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By Root 1702 0

not at this time have particularly brilliant school reports. The truth is, teachers and at least this pupil talked past one another. I learned absolutely nothing in the history lessons given by a small, fat old man, ‘Tönnchen’ (‘little barrel’) Rubensohn, except the names and dates of all the German emperors, all of which I have since forgotten. He taught them by dashing round the form pointing a ruler at each of us with the words: ‘Quick, Henry the Fowler – the dates.’ I now know that he was as bored by this exercise as we were. He was, in fact, the most distinguished scholar in the school, author of a monograph on the mystery cults of Eleusis and Samothrace, a contributor to Pauly-Wissowa, the great encyclopedia of classical antiquity and a recognized classical archaeologist in the Aegean and papyrus expert long before the war. Perhaps I should have discovered this in the sixth form where education was no longer based on compulsory memorization. Until then the main effect of his teaching was to turn at least one potential future historian off the subject. It is not surprising that in Berlin I learned by absorption rather than instruction. But, of course, I did learn.

The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and, as I now know, was bound to fail. The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me, as deleted texts are still waiting to be recovered by experts, somewhere on the hard disks of computers. I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness which I do not feel towards Communist China, because I belong to the generation for whom the October Revolution represented the hope of the world, as China never did. The Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle symbolized it. But what exactly made the Berlin schoolboy a communist?

To write an autobiography is to think of oneself as one has never really done before. In my case it is to strip the geological deposits of three quarters of a century away and to recover or to discover and reconstruct a buried stranger. As I look back and try to understand this remote and unfamiliar child, I come to the conclusion that, had he lived in other historical circumstances, nobody would have forecast for him a future of passionate commitment to politics, though almost every observer would have predicted a future as some kind of intellectual. Human beings did not appear to interest him much, either singly or collectively; certainly much less than birds. Indeed, he seems to have been unusually remote from the affairs of the world. He had no personal reasons for rejecting the social order and did not feel himself suffer even from the standard anti-Semitism of central Europe, since, fair-haired and blue-eyed, he was not identified as ‘Der Jude’ but as ‘Der Engländer’. To be blamed for the Treaty of Versailles could be tough in a German school, but it was not demeaning. The activities to which I gravitated spontaneously at a school where I felt unquestionably happy had nothing to do with politics: the literary society, the boat club, natural history, the marvellous school journeys through the Mark Brandenburg and Mecklenburg, camping or staying the night in youth hostels on straw palliasses while, full of joy and passion, we talked half the night away. About what? About everything, from the nature of truth to who we were, from sex and more sex, to literature and art, from jokes to destiny. But not about the politics of the day. At least that is how I remember those unforgettable nights. Certainly I cannot recall political discussions, let alone disagreements, with my two closest friends, Ernst Wiemer and Hans-Heinz Schroeder, the classroom poet – he died in Russia during the war. What I had in common with them is unclear. I merely note that, on the graduation