Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [88]
Most Party members in the GDR, and almost certainly most Party intellectuals, believed in some kind of socialism to the end. It is hard to find among them, as among Soviet emigrants, reform communists who had become 100 per cent pro-American cold warriors. But they were increasingly downhearted. When did communists begin to suspect – or to believe – that the ‘really existing’ socialist economy, clearly inferior to the capitalist one, was not working at all?
Markus Wolf, the head of GDR espionage, a man of visibly impressive ability, whom I got to know when a Dutch TV station organized a conversation between him and myself on the Cold War, told me that he had come to the conclusion in the late 1970s that the GDR system would not work. Even so, in the last moments of the GDR he came out publicly as a communist reformer – an unusual stance for an intelligence chief. In 1980 the Hungarian Janos Kornai’s book The Economics of Shortage already provided the classical analysis of the self-contradictory operations of Soviet-style economies. In the 1980s, a decade when these economies were visibly running down (unlike the post-Mao Chinese economy), communists in the Soviet bloc countries with elbow-room – Poland and Hungary – were already, it was clear, preparing for a shift. The hard-line regimes in Prague and Berlin had nothing to rely on except the potential intervention of the Soviet army, which was no longer on the cards since Gorbachev had taken over in the USSR. In Eastern Europe as in the West, Communist Parties were decomposing. Soon the Soviet Union itself would decompose. An historical epoch was ending. What was left of the old international communist movement lay beached like a whale on a shore from which the waters had withdrawn.
Late in the 1980s, almost at the end, an East German dramatist wrote a play called The Knights of the Round Table. What is their future? wonders Lancelot. ‘The people outside don’t want to know any more about the grail and the round table … They no longer believe in our justice and our dream … For the people the knights of the round table are a pile of fools, idiots and criminals.’ Does he himself still believe in the grail? ‘I don’t know,’ says Lancelot. ‘I can’t answer the question. I can’t say yes or no …’ No, they may never find the grail. But is not King Arthur right when he says that what is essential is not the grail but the quest for it? ‘If we give up on the grail, we give up on ourselves.’ Only on ourselves? Can humanity live without the ideals of freedom and justice, or without those who devote their lives to them? Or perhaps even without the memory of those who did so in the twentieth century?
10
War
I
I arrived back in England just in time for the war to start. We had expected it. We, or at least I, had even feared it, though no longer in 1939. This time we knew we were already in it. Within a minute of the prime minister’s old, dry voice declaring war, we had heard the wavy sound of the sirens, which to this day brings back the memory of nocturnal bombs to any human being who lived through the Second World War in cities. We were even surrounded by the visible landscape of aerial warfare, the corrugated iron of shelters, the barrage balloons tethered like herds of silver cows in the sky. It was too late to be afraid. But what the outbreak of war meant for most young men of my generation was a sudden suspension of the future. For a few weeks or months we floated between the plans and prospects of our pre-war lives and an unknown destiny in uniform. For the moment life had to be provisional, or even improvised. None more so than my own.
Until my return to England I had not really come to terms with the implications of the family’s emigration. I now discovered myself not only without a known future