Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [33]
Perhaps I would have forgiven him, had I known that he was an admirer of the architecture of the ‘neue Sachlichkeit’ (new sobriety) and regarded both its uncluttered lines and ‘the conscious austerity of modern creative writing … as signs of a return to a new classicism’, an apollonian spirit welcome to a teacher of ancient Greek. He chose the communist Ludwig Renn’s novel Krieg (War) as an example of this new classicism. (He had of course, like most of our teachers, served in the 1914 war.) Still, if I did not exactly like him, I respected him. And I unquestionably benefited from his efforts, finally successful in the year before I came to the Grunewaldstrasse, ‘finally to get truly modern works into the school library’.
Several of these works shaped my life. In a large encyclopedic guide to contemporary German writing I discovered the poems (as distinct from the songs and plays) of Bertolt Brecht. And it was to the school library that an exasperated master – his name was Willi Bodsch, and I remember nothing else about him – referred me when I announced my communist convictions. He told me firmly (and correctly): ‘You clearly do not know what you are talking about. Go to the library and look up the subject.’ I did so, and discovered the Communist Manifesto …
What I learned in the formal schoolroom lessons is less clear. I can see that they were not a particularly central part of school experience, except as occasions for observing, manipulating and sometimes testing the nerves and authority of a group of ill-understood adults. Most of them seemed to me to be almost caricatures of German schoolmasters, square, with glasses and (when not bald) crew-cut, and to be rather old – they were mostly in their late forties or early fifties. All of them sounded like passionate conservative German patriots. No doubt those who were not kept a low profile, but most of them probably were. None more so than the George Groszian figure of Professor Emil Simon, whose Greek lessons we became expert at side-tracking, either by asking what Wilamowitz would have thought of the passage (good for at least ten minutes of panegyric about the greatest of German classical scholars) or, more reliably, stimulating his reminiscences of the world war. This would invariably lead us from construing Homer’s Odyssey to a monologue about the experience of the frontline soldier, an officer’s duty, the need for postwar order, Russian barbarism, the horrors of the October Revolution and the Cheka, Lenin’s praetorian guard of Lettish riflemen and the like, plus a reminder that, contrary to what ignorant workers might think, Spartacus, far from of proletarian origins, had been a person of high social status before he was enslaved. It was, as I now recognize many decades later, an early version of the thesis used in the 1980s in mitigation of the Third Reich, namely that it had been necessary to defend an ordered society against bolshevism, and in any case the horrors of the Hitler era had been anticipated and were inspired by the horrors of Red Russia. So far as I know Emil Simon was not a Nazi, but merely a German conservative reminding himself of better days, such as might be heard in middle-class bars round the Stammtisch (the regulars’ table). Irrespective of our politics, we made fun of him and pitied his son, a pale, fragile boy who sat in the front row of the class and carried the triple burden of being Emil’s son, his pupil, and the witness to our ridicule of him.
In any case, life was too interesting to concentrate essentially on school work. I did