesy of ‘social fascism’, their triumph would prove fleeting, followed in short order by a proletarian revolution led by the KPD, with its hundreds of thousands of members and millions of voters.¹⁰ ‘After Hitler, our turn’, as the slogan had it – not so much socialism or barbarism as barbarism then socialism. The upshot? A fast-motion disaster. As Hobsbawm wrote in 1970, in a verdict that may be extended to the uncomprehending teenage militant, the KPD ‘did not even realise that it was failing, until long after it was too late, let alone how catastrophically and irrevocably it had failed. And so it went down to a total and final defeat.’¹¹

Sceptical of the notion that an anti-fascist united front, assuming the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had consented to it, could have averted the calamity,¹² Hobsbawm rejects the canard of communist complicity in Nazi triumph. Three arresting snapshots round off his memories of Weimar. The first is a depiction of the KPD’s last legal demonstration, exuding vain defiance, on a perishing winter’s day on 25 January 1933. The second is an evocation of the moment five days later, when he read the headline announcing Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler as Chancellor – something ‘I can see … still, as in a dream’.¹³ (‘Moments when one knows history has changed are rare, but this was one of them’, Hobsbawm has recently remarked.)¹⁴ The last, prefaced as the historian’s ‘introduction to a characteristic experience of the communist movement: doing something hopeless and dangerous because the Party told us to’,¹⁵ is campaigning for the KPD in the March elections and sheltering the SSB’s duplicator after the Reichstag fire had rendered an already bad situation impossible.

Of course, Hobsbawm was among the fortunate ones, emigrating with his sister to London just as Hitler unveiled a boycott of Jewish businesses in early April 1933. ‘After the excitement of Berlin, Britain was inevitably a comedown.’¹⁶ Addressing survivors of his old London school at their annual reunion in 2007, he invited them to

Imagine yourselves as a newspaper correspondent based in Manhattan and transferred by your editor to Omaha, Nebraska. That’s how I felt when I came to England after almost two years in the most unbelievably exciting, sophisticated, intellectually and politically explosive Berlin of the Weimar Republic. The place was a terrible letdown.¹⁷

And yet, immigrant but not foreigner, the blue-eyed, fair-haired boy whom his Berlin schoolmates had referred to as ‘Der Englander’ (rather than ‘Der Jude’) would appear by the end of the decade to have acquired what Pieter Keunemann affectionately portrayed as ‘a large and vulgar patriotism for England, which he considered in weak moments as his spiritual home’.¹⁸

By contrast with the crises convulsing the continent, the United Kingdom, for all the regionally uneven impact of the slump, was experiencing something of an imperial Indian summer. Forced off the gold standard and out of free trade, it could shelter in the empire artificially inflated by the victors in 1919. Politically, the comparative torpor of the country, ruled since 1931 by a National Government that obtained a ‘doctor’s mandate’ four years later (and would probably have won the election scheduled for 1940), was not compensated for by any experience of adolescent activism. Banned by his adoptive parents from joining the (mass but reformist) Labour Party, let alone the (revolutionary but miniscule) Communist Party, Hobsbawm pretty much ‘lived a life of suspended political animation’ until he went up to Cambridge in 1936.¹⁹ Culturally, too, London could scarcely compete with Berlin, where he had encountered the fiction of Mann and Döblin, the poetry as well as the dramaturgy of Brecht, the music of Weil. Educationally, however, it meant St Marylebone Grammar School, where he was ‘introduced … to the astonishing marvels of English poetry and prose’ and ‘took to examinations as to ice-cream’.²⁰ With astonishing rapidity, Hobsbawm’s grammar school equipped him to win a scholarship to Cambridge University, with the choice of reading for a degree in three or more subjects, launching him on a brilliant cursus (tarnished, if at all, only by the original option for King’s over Balliol). Voracious reading – concomitant of an ‘ultra-intellectualisation’ that can be regarded as a sublimation of political, not to mention other, more familiar adolescent passions – was counter-pointed by one genuinely exciting and enduring artistic revelation, on a par with anything vouchsafed by Weimar: jazz. Inducted into it by a cousin, Hobsbawm enthusiastically greeted ‘the dimension of wordless, unquestioning physical emotion into a life otherwise almost monopolized by words and the exercises of the intellect’.²¹

The undergraduate is said to have ‘admit[ted] a love of literature, English, French and German, but only specifies Thurber. Otherwise sticks to Lenin and Stalin.’²² The autobiographer is similarly reticent about his reading – frustratingly so. As to what he made of it, and it of him,

The short answer is: I tried to give it a Marxist, that is to say an essentially historical, interpretation. There was not much else to do for an impassioned but unorganised and necessarily inactive communist teenage intellectual. Since I had not read much more than the Communist Manifesto when I left Berlin … I … had to acquire some knowledge of Marxism. My Marxism was, and still to some extent remains, that acquired from the only texts then easily available outside university libraries, the systematically distributed works and selections of ‘the classics...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Formative Experiences, Refounding Moments
• 2. The International and the Island Race
• 3. Enigmatic Variations
• Conclusion: The Ways of the World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index