As I lay in bed, surrounded by sound and paper, I concluded that the world of 2002 needs historians more than ever, especially sceptical ones. Perhaps reading the perambulations of an old member of the species through his lifetime may assist the young to face the darkening prospects of the twenty-first century not only with the requisite pessimism, but with a clearer eye, a sense of historical memory and a capacity to stand away from current passions and sales pitches.
Here age helps. In itself, it makes me a statistical rarity, since in 1998 the number of human beings in the world aged eighty or above was estimated at 66 millions, which is roughly 1 per cent of the global population. Merely by virtue of long life, the history that belongs to books for others is part of the lives and memories of this tiny minority. For a potential reader just about to enter the age of higher education, that is to say born in the early or middle 1980s, most of the twentieth century belongs to a remote past from which little has survived into actual consciousness except historic costume dramas on film and videotape, and mental images of bits and pieces from the century which, for one reason or another, have become part of collective myth as episodes from the Second World War have become in Britain. Most of it belongs not to life but to the preparation of school examinations. The cold winter day when Adolf Hitler came to power in Berlin, which I remember vividly, is immeasurably distant for twenty-year-olds. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, during which I married, can have no human meaning in their lives, nor indeed in the lives of many of their parents, since no human being aged forty or less was even born when it occurred. These things are not, as they are for those of my age, part of a chronological succession of events that defines the shape of our private life in a public world, but at best a subject for intellectual understanding, at worst part of an indiscriminate set of things that happened ‘before my time’.
Historians of my age are guides to a crucial patch of the past, that other country where they did things differently, because we have lived there. We may not know more about the history of the period than younger colleagues who write about our lifetime in the light of sources not then available to us or, in practice, to anybody. Least of all can we rely on memory, even when age has not eroded it. Unaided by written documentation, it is almost certain to get the facts wrong. On the other hand, we were there, and we know what it felt like, and this gives us a natural immunity to the anachronisms of those who were not.
Living for over eighty years of the twentieth century has been a natural lesson in the mutability of political power, empires and institutions. I have seen the total disappearance of the European colonial empires, not least the greatest of all, the British Empire, never larger and more powerful than in my childhood, when it pioneered the strategy of keeping order in places like Kurdistan and Afghanistan by aerial bombardment. I have seen great world powers relegated to the minor divisions, the end of a German Empire that expected to last for a thousand years, and of a revolutionary power that expected to last for ever. I am unlikely to see the end of the ‘American century’, but it is a safe bet that some readers of this book will.
What is more, those who are old have seen the fashions come and go. Since the end of the USSR it has become political orthodoxy and conventional wisdom that there is no alternative to a society of individualist capitalism, and political systems of liberal democracy, which are believed to be organically associated with it, have become the standard form of government almost everywhere. Before 1914 this was also widely believed, though not as widely as today. However, for most of the twentieth century any of these assumptions seemed quite implausible. Capitalism itself seemed on the edge of the abyss. Bizarre as it may seem today, between 1930 and 1960 level-headed observers assumed that the state-commanded economic system of the USSR under the Five-Year Plans, primitive and inefficient as even the most sympathetic visitors could see it was, represented a global alternative model to western ‘free enterprise’. There were as few votes in the word ‘capitalism’ then as in the word ‘communism’ today. Level-headed observers considered it might actually outproduce it. I am not surprised to find myself once again among a generation that distrusts capitalism, though it no longer believes in our alternative to it.
For someone of my age living through the twentieth century was an absolutely unique lesson in the impact of genuine historical forces. In the thirty years after the Second World War the world and what it was like to live in it changed more rapidly and fundamentally than in any other period of comparable length in human history. Those as old as I in a few countries of the northern hemisphere are the first generation of humans to have actually lived as adults before this extraordinary launch of the spacecraft of collective humanity into orbits of unprecedented social and cultural upheaval, which the world is experiencing today. We are the first generation to have lived through the historic moment when the rules and conventions that had hitherto bound human beings together in families, communities and societies ceased to operate. If you want to know what it was like, only we can tell you. If you think you can go back, we can tell you, it can’t be done.
II
Age produces one kind of historical perspective, but I hope my life has helped me to project another: distance. The crucial difference between the historiography of the Cold War – let alone the snake-oil salesmen of the ‘war against terrorism’ – and that of the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century is that (except in Belfast) we are no longer expected to take sides as Catholics or Protestants, or even to take their ideas as seriously as they did. But history needs distance, not only from the passions, emotions, ideologies and fears of our own wars of religion, but from the even more dangerous temptations of ‘identity’. History needs mobility and the ability to survey and explore a large territory, that is to say the ability to move beyond one’s roots. That is why we cannot be plants, unable to leave their native soil and habitat, because no single habitat or environmental niche can exhaust our subject. Our ideal cannot be the oak or redwood, however majestic, but the migrant bird, at home in arctic and tropic, overflying half the globe. Anachronism and provincialism are two of the deadly sins of history, both equally due to a sheer ignorance of what things are like elsewhere, which even limitless reading and the power of imagination can only rarely overcome. The past remains another country. Its borders can be crossed only by travellers. But (except for those whose way of life is nomadic) travellers are, by definition, people away from their community.
Fortunately, as readers who have followed me so far know, all my life I have belonged to untypical minorities, starting with the enormous advantage of a background in the old Habsburg Empire. Of all the great multi-lingual and multi-territorial empires that collapsed in the course of the twentieth century, the decline and fall of the Emperor Franz Josef’s, being both long expected and observed by sophisticated minds, has left us by far the most powerful literary or narrative chronicle. Austrian minds had time to reflect on the death and disintegration of their empire, while it struck all the other empires suddenly, at least by the measure of the historical clock, even those in visibly declining health, like the Soviet Union. But perhaps the perceived and accepted multi-linguality, multi-confessionality and multi-culturality of the monarchy helped them to a more complex sense of historical perspective. Its subjects lived simultaneously in different social universes and different historical epochs. Moravia at the end of the nineteenth century was the background to Gregor Mendel’s genetics, Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Leoš Janáček’s Jenufa. I recall the occasion, some time in the 1970s, when I found myself in Mexico City at an international round table on Latin American peasant movements, and suddenly became aware of the fact that four of the five experts who made up the panel had been born in Vienna …