Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [189]
Clemens, a large, shambling, distracted-looking man who disliked phone conversations of more than fifty seconds, apt to lapse into a macaronic mixture of languages, may best be described as the most original intellectual impresario of postwar Europe. The theatrical metaphor is suitable. Son of Hugo Heller, a Viennese bookseller and cultural entrepreneur who had the bad luck to attract the sarcasm of Karl Kraus, he began his career as a pupil in the Max Reinhardt Theatre School, before being sent to the USA after Hitler came to Austria. He returned as a US officer to launch the celebrated Salzburg Seminars, was extruded from them by the US witch-hunt, and established himself in Paris. There he and Braudel formed their extraordinarily successful partnership, to which Heller brought the profoundly cosmopolitan culture of expatriate central Europe, a smell for intellectually interesting and promising people and ideas, an international network and the ability to mobilize American Foundation money for his academic projects. France being what it is, this led him to be denounced as an agent of the CIA in due course, fortunately in vain. Music and the intellect were the guiding passions of this man of extraordinary warmth and generosity. One of the rewards of a long life has been to be his friend.
Although my friendships in the 1950s came through the Historical Congress, they were mediated through the politics of intellectuals. They did not actually come through the Communist Party, although most of the people I met were at that time still in the Party. The French CP, an organization apparently run by political sergeant-majors, had a quite extraordinary knack of bullying and then antagonizing the intellectuals its Resistance record had attracted in such quantities, which astonished those of us used to the more relaxed ways of the British and Italian Communist Parties; but then, as my friend Antonin Liehm has pointed out, being a genuine mass party between the wars, it had, like the Czech CP, stalinized itself, rather than had ‘bolshevization’ imposed on it from outside. On the defensive after 1947 it retreated into a private cultural and political universe, fortified against the temptations of the outside world in a manner which reminded me of Roman Catholic minorities in the era of Vatican One, at all events in Britain. (Having been brought up in a Catholic country, French communist intellectuals were, of course, keenly aware of the structural similarities between the Party and the Church.) It had a proletarian distrust of intellectuals. When the British Communist Historians’ Group looked for opposite numbers in France, we got no help from the PCF. The pre-war party wanted militants, not academics. Hence the 1950 Historical Congress, though attracting young Marxists, was not attended by several of the subsequently eminent and eventually anti-communist historians who were hard-line young CP activists at the time – François Furet, Annie Kriegel, Alain Besançon, Le Roy Ladurie. I did not get to know them until their post-communist days.
In fact, looking back, it now seems clear to me that the foundation of my network of friends was not so much communism as the common experience of and identification with the Resistance.
For all this decade and until the tragic break-up of their marriage, my Paris base was to be the rather basic working-class flat on the boulevard Kellerman of Henri Raymond and the enchanting Helène Berghauer. To the Raymonds I went most of my vacations, and with them I spent most of my free time. For some years after the break-up of my first marriage they were the closest thing to a family I had. When they left Paris I would travel with them in their small car to wherever we agreed to go – to the Loire valley, to Italy, wherever. When they were in town I shared it with them, going round in their company, observing the passing scene from the approved cafés such as the Flore or the Rhumerie, watching out for, and passing the time of day with, acquaintances among