Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [8]
It was a multinational, but not a multicultural society. German (with a local intonation) was its language, German (with a local touch) its culture, and its access to world culture, ancient and modern. My relatives would have shared the passionate indignation of the great art historian Ernst Gombrich, when, to fit in with late twentieth-century fashions, he was asked to describe his native Viennese culture as Jewish. It was plain Viennese middle-class culture, unaffected by the fact that so many of its eminent practitioners were Jews and (faced with the endemic anti-Semitism of the region) knew themselves to be Jews, any more than by the fact that some of them came from Moravia (Freud and Mahler), some from Galicia or the Bukovina (Joseph Roth) or even from Russe on the Bulgarian Danube (Elias Canetti). It would be just as pointless to look for consciously Jewish elements in the songs of Irving Berlin or the Hollywood movies of the era of the great studios, all of which were run by immigrant Jews: their object, in which they succeeded, was precisely to make songs or films which found a specific expression for 100 per cent Americanness.
As speakers of the Kultursprache in a former imperial capital children instinctively shared the sense of cultural, if no longer political, superiority. The way Czechs spoke German (böhmakeln) struck us as inferior and therefore funny, and so did the incomprehensible Czech language with its apparent accumulation of consonants. Without knowing, or having any opinion about, Italians we referred to them with a touch of contempt as Katzelmacher . Emancipated and assimilated Viennese Jews talked about Eastern Jews as of some other species. (I distinctly remember asking an embarrassed older member of the family whether those Eastern Jews had surnames like ours, and if so what names, since they were obviously so different from us.) It seems to me that this explains much of the enthusiasm with which Austrians greeted their annexation by Hitler’s Germany: it restored their sense of political superiority. At the time I only noticed that one or two of my classmates in secondary school were Hakenkreuzler (swastikers). Since I was an English boy, however culturally indistinguishable from the Austrians, this clearly did not concern me directly. But it brings me to the question of politics.
Because I was to be seized so young and so long by that typical twentieth-century passion, political commitment, it seems reasonable to ask how much of its roots can be found in a childhood in 1920s Vienna. That is difficult to reconstruct. We lived in an era steeped in politics, although the affairs of the wider world came to us, as I have said, mainly through overheard adult conversations, whose purport children did not fully grasp. I remember two of these, both probably around 1925 or so. One occurred in an alpine sanatorium where I had been sent to recover from some illness (we children appeared constantly to have some sickness or other) under the supervision of my aunt Gretl who was also convalescing there. ‘Who is this Trotsky?’ asked a woman, whom I vaguely recall or imagine as maternal and middle-aged, but not without a touch of satisfaction. ‘Just a Jewish boy called Bronstein.’ We knew about the Russian Revolution, but what exactly was it? Another happened at an athletics meeting to which my uncle (and presumably my father) had taken me, made memorable by my first experience of a black sprinter by the name of Cator. ‘You say there’s no war anywhere at the moment,’ said someone, ‘but surely, there’s a revolt in Syria?’ What did or could this mean to us? We knew there had been a world war, as any British boy born in 1944 would grow up knowing that there had been one. Two of my British uncles had been in it, our neighbour Mr Gold would show me