Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

out, no part of the Hobsbaum–Grun family was to need the safety net of the family system more than my parents, especially after my father’s death changed an economic situation of permanent crisis into one of catastrophe. But until then – in my case until the age of eleven plus – we children were barely aware of this.

We were still in the era when taking a taxi seemed an extravagance that required special justification, even for relatively well-off people. We – or at least I – seemed to have all the usual possessions our friends had and do all the things they did. I can recall only one occasion when I had an inkling of how tough things were. I had just entered secondary school (Bundesgymnasium XIII, Fichtnergasse). The professor in charge of the new form – all teachers at a Gymnasium were automatically Herr Professor, just as we automatically were now addressed like adults as Sie and not like children as Du – had given us the list of books we needed to buy. For geography we needed the Kozenn-Atlas , a large and evidently rather expensive volume. ‘This is very dear. Is it absolutely necessary for you to have it?’ my mother asked in a tone which must clearly have communicated to me a sense of crisis, if only because the answer to her question was so obvious. Of course it was. How could Mummy not see this? The book was bought, but the sense that on this occasion, at least, a major sacrifice had been made has remained with me. Perhaps this is a reason why I still have that atlas on my shelves, a bit tattered and full of the graffiti and marginalia of someone in the early forms of secondary school, but still a good atlas, to which I refer from time to time.

Perhaps other children of my age might have been more conscious of our material problems. As a boy I was not much aware of practical realities; and adults, insofar as their activities and interests did not overlap with my own, were not part of practical reality so far as I was concerned. In any case I lived for much of the time in a world without clear boundaries between reality, the discoveries of reading and the creations of imagination. Even a child with a more hard-headed sense of reality, such as my sister, had no clear idea of our situation. Such knowledge simply was not supposed to be part of the world of our childhood. For instance, I had no idea what work my father did. Nobody bothered to tell children about these things, and in any case the ways in which people like my father and uncle earned their living were far from clear. They were not men with firmly describable occupations, like the figures on ‘Happy Families’ cards: doctors, lawyers, architects, policemen, shopkeepers. When asked what my father did, I would vaguely say, or write, ‘Kaufmann’ (merchant), knowing quite well that this meant nothing, and was almost certainly wrong. But what else was one to put?

To a large extent, our – or at least my – lack of awareness of our financial situation was due to the reluctance, no, the refusal, of my Viennese family to acknowledge it. It was not that they insisted on the last resort of the middle class fallen on bad times, ‘keeping up appearances’. They were aware of how far they had fallen. ‘It really lifts the heart to see this in our impoverished and proletarianized times,’ my grandmother wrote to her daughter, marvelling at the smoothness and opulence of a nephew’s wedding, noting bitterly that the bridegroom had given his bride ‘a very beautiful and valuable ring, made by us’ in better days. That is before Grandpa Grun, his savings reduced in value by the great inflation of the early twenties to the price of a coffee and cake at the Cafe sIlion, returned in old age to the occupation of his youth as a commercial traveller, selling trinkets in provincial towns and alpine villages. Large swathes of the Austrian middle class were in a similar position, impoverished by war and postwar, getting used to tightened belts and a far more modest lifestyle than ‘in peacetime’ – i.e. before 1914. (Nothing since 1918 counted as peace.) They found having no money hard – harder, they thought, than the workers who were, after all, used to it. (Later, when I became an enthusiastic communist teenager my aunt Gretl shook her head over my refusal to accept what, to her, was this self-evident proposition.) Not that the English husbands of Grun daughters were better off. Two of them were spectacularly unfitted for the jungle of the market economy: my father and Wilfred Brown, a handsome wartime internee who married the oldest sister, Mimi. Even my uncle Sidney, the only Hobsbaum brother to earn a living in business, spent most of the decade extracting himself from the ruins of one failed project only to plunge into the next, equally doomed, enterprise.

At bottom my Viennese family found any other way of life than that before 1914 inconceivable, and carried on with it, against the odds. Thus my mother, even when unable to pay the grocery bills, let alone the rent and utilities, always employed servants. Nor were these old retainers, such as Helene Demuth, who is buried with the Karl Marxes in Highgate Cemetery. They were and remained the quintessential ‘servant problem’ of middle-class ladies, an endless succession of young women from agencies who stayed a month or two, ranging from the rare ‘eine Perle’ (a pearl), to the clumsy arrival straight from the country, who had never seen a gas-stove, let alone a telephone. When my mother visited England for the first time in 1925, to take care of her sister Mimi who was then ill in Barrow-in-Furness, she wrote to her other sister, impressed not only with the efficiency, equanimity and lack of fuss with which households were run (so different from Vienna Jewish families …), but that it was done without servants. ‘Here you find ladies who do everything themselves, and have children, and even do all the laundry themselves, and still remain ladies.’²

Even so, she never seriously considered the British option. ‘As someone with years of experience of being broke,’ she wrote to her sister who complained of money troubles in Berlin,

let me give you one major piece of advice, which I urge you to take seriously. Try not ever to admit that you could do without a maid!! In the long run you can’t manage without one anyway, and so it is best to start with the assumption that a maid is just as much a necessity as food or a roof over your head. What you save is nothing compared to the loss in health, comfort, and above all the state of your nerves: and the worse things get, the more you need them. True, just lately I wondered whether to give Marianne notice – not that I could do it before Christmas, it’s too late, and she was always so good – but the only reason I did was that I’m ashamed that she should see that I can’t pay the grocer etc. And, deep down I know perfectly well it is best to grow a thick skin and to keep her. ³

Of all this we knew or understood nothing except that the parents had rows, possibly with increasing frequency – but whose parents do not have rows? – and, in the central European winters, that the rooms were icy. (Had we lived in Britain in the era of coal-fired fireplaces, very nearly the most inefficient form of indoor heating invented, this would not necessarily have been due to lack of money to buy winter fuel.)

Firm and cohesive, partly because of the very precariousness of its material base, the family divided the world, and therefore my life, into two parts: inside and outside. In effect, so far as we children were concerned, the family and its close friends constituted, or determined, the world of adults that I knew as people and not merely as service providers or, as it were, stage extras on the filmset of our life. (It also determined which children would remain permanently part of our lives and we of theirs, like the Gold girls, or the daughter of the Szanas.) The adults I knew consisted almost entirely of relatives, or of the friends of parents and relatives. Thus I have no memory as a person, of the dentist my mother took me to, even though the experience of going there was only too unforgettable, for he was not someone she ‘knew’. On the other hand I remember Doktor Strasser as a real person, presumably because the family knew him and his family. Curiously enough, teachers do not appear to have belonged to the world of individual adults until my last year in Vienna, and only became people with whom I had personal relations, in Berlin.

School was strictly outside. And ‘outside’, lacking adults as real persons, consisted essentially of other children. The world of children, whether ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, was one which the adults did not really understand, just as we did not really understand what they were about. At best, each side of the generation gap accepted what the other side did as ‘how like children’ or ‘that’s what grown-ups do’. Only puberty, arriving in my last year in Vienna, began to undermine the walls between these separate spheres.

Of course the two spheres overlapped. My reading, especially my English reading, was largely supplied by adults, although I found Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper which well-meaning relatives sent from London both boring and incomprehensible. On the other hand from an early age I gobbled up the German