Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [38]
Rolf Leder was a man who saw himself as out of place in the bourgeois environment of our school. He had, he claims in his autobiography, joined the Young Communists on the street not much more than a year before he recruited me, and was proud to have won acceptance in the streetwise milieu of young Berlin working-class reds by ‘proving himself’ in the ‘time of latent civil war’ when the comrades faced the cops and the brownshirt stormtroopers. 1 However, he did not suggest that I should join the KJV but a distinctly less proletarian organization, the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (SSB), designed specifically to hold secondary-school students. I did so, and he went his own way. I never saw him again after I left Berlin. He died in 1996.
Yet our lives remained curiously intertwined. Many years later, in a West German work on writers and communism, I discovered that a rather prominent member of the literary establishment in the German Republic, the poet Stephan Hermlin, was actually called Rudolf Leder. He had, I later discovered from his autobiography, stayed on illegally in Germany, refusing his family’s offer to send him to Cambridge, suffering some months’ imprisonment in a concentration camp. In 1935 he had been in France, he fought in Spain and later in the French Resistance, before returning to the Soviet-occupied zone in 1946 and a distinguished literary career in what was to become the GDR. From what I have read of his work, I think he was a good rather than an outstanding poet, probably better as a translator and adapter of other poets, and his brief, allusive memoir Abendlicht is widely admired. On the other hand, as a prominent figure on the cultural scene under a philistine and authoritarian regime he behaved well, protesting and protecting, and using his friendship with Honecker against the Stasi (secret police). This is an instance when the old German phrase ‘Guter Mensch, schlechter Musikant’ (‘good guy, bad musician’) should be read not as a disparagement of the artist but as praise for the public man. I wrote him a letter, presumably care of the Writers’ Union, to ask whether he was the Leder I had known, and received a brief answer, saying he was, but he could not remember me. Nor did he react later, when friends in Berlin mentioned me to him. However, the brief connection between two Berlin schoolboys in 1932, both of whom, in different ways and countries, became well-known figures on the cultural left, seems to fascinate both journalists and readers in post-1989 East Germany. At all events I have frequently found myself asked about it.
There is a curious coda to the episode of Rudolf Leder. Shortly before his death, Karl Corino, a West German literary bloodhound hostile to Stephan Hermlin, followed the trail of his public biography, and discovered that most of it was romance sometimes only tangentially connected with reality. 2 He had not abandoned a wealthy, cultured, art-collecting and music-loving household of the Anglo-German high bourgeoisie for the struggle of the workers. His father was a Romanian and later stateless businessman, married to a Galician immigrant to Britain (and therefore with a British passport), who had known a brief era of financial glory in the inflation years, followed by collapse. The father had not served in the First World War, nor died in a concentration camp, but in 1939 had reached safety in London. Hermlin himself had not been in a concentration camp, even briefly. He had not been to Spain. There was no evidence of work in the French Resistance. And so on. It was a highly effective and, in spite of the evident bias of the author and some of his sources, a convincing hatchet-job.
Of course