Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [22]
The second was the Boy Scouts. I was taken to a world jamboree of the movement, which took place at the time not far from Southport, and returned an enthusiastic convert, with a copy of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys , determined to join them. I did so the next year in Vienna, where the ‘Pfadfinder’ (Scouts) competed with the blue-shirted Social-Democratic ‘Red Falcons’, which my mother dissuaded me from joining on the grounds that their campfires were admirable, but I was still too young to commit myself to the Marxism that went with them. I was thus to make my entry into public life at the age of fourteen not under revolutionary auspices, but at a Boy Scout parade, composed mainly of middle-class Viennese Jewish boys, formally inspected by the then President of Austria, an undistinguished and doubtless anti-Semitic Catholic politician by the name of Miklas.
I was a passionately enthusiastic Scout, even recruiting some of my classmates, though not much gifted either for fieldcraft or group life. It was among the Scouts that I found my best friend in the days between the deaths of my father and my mother. We maintained contact until his death, for he escaped to England after Hitler occupied Austria, found a job as a doorkeeper to the Afghan legation in London and remained to become a medical technician. (My troop leader ended up in Australia.) Had there been any Baden-Powell Scouts in Germany, I might well have joined them there too, after my mother’s death, but there were none, any more than at that time – difficult though this may be to credit now – there were any German football teams that counted internationally. If there were the equivalent of the Austrian ‘Red Falcons’, they belonged to a very much less exciting and not at all revolutionary Social-Democratic Party. Marxism thus had no competitors.
For the two years after my return from England I lived a curiously provisional semi-independent life. To stay with a neurotic and semi-invalid grandmother after my mother went into hospital was clearly out of the question. For a few months I was taken over by Great-uncle Viktor Friedmann and Aunt Elsa, who had at least one child still in the house, my cousin Herta, several years my senior. (Her brother Otto had been boarding with Sidney and Gretl in Berlin, so there was some obligation of reciprocity.) For the rest of the school year I commuted daily from their flat in the Seventh District, the other side of the Old Town, to my Gymnasium in the Third District, opposite – though I did not then know it – the house built for himself by the philosopher Wittgenstein. In the summer of 1930 I joined Gretl, Nancy and Peter in an Upper Austrian alpine village, Weyer-an-der-Enns, to be near my mother, who had been sent to a hospital/sanatorium there. As all readers of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain know, mountain air was prescribed for TB sufferers. But it did her no good.
I spent my last school year in Vienna alone, or rather as a sort of male au pair. Someone discovered a Mrs Effenberger, widow of a colonel and, like so many good Viennese, from southern Bohemia – she came from Pisek – whose son Bertl, two or three years younger than me, wanted English lessons. In return for these, and possibly a very modest subsidy, she