Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [35]
In short, if I were to make the mental experiment of transposing the boy I was then into another time and/or place – say, into the England of the 1950s or the USA of the 1980s – I cannot easily see him plunging, as I did, into the passionate commitment to world revolution.
And yet, the mere fact of imagining this transposition demonstrates how unthinkable it was in the Berlin of 1931–3. It has indeed been imagined. Fred Uhlman, a few years older than me when he left Germany, a refugee lawyer who took to painting sad pictures of the bleak Welsh countryside, wrote a quasi-autobiographical novella later made into a film (Reunion ) about the dramatic impact of the new Hitler regime on the school friendship of a Jewish boy, unconscious of impending cataclysm, and a young ‘Aryan’ aristocrat at a South German Gymnasium not unlike my own. Perhaps this was a possible scenario in Stuttgart, but in the crisis-saturated atmosphere of the Berlin of 1931–3, such a degree of political innocence was inconceivable. We were on the Titanic, and everyone knew it was hitting the iceberg. The only uncertainty was about what would happen when it did. Who would provide a new ship? It was impossible to remain outside politics. But how could one support the parties of the Weimar Republic who no longer even knew how to man the lifeboats? They were entirely absent from the presidential elections of 1932, which were fought between Hitler and the communist candidate Ernst Thälmann and old imperial Field Marshal Hindenburg, supported by all non-communists as the only way of holding up the rise of Hitler. (Within a few months he was to call Hitler to power.) But for someone like myself there was really only one choice. German nationalism, whether in the traditional form of the PHG or in the form of Hitler’s National Socialism was not an option for an Engländer and a Jew, though I could understand why it appealed to those who were neither. What was there left but the communists, especially for a boy who arrived in Germany already emotionally drawn to the left?
As I entered the school year 1932–3, the sense that we were living in some sort of final crisis, or at least a crisis destined for some cataclysmic resolution, became overpowering. The presidential election of May 1932, the first of several in that ominous year, had already eliminated the parties of the Weimar Republic. The last of its governments, under Brüning, had fallen shortly after and given way to a clique of aristocratic reactionaries governing entirely by presidential decree, for the administration of Franz von Papen had virtually no support in the Reichstag, let alone even the makings of a majority. The new government immediately sent a small detail of soldiers to dismiss the government of the largest German state, Prussia, where a Social-Democratic–Centre Party coalition had maintained something like democratic rule. The ministers went like lambs, as Papen, trying to bring Hitler into his government, revoked a recent ban on the wearing of their uniforms by Nazi stormtroopers. Their deliberately provocative parades now became part of the normal street scene. Every day saw battles between the uniformed protection squads of the various parties. In July alone eighty-six were killed, mainly in clashes between Nazis and communists, and the number of those seriously injured ran into hundreds. Hitler, playing for higher stakes, forced a general election in July. The Nazis were returned with almost 14 million votes (37.5