Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [5]
Five, later six, children of pre-school age, or at best in the first years of primary school, in the same garden, are great cementers of inter-family relations. The Hobsbaums and the Golds got on well, in spite of their very different backgrounds – for (notwithstanding their name) the Golds do not seem to have been Jewish. At all events they remained and flourished in Austria, that is to say in Hitler’s Greater Germany, after the Anschluss. Both Mr and Mrs Gold came from Sieghartskirchen, a nowheresville in Lower Austria, he the son of the only local innkeeper–farmer, she the daughter of the only village shopkeeper (anything from socks to agricultural equipment). Both maintained strong family links there. They were sufficiently prosperous in the 1920s to have their portraits painted – a black-and-white copy of the two, sent by one of the two surviving Gold girls a year or so ago, is before me. The picture of a serious-looking gentleman in a dark lounge suit and a starched collar brings nothing back, and indeed I had no close contact with him as a small boy, although he once showed me his officer’s cap from the days before the end of the empire, and was the first person I knew who had actually been to the USA, to which he had travelled on business. From there he brought a gramophone record, the tune of which I now recognize as ‘The Peanut Vendor’, and the information that they had a make of motor-car called ‘Buick’, a name I found, for some obscure reason, hard to credit. On the other hand the image of a handsome long-necked lady with short hair waved at the sides, looking at the world with a serious but not very self-confident gaze over her décolleté shoulder, immediately brings her to life in my mind. For mothers are a much more constant presence in the life of young children, and my mother, Nelly, intellectual, cosmopolitan, educated, and Anna (‘Antschi’) Gold, with little schooling, always conscious of the provincialism of her origins, soon became best friends and remained so to the end. Indeed, according to her daughter Melitta, Nelly was Anna’s only intimate friend. This may explain why photos of unknown and unidentifiable Hobsbawms still keep turning up in family albums of the Gold grandchildren who remained in Vienna. One of the Gold girls recalls, almost as vividly as I do, going (with her mother) to see my mother in her last days. Weeping, Antschi told her: ‘We will never see Nelly again.’
Two people, almost as old as the ‘short twentieth century’, thus began life together and then made their different ways through the extraordinary and terrible world of the past century. That is why I begin the present reflections on a long life with the unexpected reminder of a photo in the albums of two families which had nothing else in common except that their lives were briefly brought together in the Vienna of the 1920s. For memories of a few years of early childhood shared by a retired university professor and peripatetic historian with a retired former actress, television presenter and occasional translator (‘like your mother!’) are of little more than private interest for the people concerned. Even for them, they are no more than the thinnest of threads of spider silk bridging the enormous space between some seventy years of entirely separate, unconnected lives conducted without knowledge or even without a moment’s conscious thought of one another. It is the extraordinary experience of Europeans living through the twentieth century that binds these lives together. A rediscovered common childhood, a renewal of contact in old age, dramatize the image of our times: absurd, ironic, surrealist and monstrous. They do not create them. Ten years after the five infants looked at the camera, my parents were dead, and Mr Gold,