Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [240]
But even beyond this I recognize myself in E. M. Forster’s phrase about C.P. Cavafy, the anglophone Greek poet from my native Alexandria, who ‘stood at a slight angle to the universe’. For the historian, as for the photographer, this is a good way to stand.
For most of my life this has been my situation: typecast from a birth in Egypt, which has no practical bearing on my life-history, as someone from elsewhere. I have been attached to and felt at home in several countries and seen something of many others. However, in all of them, including the one into whose citizenship I was born, I have been, not necessarily an outsider, but someone who does not wholly belong to where he finds himself, whether as an Englishman among the central Europeans, a continental immigrant in Britain, a Jew everywhere – even, indeed particularly, in Israel – an anti-specialist in a world of specialists, a polyglot cosmopolitan, an intellectual whose politics and academic work were devoted to the non-intellectual, even, for much of my life, an anomaly among communists, themselves a minority of political humanity in the countries I have known. This has complicated my life as a private human being, but it has been a professional asset for the historian.
This has made it easy to resist what Pascal called ‘the reasons of the heart of which reason knows nothing’, namely emotional identification with some obvious or chosen group. As identity is defined against someone else, it implies not identifying with the other. It leads to disaster. That is exactly why in-group history written only for the group (‘identity history’) – black history for blacks, queer history for homosexuals, feminist history for women only, or any kind of in-group ethnic or nationalist history – cannot be satisfactory as history, even when it is more than a politically slanted version of an ideological sub-section of the wider identity group. No identity group, however large, is alone in the world; the world cannot be changed to suit it alone, nor can the past.
This is particularly urgent at the beginning of the new century, in the aftermath of the end of the short twentieth century. As old regimes disintegrate, old forms of politics fade away and new states multiply, the manufacture of new histories to suit new regimes, states, ethnic movements and identity groups becomes a global industry. As the human hunger for continuity with the past grows in an era designed as a continuous break with the past, the media society feeds it by inventing its versions of a box-office national history, ‘heritage’ and theme parks in ancient fancy dress. And even in democracies where authoritarian power no longer controls what can be said about past and present, the joint force of pressure groups, the threat of headlines, unfavourable publicity or even public hysteria impose evasion, silence and the public self-censorship of ‘political correctness’. Even today (2002) there is shock when a consistently anti-Nazi German writer of notable moral courage, Gunther Grass, chooses as the subject of a novel the tragedy of a sinking ship filled with German refugees fleeing from the advancing Red Army in the last stages of the Second World War.
III
The test of a historian’s life is whether he or she can ask and answer questions, especially ‘what if’ questions, about the matters of passionate significance to themselves and the world, as though they were journalists reporting things long past – and yet, not as a stranger but as one deeply involved. These are not questions about real history, which is not about what we might like, but about what happened, and could perhaps have happened otherwise but did not. They are questions about the present not the past, which is why they are important to those who live at the start of the new century, old or young. The First World War was not avoided, so the question