Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [4]
Egypt thus does not belong in my life. I do not know when the life of memory begins, but not much of it goes back to the age of two. I have never gone there since the steamer Helouan left Alexandria for Trieste, then just transferred from Austria to Italy. I do not remember anything about our arrival in Trieste, meeting-point of languages and races, a place of opulent cafés, sea captains and the headquarters of the giant insurance company, Assicurazioni Generali, whose business empire probably defines the concept of ‘Mitteleuropa’ better than any other. Eighty years later I had occasion to discover it in the company of Triestine friends, and especially Claudio Magris, that marvellous memorializer of central Europe and the Adriatic corner where German, Italian, Slav and Hungarian cultures converge. My grandfather, who had come to meet us, accompanied us on the Southern Railway to Vienna. That is where my conscious life began. We lived with my grandparents for some months, while my parents looked for an apartment of their own.
My father, arriving with hard savings – nothing was harder than sterling in those days – in an impoverished country with a currency subsiding towards collapse, felt confident and relatively prosperous. The Seutter Villa seemed ideal. It was the first place in my life I thought of as ‘ours’.
Anyone who comes to Vienna by rail from the west still passes it. If you look out of the right-hand window as the train comes into the western outskirts of Vienna, by the local station Hütteldorf-Hacking, it is impossible to miss that confident broad pile on the hillside with its four-sided dome on a squat tower, built by a successful industrialist in the later days of the Emperor Franz Josef (1848–1916). Its grounds reached down to the Auhofstrasse, which led to the west along the walls of the old imperial hunting ground, the Lainzer Tiergarten, and from which it was reached by a narrow uphill street (the Vinzenz-Hessgasse, now Seuttergasse) at the bottom of which there was then still a row of thatched cottages.
The Seutter Villa of my childhood memories is largely the part shared by the old and young of the Hobsbaums (for so, in spite of the Alexandrian consular clerk, the name was spelled), who rented a flat on the first floor of the villa, and the Golds, who rented the ground-floor apartment below us. Essentially this centred on the terrace at the side of the house, where so much of the social life of the generations of both these families was conducted. From this terrace a footpath – steep in retrospect – led down to the tennis courts at the bottom – they are now built over – past what seemed to a small boy a giant tree, but with branches low enough for climbing. I remember showing its secrets to a boy who had come to my school from a place called Recklinghausen in Germany. We had been asked to take care of him, because times were hard where he came from. I can remember nothing about him except the tree and his home-town in what is now the Land Nordrhein-Westfalen. He soon went back. Though I did not think of it as such, this must have been my first contact with the major events of twentieth-century history, namely the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, via one of the children temporarily sent out of harm’s way to well-wishers in Austria. (All Austrians at that time saw themselves as Germans, and, but for a veto from the peacemakers after the First World War, would have voted to join Germany.) I also have a vivid memory of us playing in a barn full of hay somewhere in the grounds, but on my last visit to Vienna with Marlene we checked