Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [42]
We were thus recognizably like the young ultras of 1968, but with four major differences. First, we were not a minority of radical dissidents in societies that had never been more prosperous and with political systems of unquestioned stability. In the economically storm-tossed and politically brittle Germany of 1932 those who radically rejected the status quo were the majority. Second, unlike the 1968 student radicals, we – right or left – were not protesters but engaged in an essentially revolutionary struggle for political power; more exactly, disciplined political mass parties seeking sole state power. Whatever was to come after, taking power was the first, indispensable step. Third, comparatively few of us on the ultra left were intellectuals, if only because even in a well-schooled country like Germany over 90 per cent of young people never got even a secondary education. And among the intellectual youth, we on the left were a modest minority. The bulk of secondary students were almost certainly on the right, though – as in my own school – not necessarily on the National Socialist right. Among the university students support for Hitler was notoriously strong.
The fourth difference was that the communist intellectuals were not cultural dissidents. Culturally the major divide was not, as in the era of rock music, between generations, but the basically political conflict between those who accepted and those who rejected what the Nazis called ‘cultural bolshevism’, that is to say almost everything that made the fourteen years of the Weimar Republic such an extraordinary era in the history of the arts and sciences. In Berlin, at least, we shared this culture with our seniors, for pre-Stalinist communism, while distinguishing sharply between writers and artists with the ‘right’ and those with the ‘wrong’ line, did not yet reject the men and women of the cultural avant-garde who had so patently hailed the October Revolution and shared the KPD’s distaste for the Republic of Ebert and Hindenburg. ‘Socialist Realism’ was still below the horizon. An admiration for Brecht, the Bauhaus and George Grosz did not separate parents and children, but it did separate the right from a sort of cultural popular front that stretched from the social-democratic authorities of Prussia and Berlin to the furthest outskirts of anarchist bohemia. It also united liberals with the left. The chief reason why in its day the German Democratic Republic had a far more liberal legislation on birth control and abortion than the western Federal Republic was that, in the days of Weimar, legalizing abortion, prohibited by the German Civil Code, had been a major campaigning issue for the KPD. I look at my surviving copy of the Schulkampf , and there it is still, together with announcements of meetings by the medical men so long associated with sexual emancipation.
Reconstructing my experience of the last months of the Weimar Republic, how can I disentangle memory from what I now know as a historian, what I now think after a lifetime of political reflections and debates about what the German left should or should not have done? Then I knew no more of what was happening between the triumph of the Nazis at the elections of 30 July 1932 and Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 than I read in the Vossische Zeitung. In any case, I did not really react to the news politically or critically, but as a romantic partisan, or a football supporter. The Berlin transport strike, which took place shortly before the last democratic election of the Republic in early November 1932, was then, and has been ever since, the subject of bitter polemics.