Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

heart. Unlike the dialect of Vienna, spoken in one way or another by everyone from emperor to dustman, the Berlin dialect, a speeded-up, wisecracking urban adaptation of the plattdeutsch language of the north German plain, was primarily a demotic idiom separating the people from the toffs, though well understood by all. The mere insistence on specific Berliner grammatical forms which, correct in dialect, were patently incorrect in school German, was enough to keep it separate from educated talk. Naturally the middle-class pupils of my classical Gymnasium took to it with enthusiasm, as the pupils of prestigious Paris lycees take to the plebeian argot of their city, and after the end of the GDR, inhabitants of the former East Berlin, resentful but proud, liked to distinguish themselves from the Western rulers of their part of Germany by insisting on ‘berlinering’, i.e. talking the broadest dialect. It was a confident, brash, in-your-face idiom, into which I also plunged with enthusiasm, even though to this day the native inflection of my German hints at Vienna. Even today the sound, now rare on the street, of pure Berlinerisch, brings back to me the historic moment that decided the shape both of the twentieth century and of my life.

I came to Berlin in the late summer of 1931, as the world economy collapsed. Within weeks of my arrival, Britain, its axis for the past century, abandoned both the gold standard and free trade. In central Europe catastrophe had been expected since the Americans called in their loans and it had occurred earlier that summer when two major banks had collapsed. Financial cataclysm did not have much direct impact on a displaced teenager, but unemployment, already rising steeply – it hit 44 per cent of the German labour force in 1932 – reached into our own family. My cousin Otto, who had lived with Sidney and Gretl and still visited them from time to time, had lost his job, and reacted by becoming a communist. He was not the only one: in 1932 85 per cent of the membership of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) was unemployed. Younger than him, I was naturally impressed by someone so tall, handsome, successful with women, and now wearing a badge with the Russian initials of the Young Communist International. I suppose he was the first communist I had ever knowingly met: in Austria there were hardly any, and joining the Communist Party was therefore not something that would come to young men’s minds until after the civil war of 1934 had discredited the social-democrat leaders.

The collapse of the world economy was up to a point something young persons of the middle class read about, rather than experienced directly. But the world economic crisis was like a volcano, generating political eruptions. That is what we could not escape, because it dominated our skyline, like the occasionally smoking cones of the real volcanoes which tower over their cities – Vesuvius, Etna, Mont Pelee. Eruption was in the air we breathed. Since 1930 its symbol was familiar: the black swastika in a white circle on red ground.

It is difficult 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 provisional way-station between a dead past and a future not yet born, unless perhaps in the depth of revolutionary Russia. Nowhere was this more palpable than in the dying days of the Weimar Republic.

Nobody had really wanted Weimar in 1918, and even those who accepted, or even actively supported it, thought of it as at most a second-best compromise: better than social revolution, bolshevism or anarchy (if they were on the moderate right), better than the Prussian Empire (if they were on the moderate left). It was anybody’s guess whether it would outlast the catastrophes of its first five years: a penal peace treaty almost unanimously resented by Germans of all political stripes, failed military coups and terrorist assassins on the extreme right, failed local Soviet republics and insurrections on the extreme left, French armies occupying the heartland of German industry, and on top of all this, the (to most people) incomprehensible, and even to this day unparalleled, phenomenon of the galloping Great Inflation of 1923. For a few years in the middle 1920s it looked briefly as though Weimar might work. The Mark was stabilized – it remained stable until the war and again from 1948 until its demise – the most powerful economy of Europe, recovered from the war, had regained its dynamism, and for the first time political stability seemed in sight. It did not, it could not, survive the Wall Street Crash and the Great Slump. In 1928 the lunatic ultra-right had seemed virtually extinct. In the elections of that year Hitler’s Nazi Party was reduced to 2.5 per cent and twelve seats in the Reichstag, actually less than the increasingly enfeebled Democrat Party, the most loyal supporters of Weimar. Two years later the Nazis came back with 107 seats, second only to the social democrats. What remained of Weimar was ruled by emergency decree. Between the summer of 1930 and February 1932 the Reichstag was in session for barely ten weeks, all told. And as unemployment rose, so, ineluctably, did the forces of some kind of radical-revolutionary solution: National Socialism on the right and communism on the left. These were the circumstances in which I came to Berlin in the summer of 1931.

I joined Nancy and seven-year-old Peter in Sidney and Gretl’s flat in the Aschaffenburgerstrasse, rented from one of the many financially hard-pressed elderly widows of good family. I can remember very little about this apartment except that it was light and that the dinner conversation of the adults with their evening guests could be overheard from the room I slept in. Sidney and Gretl had a reasonably active social life, what with business acquaintances, relatives and Viennese friends visiting or living in Berlin, for little and impoverished interwar Austria was too small a scene for Viennese talent. We were too young to take much part in this. We took the Vossische Zeitung, a newspaper my aunt appreciated chiefly for the cultural pages, which she cut out. I have vivid memories of great cinemas and the elaborate luxury automobiles parked outside – Maybachs, Hispano- Suizas, Isotta-Fraschinis, Cords.

Within a few days of my arrival Uncle Sidney found a place for me within walking distance of the flat and Nancy’s neighbouring Barbarossaschule, at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium in Schoneberg, in time to join the Obertertia (upper third form). Unlike Austrian and British secondary schools, German ones numbered downwards: one started in the Sexta (sixth form) and graduated with the leaving certificate (Abitur) from the Oberprima (upper first form). Of all the thirteen years I spent at seven educational establishments before going up to Cambridge, the nineteen or so months at the PHG have left the deepest impression on my life. It was the medium through which I experienced what I knew even then to be a decisive moment in the history of the twentieth century. Moreover, I experienced it, not as the child of Austria (even though I just reached puberty in my last year in Vienna), but at the Columbus-like moment of adolescence when passion and intelligence discover the world for the first time, and the very experience of living is unforgettable. Many years later an old friend brought me together with the then German ambassador to the UK, Gunther von Hase, who, when my name had come up in conversation, immediately recalled me as having been in his form. And I, in turn, had immediately identified the name as that of a remembered face in the classroom in which both of us had sat – and that only for a few months in a long life, in which it is pretty certain neither of us had given any thought to the other since 1933. We were merely classmates, not in any sense friends. But we were there together at a time in our lives and in history which one does not forget. The very names revived it. In the low-lying landscape of my school years the PHG stands out like a sierra. For the first years after Berlin, life in England held no real interest.

Was my Berlin school really as important as it seems to me in retrospect? The artillery of Weimar bombarded an expectant fourteen-year-old from all sides. School did not teach me the songs which still mean ‘Berlin’ to me – those from the Brecht–Weill Dreigroschenoper to the bronze voice of Ernst Busch singing Erich Weinert’s ‘Stempellied’ (‘Song of the Dole’). The great events of the times – the fall of the Bruning government, the three national elections of 1932, the Papen and Schleicher governments, Hitler taking power, the Reichstag fire – did not reach me through school, but through street posters, and via the daily paper and the periodicals at home (though, curiously, I have less memory of the radio news in Berlin than in Vienna). Those monuments of Weimar design and Weimar content, the books of the Malik Verlag, I remember them from the stands in the book department of the KaDeWe, the great department store on the Tauentzienstrasse, which is one of the few continuities with the Berlin of my youth: full of authors such as B. Traven, Ilya Ehrenburg, Arnold Zweig and, in a different mode, Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger.

Much of it, obviously, must have reached me through home. Uncle Sidney was enjoying one of his occasional spells of economic sunshine working for Universal Films, which as the producer of Lewis Milestone’s All