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By Root 1586 0

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 Grün, his savings reduced in value by the great inflation of the early twenties to the price of a coffee and cake at the Café śIlion, 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 Grün 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