I
read this book on a weekend cruise. My conjugal
duties demanded my presence on the seas; I’m
not the sun-and-fun type. But, I figured, taking
along an autobiography of one of the foremost British
Marxist historians, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century
Life (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press Ltd,
2002/New York: Pantheon/Random House, 2003) would
provide me with rich irony, given my surroundings.
Well, after a slow 150 pages in which Hobsbaum tells
of his birth in 1917 in Alexandria to a Jewish father,
son of an émigré cabinet-maker, and
a Viennese jeweller’s daughter followed by
his youth in Austria and then Weimar Berlin and
his stint at Cambridge, his story gains energy,
if intermittently. Certainly Hobsbaum has led, after
a rather tenuous period of living hand-to-mouth
via the courtesy of relations and friends, a life
more comfortable than that gained by most of my
cruise companions, if not in the childhood of every
one of the boat’s workers from 29 countries,
I venture. His adherence to the Communist Party
for so much of his life, from his profession in
1932 in Germany to his joining in 1936 and his allegiance
throughout Stalinism and after the Hungarian revolt
of 1956 motivates his four-hundred page apologia.
Balancing his ideological commitment to a concomitant
refusal to accept dogma results in a curious tension.
How can a securely employed, well-travelled, multi-lingual,
and nimbly minded individual stay loyal to a cause
that rallied the poor and the intellectual while
committing so many murders in its name?
Hobsbaum
argues well his reasoning. Surprisingly, little
of his book recapitulates his scholarly mission,
the fame of which derives first from his popularising
of the earlier century’s “primitive rebels,”
those who resisted capitalisation and globalisation
and their own redundancy. Far too many pages provide
lists of luncheons, flights, and friends. Hobsbaum
warns the reader that little of his private life
will emerge here, and his sons gain only a couple
of sentences here and there, for example; their
half-brother, apparently the result of an affair
in-between his two marriages, is mentioned in half-a-sentence.
Instead, as the blurb and the cover images trumpet,
Hitler, Che, and the Soviet Man of Steel gain attention,
and even more the milieu in which he and his internationalists
roamed in between seminars and scholarship—again,
little of the classroom to be found here. Hobsbaum
actually gives little insight into the Great Men,
but much on his mates.
Idiosyncratically,
the book’s form skips about. Most of it tracks
his own career, while latter chapters sum up his
thoughts and chats in France, Italy, Spain, the
Third World, and the U.S. One chapter, fascinating
to me for its oblique mirroring of recent Ireland,
takes on the land of his holiday home in Wales near
the eccentric Clough Williams-Ellis, builder of
among other wonders, the seaside resort of Portmeirion,
later the site of the 1960s television series The
Prisoner. In this chapter, the author carefully
analyses the resurgence of Welsh separatism in that
decade, to the point that it drove him to a safer
and more anglicised portion of the principality
in which to vacation. Hobsbaum dismisses “ethnolinguistic
nationalism” and diminishes such factions as
the PIRA “practical revolutionaries” who
split from the properly Marxist Officials. He has
little time for the 1960s legacy of individualism
that led to the promotion of non-conformity at the
expense of the social ideal for which earlier revolutionaries
had struggled.
Hobsbaum
pinpoints the crucial difference between himself
and later radicals. He is one of the last living
intellectuals inspired to hoist the Red flag by
the events in the year of his birth. A teenager
when he cast his lot with the German communists
just before Hitler’s consolidation of power,
Hobsbaum defends his faith in Marx. While later
converts recanted once the allure of the anti-fascist
crusade dimmed, Hobsbaum emphasises that he remained
a believer after Khrushchev’s decision to undermine
the monolithic power of the CPSU in 1956—the
second time that “ten days shook the world.”
“To put it in the simplest terms,” he
summarises, “the October Revolution created
a world communist movement, the Twentieth Congress
destroyed it.” (201) Because Hobsbaum and his
CP allies had been lied to, “something that
had to affect the very nature of a communist’s
belief,” the concealment of the truth about
Stalin led to the instability of an presumed solid
façade of political and cultural endurance,
and foreshadowed the fall of the Wall.
Which
perhaps was a Potemkin village, but one where, Hobsbaum
claims, protection against the harsh blows of capitalism
and unrestrained greed did enable Soviets and those
under their subjection to pursue a laudable goal
of communist equality and worldwide fraternity.
Hobsbaum cautiously tiptoes around the conflict
of the dream with the reality.
He
acknowledges that communists like himself and their
western parties never had to govern from a position
of actual power, and therefore mitigates the decisions
made by those who did rule in the name of the working
class. No creed since Islam in the seventh century,
he reminds us, spread so rapidly and so far across
our planet.
Speaking
of this takeover, Hobsbaum elides complications.
He compares the removal of communist ministers in
western governments circa 1947 with their inclusion
in non-communist administrations “in the countries
under communist rule.” (180) He laments the
establishment of the Orwellian-monikered Cominform
before continuing: ‘The Eastern regimes, deliberately
not set up as communist, but as pluriparty “new”
or “peoples’ democracies” with mixed
economies, were now assimilated to the “dictatorship
of the proleteriat”, i.e. the standard Communist
Party dictatorships.’ The author seems to skip
over how a country can be “under communist
rule” with a mixed economy and a pluriparty
regime for long, before being standardised as a
CP one-party dictatorship, given the logic of communist
consolidation of power within a single party model.
And, from my admittedly non-specialist understanding
of those nations soon to be mortared into the façade
of the Eastern bloc, such a pluriparty system was
never seriously intended to survive, given the 1943
Tehran conference and the Cold War’s surrender
to the USSR of those Central and Eastern European
nations as a buffer zone to defend Stalin’s
empire.
Hobsbaum
confused me with a statement about one of those
buffer nations with which I have some familiarity,
Hungary. Discussing an intellectual who claimed
to be a victim of Soviet repression post-1956 who
in fact was a Party organiser after the revolt,
the author states: ‘Unfortunately in the course
of those years, under the benevolent eye of the
Kadar government, the sympathizers with the 1956
movement, that is to say the bulk of the communist
intellectuals and the academics, quietly re-established
their positions.’ (145)
Those
less informed about Hungary at this time might misconstrue
this passage, intended to contrast the fake refugee
from the revolt with his comrades who remained,
as praising the regime of Kadar, who pretended to
side with the rebels only to turncoat to the Soviet
invaders as they returned to crush the revolt, and
to imply that the majority of those who were sympathisers
with the rebellion suffered no harm under the Kadar
regime. Although a communist revolt, the Hungarians
sought neutrality apart from the Warsaw Pact and
a mixed economy. These aims, Hobsbaum agrees, could
not have been tolerated under Soviet domination,
but he diminishes the struggle of those who sought
a more human face for socialism by too often defending
the Russian bear’s slashes across the face
of those who defied its imperial might, feigned
as a blow for people’s equality.
Throughout
his book, Hobsbaum distances himself from Judaism
and Zionism, in the name of a greater identity with
the oppressed everywhere. Yet his early identification
with the position of the outsider, the alien, and
the non-conformist (witness too his long championship
in scholarship and avocation of an appreciation
for jazz) could only have been gained by his Judaic
stance, secular as it was, and his similar oppositional
decision to embrace communism at fourteen. I find
his lack of sympathy for Israel predictable therefore,
but still would like to know what alternatives could
have existed for his relatives who did not survive
the camps, or those who did survive in a hostile
Europe.
His
detachment from issues like these when they effect
the individual may be attributed to his rather distanced
position as that outsider, whether in Wales, in
London, in Berlin, or in Alexandria (although his
lectureships at the New School in New York City,
at Stanford and the Getty Center, or his frequent
global trips in search of like-minded companions
sounded quite enjoyable to me). He claims that after
his forties, whatever happened of note in his life
was inside his head, and these transatlantic odysseys
merely widened his intellectual horizons. Or maybe
not, as he remained loyal to the Cause throughout
the Cold War, despite New Labour, and now in spite
of Bush. His chapters on the rest of the world outside
the dons’ room and the overseas seminar open
up many intriguing insights, but I never felt as
if Hobsbaum could have felt at ease any more than
I did on that cruise ship, modulated expressions
of a de-classified unity to the contrary.
A
sample, taken from a discussion of the Party’s
‘cultural group’ protesting in 1956: ‘The
Indo-Scandinavian intellectual Palme Dutt, one of
those implausibly tall upper-class figures one occasionally
meets among Bengalis, belonged through his mother
to an eminent Swedish kindred—Olaf Palme, the
socialist premier assassinated in 1986, was another
member.’ (208-9) This, like his analogy of
labeled decanters in “the combination room”
at Cambridge to keep dons from confusing their port
and their sherry, speak of a privileged world in
which Hobsbaum has earned his eminence, and one
where, his communism to the contrary, he continues
to thrive. It is natural for any of us to write
from the position we know, and my own cruise-ship
leisure to read Hobsbaum’s testimony no doubt
distances me from the vessel’s underpaid, tip-reliant
Bulgarian waitresses who waited upon my family in
a newly-globalized opportunity for career advancement
they may not have expected when born under communist
rule. I don’t mean to criticise the laurels
which Hobsbaum has earned, but I do wish to point
out that, as he confesses, ‘somewhere inside
of me there is a small ghost who whispers: ”One
should not be at ease in a world such as ours.”
As the man said when I read him in my youth: “The
point is to change it.”’ (313). However,
he interprets the world marvelously--if evasively.
