Quiet on the Western Front, the movie of Erich Remarque’s celebrated antiwar novel, was at the epicentre of Weimar cultural politics. The Nazis had organized demonstrations against it and demanded that it should be banned. More than this: its boss, ‘Uncle’ Carl Laemmle, was the only Hollywood tycoon who came from Germany and had personal knowledge of what was going on there, because he returned for an annual visit to keep in touch. And he did. He was far from a highbrow, but to the informed eye the movies for which Universal was best known – All Quiet apart – the horror pictures such as Frankenstein and Dracula, clearly showed the influence of the German expressionist avant-garde.
Who knows how Sidney got into the movie business? Sometime in 1930 he had succeeded in talking himself into some kind of a job at Universal. It was uncertain and insecure. But while it lasted, it was recognized – if only by the personal gift by Uncle Carl himself of a signed copy of his biography, by the hand of an English literatteur and forgotten minor poet in the Georgian mode, John Drinkwater. (Laemmle had picked him after H. G. Wells had refused him because he was told that Drinkwater, of whom he had naturally not heard, had written a biography of Abraham Lincoln.) The book sold 164 bona fide copies in England.1 Our copy has not survived the peripeties of the Hobsbawm family in the twentieth century.
What his precise functions in the company were, I never knew. A letter from my grandmother reports an offer to give him a job in the Paris office in the autumn of 1931, which he refused, because Gretl said the children (my sister and myself) had hardly had a chance to get used to the new schools in Berlin. Fate is determined by such short-term family decisions. What would our lives have been if we had gone to Paris in 1931? One of the jobs he certainly did was to fit out the expedition to shoot the film S.O.S. Eisberg, a polar adventure with Luis Trenker, a veteran of snow-and-rock pictures, and the air-ace Ernst Udet, who was earning his living as a stunt flyer until German rearmament gave him a distinguished place in Hitler’s air force. Technical advice came from members of the Alfred Wegener expeditions, one of whom came to the house and told me about the theory of continental drift, and how he had all his toes frozen off in the Greenland winter. On at least one other occasion he promoted Hollywood products distributed in Europe – more specifically, Frankenstein in the Polish market. His campaign, of which he was proud, included the word-of-mouth rumour (for the benefit of the then very large Jewish public) that Boris Karloff, whose real name was an undramatic Pratt, was merely a lightly gentilized Boruch Karloff. He certainly had some connection with Poland, for at one time in the summer of 1932 there was some question of a permanent posting to Poland, and Sidney tried to prepare us for the very different life there. We would live in Warsaw. The Poles, he told me, were touchy people with a strong sense of honour, and a tendency to fight duels. I never had the chance to check out his information.
Nevertheless, on reflection, home was not anchored in Berlin as school was. As will be clear by now, the Hobsbawm household lived, not in Berlin, but in a transnational world, where people like us still – though the 1930s were to make it much more difficult – moved from country to country in search of a living. We might have roots in England or Vienna, but Berlin was merely one stop on the complicated route that might take us almost anywhere in Europe west of the USSR. Nor did home in Berlin – three addresses and two different forms of household in eighteen months – have the continuity of school. My window on the world at its moment of crisis was the Prinz- Heinrichs-Gymnasium.2
It was a perfectly conventional school in the conservative Prussian tradition, founded in 1890 to meet the needs of a rapidly growing middle-class area. Prince Henry, whose name it bore, a brother of Emperor William II, was a naval figure, which may explain why the school rightly prided itself on its boat club on the Little Wannsee (a model of its boat-house ‘in the Spreewald style’ had won a gold medal at the Brussels World Exposition of 1908). Rightly, because, while providing good training it was not, unlike its British equivalents, particularly interested in competitive races and it provided a wonderful opportunity for junior and senior boys to meet on equal terms. The club had somehow acquired a meadow, known as ‘unser Gut’ (our estate) on the small fishery- protected Sakrower See, accessible only by special permission through a narrow waterway. Groups of friends made up crews to row there or meet there at weekends, to talk, look at the summer skies and swim across the green waters before returning to the evening city. For the first and only time in my life I could see the point of a sports club. An old boy of the school, Dr Wolfgang Unger, a physician at the Spandau hospital, kept an eye on the training of new recruits. I understand that, after being removed from his hospital post on racial grounds in 1934, he committed suicide, unwilling to leave his country, Germany.
A Prussian school with military connections was naturally Protestant in spirit, deeply patriotic and conservative. Those of us who did not fit this pattern – whether as Catholics, Jews, foreigners, pacifists or leftwingers, felt ourselves as a collective minority, even though in no measurable way an excluded minority.3 Nevertheless it was not a Nazi school. (Few of the boys I knew showed much enthusiasm for Hitler and the Brownshirts, except Kube, the unusually dense son of a man who was Hitler’s Gauleiter of Brandenburg, and who made it his business to get a literature teacher at the school fired on the grounds that he ‘favoured’ the surviving Jewish students and taught chiefly the degraded literature of the Weimar Republic. He was to become the notorious boss of occupied Belorussia during the war, until eventually assassinated by his patriotic local mistress.) On the contrary. Whatever sympathy the school might have had for the national revival promised by Hitler did not survive the forcible purging, not long after I left for England, of the highly respected and popular headmaster, Oberstudiendirektor Dr Walter Schonbrunn, a political undesirable under the new regime. He was replaced by an imposed and bitterly resented Kommissarischer Leiter. One can hardly call the PHG of the 1930s a centre of dissidence, but it is characteristic that Franz Marc’s ‘Tower of Blue Horses’ – I remember it well from the school hallway – banned as ‘degenerate art’ by the new authorities, was rescued from a storeroom by one form and hung in its own classroom. Pupils protested against the dismissal of Professor ‘Sally’ Birnbaum, the popular mathematics and science teacher: signatures were collected all over the school for a petition to retain him. In the winter of 1936–7 the entire lower first form still made a collective visit to his home in the Rosenheimerstrasse. (He survived in Berlin until 1943 when he and his wife were loaded on to 36. Osttransport, destination, presumably, Auschwitz.) Indeed, there is some evidence that the school went out of its way to treat Jewish students and teachers well, at least while they remained. However politically unacceptable to a would-be teenage revolutionary, who would never have dreamed of wearing the peaked school cap (rather in the yachtsman’s style with a soft top), it was a decent school.
This was undoubtedly due to what the Hitler regime recognized in Schonbrunn (generally known as ‘der Chef’ or ‘the boss’) as the anti-hierarchical and socially suspect spirit of Weimar. The boat club was one expression of it. The stress on student self-government and participation in disciplinary cases was another. The unforgettable camping and youth-hostelling class journeys through the Mark Brandenburg and Mecklenburg were a third. (Not for nothing had Dr Schonbrunn, equally qualified to teach German, Latin, Greek and mathematics, published a work with the title, whose tone is virtually untranslatable into non-German languages, Jugendwandern als Reifung zur Kultur (Youth Ripening into Culture by Hiking). I did not, personally, warm to this smallish man with sharp eyes behind rimless glasses and a receding hairline, who wore plus-fours when he joined his charges on a Wandertag or school journey. (But then, as every reader of the Tintin books knows, this was in Europe the era of plus-fours.) He dismissed my admiration for Karl Kraus and his journal Die Fackel with the phrase: ‘Der Fackelkraus, ein eitler Schwatzer’ (‘vain and garrulous’), which, in retrospect, is not 100 per cent off target. He criticized my prose style, which he regarded as excessively mannered.
Perhaps I would have forgiven him, had I known that he was an admirer of the architecture of the ‘neue Sachlichkeit’ (new sobriety) and regarded both its uncluttered lines and ‘the conscious austerity of modern creative writing … as signs of a return to a new classicism’, an apollonian spirit welcome to a teacher of ancient Greek. He chose the communist Ludwig Renn’s novel Krieg (War) as an example of this new classicism. (He had of course, like most of our teachers, served in the 1914 war.) Still, if I did not exactly like him, I respected him. And I unquestionably benefited from his efforts,
