Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

as Katzelmacher . Emancipated and assimilated Viennese Jews talked about Eastern Jews as of some other species. (I distinctly remember asking an embarrassed older member of the family whether those Eastern Jews had surnames like ours, and if so what names, since they were obviously so different from us.) It seems to me that this explains much of the enthusiasm with which Austrians greeted their annexation by Hitler’s Germany: it restored their sense of political superiority. At the time I only noticed that one or two of my classmates in secondary school were Hakenkreuzler (swastikers). Since I was an English boy, however culturally indistinguishable from the Austrians, this clearly did not concern me directly. But it brings me to the question of politics.

Because I was to be seized so young and so long by that typical twentieth-century passion, political commitment, it seems reasonable to ask how much of its roots can be found in a childhood in 1920s Vienna. That is difficult to reconstruct. We lived in an era steeped in politics, although the affairs of the wider world came to us, as I have said, mainly through overheard adult conversations, whose purport children did not fully grasp. I remember two of these, both probably around 1925 or so. One occurred in an alpine sanatorium where I had been sent to recover from some illness (we children appeared constantly to have some sickness or other) under the supervision of my aunt Gretl who was also convalescing there. ‘Who is this Trotsky?’ asked a woman, whom I vaguely recall or imagine as maternal and middle-aged, but not without a touch of satisfaction. ‘Just a Jewish boy called Bronstein.’ We knew about the Russian Revolution, but what exactly was it? Another happened at an athletics meeting to which my uncle (and presumably my father) had taken me, made memorable by my first experience of a black sprinter by the name of Cator. ‘You say there’s no war anywhere at the moment,’ said someone, ‘but surely, there’s a revolt in Syria?’ What did or could this mean to us? We knew there had been a world war, as any British boy born in 1944 would grow up knowing that there had been one. Two of my British uncles had been in it, our neighbour Mr Gold would show me his tall officer’s cap, and my best friend was a war orphan – his mother kept her husband’s sword on the wall. However, nobody I knew, English or Austrian, regarded the Great War as a heroic episode, and Austrian schools kept quiet about it, partly because it concerned another country at another time – the old Habsburg Empire – partly perhaps also because the Austrian armies had not covered themselves with much glory. It was not until I went to Berlin that I experienced the ex-officer schoolmaster proud of his front-line service. Before that, my most powerful image of the Great War came from Karl Kraus’s wonderful documentary super-drama The Last Days of Humanity, which both my mother and my aunt Gretl had bought as soon as it came out in 1922. I still have my mother’s copy, and still re-read it from time to time.

What else did we know about the times we lived in? Vienna schoolchildren took it for granted that people had the choice between two parties – the Christian socials and the social democrats or Reds. Our simple materialist assumption was that if you were a landlord you voted for the first, if you were a tenant for the second. Since most Viennese were tenants, this naturally made Vienna a Red city. Until after the civil war of 1934 communists were so unimportant that a number of the most enthusiastic ones chose to be active in other countries where there was more scope for them – mainly Germany, such as the famous Eislers: the composer Hanns, the Comintern agent Gerhart, and their sister, the formidable Elfriede, better known as Ruth Fischer, who briefly became leader of the German Communist Party – but also in Czechoslovakia, such as Egon Erwin Kisch. (Many years later the painter Georg Eisler, Hanns’s son, became my best friend.) I cannot recall paying attention to the only communist in the circle of the former Grun sisters, who wrote under the pen-name Leo Lania, then a young man who declared Zola’s L’Oeuvre to be his favourite book and Eugene Onegin and Spartacus his favourite heroes in literature and history. Our family was, of course, neither Black nor Red, since the Blacks were anti-Semites and the Reds were for workers and not people of our class. Besides, we were English, so the matter did not concern us.

And yet, moving from primary to secondary school, and from infancy towards puberty in the Vienna of the late 1920s, one acquired political consciousness as naturally as sexual awareness. In the summer of 1930 I made friends in Weyer, a village in Upper Austria where the doctors were vainly trying to deal with my mother’s lungs, with Haller Peter, the boy of the family from whom we rented lodgings. (By the tradition of bureaucratic states, when names were called for, surnames came before given names.) We fished and went robbing orchards together, an exercise I thought my sister would also enjoy, but which, as she admitted to me many years later, had terrified her. Since his father was a railwayman, the family was Red: in Austria, and especially in the countryside, it would not have occurred to any non-agricultural worker in those days to be anything else. Though Peter – about my age – was not visibly interested in public affairs, he also took it for granted that he was Red; and somehow, between lobbing stones at trout and stealing apples, I also concluded that I wanted to be one.

Three years earlier I remember another summer holiday in a Lower Austrian village called Rettenegg, at a time situated vaguely in my private life, but firmly in history. As usual, my father did not join us, but remained at work in Vienna. But the summer of 1927 was the time when the workers of Vienna, outraged by the acquittal of rightwingers who had killed some socialists in an affray, went on to the streets en masse, and burned down the Palace of Justice on the Ringstrasse (the great circular boulevard which surrounds the old central city of Vienna), eighty-five of them being massacred in the process. My father had, it seems, been caught up in the riot, but got away safely. I have no doubt that the grown-ups must have discussed this intensively (not least, my mother), but I cannot say that it made the slightest impact on me, unlike the story that, once upon a time – namely in 1908, on a journey to Egypt, his ship had passed close to Sicily at the time of the great Messina earthquake. What I actually remember from that holiday was watching the local craftsman build a boat outside our lodgings and the pine forests up the mountain which I explored alone, until I reached a woodcutters’ site, where the men gave me some of their Sterz, the stiff cereal porridge on which they lived in the woods. On the way there I saw, for the first time in my life, the great black woodpecker, all one-and-a-half foot of it under the vivid red helmet, drumming against a stump in a clearing like a mad miniature hermit, alone under the stillness of the trees.

Still, it would be too much to say that the summer at Weyer made me political. It is only in retrospect that my childhood can be seen as a process of politicization. At the time playing and learning, family and school defined my life, as they defined the lives of most Viennese children in the 1920s. Virtually everything we experienced came to us in these ways or fitted into one or another of these frameworks.

Of the two networks which constituted most of my life, the family was by far the more permanent. It consisted of a larger Viennese clan, the relatives of my grandparents and a smaller Anglo-Austrian part, two Grun sisters, my mother and her younger sister Gretl, married to two Hobsbaum brothers, namely my father and the younger Sidney, who also lived in Vienna for much of the 1920s. As for school, one did not go there until the age of six. After that, as our addresses changed I passed through two primary schools and three Gymnasia, and my sister – who left Vienna before the age of ten – through two primary schools. In these circumstances school friendships tended to be temporary. Of all those I came to know at my five schools in Vienna, all but one were to disappear totally from my subsequent life.

The family, on the other hand, was an operational network, tied together not only by the emotional bonds between mothers, children and grandchildren, and between sisters and brothers, but by economic necessity. What there was of the modern welfare state in the 1920s hardly touched middle-class families, since few of their members were employed for wages. Whom else could one call on for help? How could one not help relatives in need, even if one did not particularly like them? I don’t believe that this was specially characteristic of Jewish families, although my mother’s Viennese family undoubtedly had a sense that the mishpokhe, or at least the kinsmen and kinswomen living in Vienna, constituted a group, which met from time to time – always, as I recall from long and spectacularly boring sessions round tables placed together in some open-air cafe s to take family decisions or just gossip. We were given ice-cream, but short pleasures do not compensate for lengthy tedium. If there was anything specifically Jewish about it, it was the assumption among all of them that the family was a network stretching across countries and oceans, that shifting between countries was a normal part of life, and that for people engaged in buying and selling – as so many members of Jewish families were – earning one’s living was an uncertain and unpredictable matter, especially in the era of catastrophe which had engulfed central Europe since the collapse of civilization in August 1914. As it turned