Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

vast zone of London’s bombed and as yet totally ungentrified East End, which attracted intellectuals both because it was then still extraordinarily cheap and wonderfully accessible: ten minutes by public transport from the university and the British Museum. (Nobody one knew in those days had a car.) It had not yet become the headquarters of a band of very bright 1950s Oxbridge ex-students (actually, more ‘bridge’ than ‘Ox’) gently satirized in strip-cartoons in broadsheet newspapers when middle-class intellectuals became lifestyle setters in the 1960s. Many of them were friends acquired in Cambridge during the Cold War years. In 1946 Gloucester Crescent was not classy, but, as I wrote in a tender piece on Camden Town commissioned for Lilliput by Kaye Webb (then married to the cartoonist Ronald Searle, just returned from the Japanese gulag), one could just pretend the roar of the lions in Regent’s Park Zoo was audible from there. In 1947 we moved to a far more stylish flat behind an early eighteenth-century facade on the north side of Clapham Common opposite the church where the Clapham Sect had worshipped, a barn with a tower. Outside, I recall seeing my new colleague at Birkbeck College, Nikolaus Pevsner, perambulating the area for his great Buildings of England like an examiner giving marks to the past. Inside I struggled, in the end successfully, with my fellowship-cum-doctoral dissertation and, in the end unsuccessfully, with what I did not quite recognize as the problems of my first marriage. As it happens, fifteen years later I was to move into a Victorian house a few minutes away – the first one I ever lived in as owner and not tenant – with Marlene.

Intellectual communists or fellow-travellers were not yet marginalized. Indeed, when the BBC began transmitting its ground-breaking Third Programme, a pre-war (non-communist) Cambridge historian, Peter Laslett, who acted as a talent-scout for it, introduced me to the elderly, worldly-wise, culture-watching Anna (‘Nyuta’) Kallin, its Russian talks producer, who helped my first, initially stumbling, steps in the world of microphones. (Of course it did not matter much: one spoke at most to only a few tens of thousands.) I did several pieces for her in 1947, including what may well have been the first-ever radio talk in English on Karl Kraus.

Party members as yet had no difficulty in getting academic jobs and several historians (including myself) did so, or could have done. I became a lecturer at Birkbeck College in 1947 though the head of my department was well aware of my politics. (Students reassured him, when he asked whether I was trying to indoctrinate them.) I went to the World Youth Festival in Prague with my then wife, who took time off from her job as a Principal in the Board of Trade, that is to say a member of the tiny policy-making elite of the civil service. She was, of course, also a communist, having rejoined when we married – in those days I would have found it inconceivable to marry a non- Party member – and the senior civil service branch met in our Clapham flat.³ As far as I can remember, she did not at the time suggest that it might be better for her career in the civil service not to go to Prague. Ten years or so later, when I offered to sublet half my flat in Bloomsbury to a friend who had gone from Cambridge into the Treasury, he told me sadly that, given my known politics, he simply could not take the risk.

In my case, the end of the war even brought a brief relaxation of anti-communism. The British government, having totally refused to employ my knowledge of German for any purposes whatever during my six years in the army, now found it useful. In 1947 I was asked, presumably via some pre-war Cambridge acquaintance now in the Foreign Office, to help in ‘re-educating’ the Germans in what had once been an imperial hunting-lodge on the Luneburger Heide in North Germany, a few kilometres from the zonal border with the East, to and from which the railway transported the travelling and smuggling traffic of several thousands a day, plainly winked at by both the British and Russian authorities.⁴ The ‘democratizing’ team, which contained at least one other man banned in the following year, could not possibly be described as politically or even economically ‘sound’. The students were a well-assorted lot, from both West and – still – East: my first experience of the Germans who had stayed in Germany. I note in retrospect that the largely Jewish ‘re-educators’ from Britain – actually the idea that we came to these intelligent people from across the Channel with some patent formula for a democratic future was a bit embarrassing – did not feel the sort of visceral anti-German reaction which the knowledge of Auschwitz and the camps, already common, is today expected to have provoked. We – or at least I – did not.

Certainly one could not help wondering all the time (as I wrote) ‘what may these harmless-looking people not have done between 1933 and 1945?’ Every Ashkenazi Jew lost relatives in the camps: in my case Uncle Victor Friedmann, transported east with Aunt Elsa, a small Sephardic lady, from somewhere in France; Uncle Richard Friedmann with Aunt Julie, who would not leave their fancy goods store in agreeable Marienbad; and Aunt Hedwig Lichtenstern. (As so often among Austrian and German, but not among East European Jews, the old died, while the young got out in time.) Their names were entered in the only memorial I know worthy of the Jewish genocide, the whitewashed walls of the Altneuschul, the ancient synagogue in Prague. These walls, surrounding an empty interior, were completely filled with the names of all Czechoslovak Jews who perished under Hitler, line below line of tidy writing, names, dates, places, in alphabetical order from roof to floor. Nothing at all except the uncountable names of the dead. I read Uncle Richard’s and Aunt Julie’s names there through tears, not long before the Prague Spring of 1968. Some time in the 1970s the Czech regime took the astonishing decision to desecrate the memorial by painting out all the inscriptions. The official excuse is said to have been that no particular group among the many victims of fascism ought to be singled out for special commemoration. They were restored with some delay after the end of communism.

I had not then met people who had survived the camps, Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Some of them were to become colleagues and friends, apparently unmarked by their experiences, and even, much later, prepared to talk about the time when every day of a survivor’s life was bought at the price of someone else’s death. Like Primo Levi they were not unmarked. At least one of them, dear, witty, enthusiastic Georges Haupt, who had entered Auschwitz as a Romanian schoolboy, suddenly collapsed and died at the age of fifty. Still, both conviction and realism saved us from turning the Nazis’ own racist anti-Semitism inside out into an equivalent anti-Teutonism. Even later we (certainly I) blamed not Germans as such but National Socialism, especially as the first serious description and analysis of the univers concentrationnaire I read, Eugen Kogon’s remarkable Der SS- Staat (Frankfurt, 1946) was written by a German, about a camp – Buchenwald – that dehumanized, tortured and killed many, but did not primarily target Jews. Moreover, one look at West German cities, gigantic fields of barely cleared rubble, at the apparently total collapse of the economy in the period before the currency reform, at the yellow-faced people living on barter and camped on station platforms with sacks of potatos, suggested that whatever ordinary Germans had done under Hitler, in 1947 they were paying for what had been done by them or in their name.

As I wrote at the time, it was not hard ‘to understand what [these men and women] have gone through in the past 8 years … raids, expulsions, hunger etc. Men, women and children.’ Anyone who had returned from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, or even had experienced ‘the awful shocks of the behaviour of the Russians in the first weeks after liberation’ could talk of hard times. Not because the Russians necessarily took it out on the Germans, although the rank-and-file of the Red Army unquestionably had reasons for doing so and did so. (‘They showed no fear whatsoever and their vision of the future was the rape and pillage of Berlin.’⁵) As one of our students, returned from captivity, who has since become one of the most eminent German historians,⁶ explained to me: ‘They did not treat us worse than themselves. It was simply that they were physically so much tougher than we were. They could stand the cold better. That scared us, when we were at the front, and we suffered from it as prisoners. They would dump us on a central-Asian plain in winter and say: build a camp. Start digging.’

It was not surprising that hatred and fear of Russia penetrated the atmosphere in Germany, among both the natives and the vast numbers of refugees – particularly numerous in our part of Lower Saxony – who made Russia responsible for their mass flight or mass expulsion. In 1947 it was a curious, sometimes schizophrenic, combination of feelings: repulsion, superiority, but also respect for the victor, and the contrast between the image of uncontrolled social disintegration in the West and the vague feeling that the discipline ‘over there’ (in the Soviet zone) got people to do a day’s work, controlled the black market, etc. The Marshall Plan and the 1948 currency reform were about to change all this, but in the summer of 1947 a sense of total impotence and blankness about the future still dominated public opinion in the British zone. There could be no German reconstruction without a