Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

organization, under the Czech Artur London (later victim of the Stalinist trials), whose Spaniards, Jews, Italians, Poles and others played such a disproportionately large and heroic part in the armed Resistance in France. (Those whose image of Jews under fascism is that of eternal victims, should remember the fighting record of socialist and communist Jews, from the 7,000 who fought in the International Brigades to the MOI and their equivalents in other occupied countries.) Among other things Franz was in charge of work with the German troops themselves. He did not talk about those times, except once to our son Andy, then about ten, who wanted to know what sort of things you did in the Resistance. He said that mostly you kept out of the way of the people who wanted to arrest you, but that he had had a few narrow escapes. Born in Przemysl, which is today in the Ukraine, brought up in the deepest poverty in interwar Vienna – Franz claimed that he never had a new jacket and trousers until he became a professional revolutionary – he became politicized as a Zionist at the age of fifteen, but converted to communism from the most Marxist of the Zionist groups, the Hashomer Hazair, though he did not join the Communist Party until after the Austrian civil war of 1934. Not surprisingly, it was the immediate consequence of a few months spent wandering round pre-Hitler Germany in 1931–2. He became a professional almost from the start, having demonstrated what were clearly exceptional abilities for clandestine work to the comrade sent to instruct the Austrians in the unaccustomed situation of illegality. Though he insists that the secret of such work was punctuality and pedantry about details, in short, the strict bolshevik ‘rules of conspiracy’, as a man in his early twenties he enjoyed the romantic side of the work. He liked to recall that he occupied what had once been the office of Dimitrov in the ninth district – Vienna had always been the International’s centre for the Balkans. Soon he was setting up a Vienna office for the Romanian CP (all 300 of them) and organizing its participation in the forthcoming Seventh World Congress, before being promoted to head the ‘Apparat’ of the illegal Austrian Party – communications, safe houses, frontier crossings, and the provision and distribution of literature – and later its entire agit-prop activities. No doubt it was this that brought him to Paris after the Anschluss.

He returned to Austria after the war as a member of the Austrian CP’s Political Bureau, wrote a brief and luminous book on France, and edited the Party’s theoretical journal. In 1968 he briefly succeeded in decoupling the Austrian CP from the USSR after condemning its invasion of Czechoslovakia, but Moscow soon reasserted itself. Marek was expelled, but continued as editor of an independent left-wing monthly the Wiener Tagebuch and (together with myself and some others) planner and editor – his only regular income now came from it – of Giulio Einaudi’s ambitious Storia del Marxismo. He fell to a long-awaited heart attack in the summer of 1979. He died a communist. The Italian Communist Party was represented at his funeral. What he left at his death, give or take a few books, could be packed into two suitcases.

A man of strong, lucid intelligence and remarkable learning, he could have been a thinker, a writer, an eminent academic. But he had chosen not to interpret the world but to change it. Had he lived in a larger country and in other times, he might have been a major political figure in a humanized communism. He continued on this road to the end, resisting the temptations of a post-political refuge in literature or graduate seminar. In his way, he was a hero of our times, which were and are bad times.

II

I have so far written about communists outside power. What about the Party members I have known who faced the very different situation in communist regimes, where it brought not persecution but privilege? They were not outsiders but insiders, not opposers but rulers, often of countries most of whose inhabitants did not like them. The police was not their enemy but their agency. And for them glorious future after the revolution was not a dream but now.

They did not have the advantage, which maintained our morale, of enemies who could be fought with conviction and a clear conscience: capitalism, imperialism, nuclear annihilation. Unlike us, they could not avoid responsibility for what was being done in the name of communism in their countries, including the injustices. This is what made the Khrushchev Report of 1956 especially traumatic for them. ‘If ‘‘the laws of history’’ could no longer take the blame for these terrors, but Stalin as a person, then what about our own co-responsibility?’ wrote an exiled Czech reform-communist of my acquaintance. ⁹ He had been in the public prosecution service in the 1950s.

In my lifetime there were three generations of such communists who had crossed this threshold of power: the pre-Stalinist ‘old bolsheviks’, few of whom survived the 1930s and none of whom I knew; those who made or experienced the great change – the interwar and resistance generations of communists; and those who grew up under the regimes which collapsed in 1989. There is nothing to be said about the last of these. By the time they joined what was a public elite, they knew the rules of the game by which their countries lived. Nor is there anything I can say about the Soviet Union. I have real personal acquaintance with only one member of the Soviet generation, though he was not a Russian but a second-generation foreign communist brought up in the USSR before returning to his own country, the late Tibor Szamuely of Hungary.

He was a very bright, squat, ugly and witty historian, nephew of one of the most eminent figures in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, who had been brought up in the USSR, where his father was executed and his mother deported. He himself, after almost starving in the siege of Leningrad, claimed also to have had the usual spell in a camp during the dictator’s final lunacies. He returned to Hungary after Stalin’s death, cynical, but officially communist, and Party secretary in the university history faculty, where his line was ultra-hard, but somehow no students or colleagues were expelled or penalized. However, when I first met him in London in about 1959 he made a beeline for the most anti-communist contacts. Like so many central European Jews, he was a passionate anglophile. Perhaps he was already preparing to jump ship as a freedom-lover, which he did a few years later, becoming an anti-communist publicist for Conservative publications and a close friend of the writer and drinker Kingsley Amis, equally reactionary and funnier but notably less intelligent. In spite of what he must have regarded as my illusions we liked one another and got on extremely well. It was through him that I first went to Hungary in 1960, though, as a high official – I think he was then vice-rector of the university – he was not pleased at my insistence on visiting the great Marxist philosopher George Lukacs, who had recently been allowed by the Russians to return to Budapest. Lukacs had been seized and exiled after the 1956 revolution and now sat in his apartment above the Danube once again like an ancient high priest in civilian clothes, smoking Havana cigars. It was in Tibor’s flat that I had the memorable Christmas dinner with the master spy. It was to our flat in Bloomsbury that he chose to come directly from the airport with wife and children

1. Three sisters Grun: (left to right) Mimi, Nelly, Gretl (Vienna, 1912)

2. Three brothers Hobsbaum: (left to right) Percy, Ernest, Sidney (Vienna, early 1920s)

3. Nelly and Percy Hobsbaum in Egypt, c. 1917

4. Second mother: Aunt Gretl (England, c. 1934)

5. Mother, Nancy, cousin Peter, EH outside alpine TB sanatorium (Austria, 1930)