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By Root 1753 0

whether it could have been is academic. If we say its casualties were intolerable (as most people agree) or that the German Europe that would have emerged from the Kaiser’s victory might have been a better proposition than the world of Versailles (as I hold), I am not suggesting it could have been different. And yet, I must fail the test, were I asked such a question even in theory about the Second World War. I can, with enormous effort, envisage the argument that Spain might have been better off if Franco’s coup had succeeded in 1936, avoiding the Civil War. I am prepared to concede, with regret, that Lenin’s Comintern was not such a good idea nor – this time without difficulty, for I was never a Zionist – Theodor Herzl’s project of a Jewish nation state. He would have done better to stay with the Neue Freie Presse as its star columnist. But if you ask me to entertain the proposition that the defeat of National Socialism was not worth the 50 million dead and the uncounted horrors of the Second World War, I simply could not. I look forward to an American world empire, whose long-term chances are poor, with more fear and less enthusiasm than I look back on the record of the old British Empire, run by a country whose modest size protected it against megalomania. What marks have I got in the test? If they are too low, then this book will not give readers much help as they go into the new century, mostly with a longer life ahead of them than the author.

Still, let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.

Notes

1. Overture

1. This and the following paragraphs are based on my mother’s letters to her sister during May 1915.

2. A Child in Vienne

1. I deliberately use the German names of these places since these were the ones we used, though all towns of any size in most of the empire ahd two or three names.

2. Nelly Hobsbaum to her sister Gretl, letter dated 23 March 1925.

3. Nelly Hobsbaum to her sister Gretl, letter dated 5 December 1928.

4. Berlin: Weimar Dies

1. James V. Bryson, My Life with Laemmle (Facto Books, London, 1980), pp. 56–7. Dronkwater had so little sense of Hollywood that he did the job for less than half what Laemmle’s agent was authorized to offer.

2. Most of the information about the school in the following pages is based on Heinz stallmann (ed.) Das Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium zu Schöneberg, 1890–1945. Geschichte einer Schue (privately printed, Berlin, 1965?), my own memorises and those of Fritz Lusting.

3. In 1929 the school had 388 Protestant, 48 Catholic, 35 Jewish and 6 other pupils. Stallmann, op. cit., p, 47.

4. Mimi Brown to Ernestine Grün, letter dated 3 December 1931, announcing her plans to leave England — for Ragusa (Dubrovnik)? For Berlin?

5. Berlin: Brown and Red

1. Stephan Hermlin, Abendlicht (Leipzig, 1979), pp. 32, 35, 52.

2. Karl Corino, ’Ditchung in eigener Sache’, Die Zeit, 4 October 1996, pp. 9–11.

3. Heinz Stallmann (ed.), Das Prinz-Heinrich-Gymnasium zu Schöneberg, 1890–1945. Geschichte einer Schule (privately printed, Berlin, 1965?) provides no information, except one mention of ’Leder’ in a list of fellow-pupils of 1926–35 by a contributor who graduated in 1935.

4. My information comes from Rellix Krolokowski, ’Erinnerungen: Kommunistische Schülerbewegung in der Weimarer Republik’, a texte which I was given, possibly by the author, during a visit to Leipzig in 1996.

5. Kommunistische Pennäler Fraktion (’Pennäler’=secondary-schoolstudents, from schoolboy slang ’Penne’=secondary school).

6. Tagebuch, 17 March 1935.

6. On the Island

1. Tagebuch, 8–11 November 1934. Much of this chapter is based on the material in this diary, which I kept from 10 April 1934 to 9 January 1936.

Tagebuch, 16 June 1935 and 17 August 1935.

3. see the social analysis of the British jazz-lovers in my The Jazz Scene (London, 1959; New York, 1933).

4. Josef Skvorecky, The Bass Saxophone (London, 1978).

5. Luckily for them, my first attempt to contact a Party branch, somewhere