I still remember sitting by her bedside in the hospital, both of us listening to one another, as I prepared for growing up and she for death. She wanted to live. ‘I wish I could believe it,’ she told me, pointing to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science Scriptures, which a visitor had left her. ‘Perhaps if I had that faith, it might do more for me than the doctors have done so far,’ I remember her saying, ‘but I can’t believe it.’ But shortly before her death she imagined she was getting better, she might even be cured. I am told this is always a reliable sign that the end is close at hand.
In retrospect the years between my parents’ deaths appear a period of tragedy, trauma, loss and insecurity, which was bound to leave deep traces on the lives of two children who passed through it. This is certainly true, and it is clear that my sister took many years to recover from the loss of her father followed by an uncomprehending childhood and a resentful youth of constant disruption and emotional insecurity. I have no doubt at all that I must also bear the emotional scars of those sombre years somewhere on me. And yet I do not think I was conscious of them as such. That may be the illusion of someone who, like a computer, has a ‘trash’ facility for deleting unpleasant or unacceptable data, but one from which others may be able to recover them. However, I do not believe that this is the only explanation why, though not particularly happy, I did not experience these years as specially distressing. Perhaps the realities of the situation passed me by because I lived most of the time at some remove from the real world – not so much in a world of dreams, but of curiosity, enquiry, solitary reading, observation, comparison and experimentation – this was the only time in my life when I built myself a radio set (crystal-sets were easy to construct out of cigar boxes). Although in my year as a Boy Scout I developed at least one lasting friendship, I lived without intimacy. When I think about my own life in the last year before my mother’s death, what comes into my mind are three memories: first, sitting alone on a swing in the garden of Mrs Effenberger, trying to learn by heart the song of the blackbirds, while noting the variations between them; second, receiving my mother’s birthday present – a very cheap secondhand bike – with the sort of embarrassment that only teenagers suffer, since its frame was visibly both repainted and bent; and third, passing by a shop window framed by mirrors one afternoon and discovering what my face looked like in profile. Was I as unattractive as that? Even the fact (which I had learned from one of the fascinating popular science booklets of Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde) that I must clearly belong to the thin one of Kretzschmer’s three psychosomatic types, and that, like Frederick the Great, I would therefore look better in old age, did not bring consolation. Like so much else, then and later, I kept my feelings to myself.
Nor, in later life, was I to think much about those times. After leaving Vienna in 1931 I never saw the grave again. In 1996 I went to look for it, as part of a television programme about interwar history as experienced by a central European child. But after more than sixty years of world history the grave, with the stone plate that my mother had ordered for it (at a cost of 400 Schillings), could no longer be found. The camera crew filmed me looking for the site. Only the electronic databank which the authorities of the Jewish section of the Vienna Central Cemetery, conscious of the American tourist trade, had had the foresight to compile, recorded that the grave contained the remains of Leopold Percy Hobsbaum, died 8 February 1929, Nelly Hobsbaum, died 12 July 1931 and – to my surprise – also Grandmother Ernestine Grün, died 1934.
4
Berlin: Weimar Dies
When I went back to Vienna in 1960 for the first time after almost thirty years, nothing appeared to have changed. The houses we had lived in and the schools we had attended were still there, even if they looked smaller now, the streets were recognizable, even the trams ran under their old numbers and letters, along the same routes. The past was physically present. Not so in Berlin. The first time I returned there, I stood outside what should have been the house we had all lived in, on the Aschaffenburgerstrasse in Wilmersdorf. On the map the street still ran from the Prager Platz to the Bayrischer Platz. The Barbarossastrasse should have opened just opposite the front door of our old apartment building, leading directly to my sister’s school. But nothing was there any longer. There were houses, but I did not recognize them. As in one of those nightmares of disorientation and displacement, not only could I no longer identify anything about the place, but I did not even know in which direction to look to get my old bearings. The ruined building of my old school was still physically present on the Grunewaldstrasse, but the school itself had not survived the war. The location of my uncle’s office in the city centre was not even identifiable on the map, since the whole area round Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz, a bomb-destroyed no-man’s land between East and West, had not been even notionally restored since the war. In Berlin the physical past had been wiped out by the bombs of the Second World War. On ideological grounds, neither the two Germanies of the Cold War nor the reunited Germany of the 1990s were interested in restoring it. The capital of the new ‘Berlin Republic’, like the West Berlin of the Cold War a subsidized showcase for the values of wealth and freedom, is an architectural artefact. The German Democratic Republic was not a great builder – its most ambitious construction, apart from the Stalinallee, was the Berlin Wall – neither was it much of a restorer, although it did its best with the architecturally very beautiful old Prussian centre of the city, which happened to lie in its territory. So the city in which I spent the two most decisive years of my life lives on only in memory.
Not that the Berlin of the last Weimar years was much to write home about architecturally. It was a boom city of the nineteenth century, that is to say essentially heavy late Victorian (in German terms: Wilhelmine), but lacking the imperial style and urban cohesion of the Vienna of the Ringstrasse, or the planning of Budapest. It had inherited a rather fine neo-classical stretch, but most of it consisted, in the heavily proletarian East – Berlin was a centre of industry – of the endless courtyards of giant ‘rent-barracks’ (Mietskasernen) on treeless streets, and in the greener and solidly middle-class West of more decorated and (obviously) more comfortable apartment blocks. Weimar Berlin was still essentially William II’s Berlin which, except for its sheer size, was probably the least distinguished capital city of non-Balkan Europe, apart perhaps from Madrid. In any case, intellectual teenagers were unlikely to be impressed by the imperial efforts at memorability, such as the Reichstag and the adjoining Siegesallee, a ridiculous avenue of thirty-two Hohenzollern rulers immortalized in statues, all indicative of military glory and – this was a source of endless Berlin jokes – invariably with one foot behind and one in front. It was destroyed after the war by the victorious but humourless Allies, presumably as part of the elimination of Prussia, and all that might remind Germans of Prussia, from the post-1945 memory. It has left only one equally incongruous literary monument. Rudolf Herrnstadt, the former editor of the official daily of the East German government, purged from the Socialist Unity Party’s leadership in 1953 and denounced as a supporter of Beria, the (executed) Soviet secret police chief, was exiled to the Prussian State Archives. (In fairness to a regime that has had a justifiably bad press, it must be said that no alleged traitor within its ranks was executed, even in the worst Stalinist years.) There he amused himself by writing a brilliantly funny squib, Die Beine der Hohenzollern (The Legs of the Hohenzollern) on the basis of a file he had discovered there. This was a collection of essays by secondary-school boys, set by some master desperate to extract pedagogic content from a class visit to the (then new) monument to Prussian patriotism. How far did the postures of the statues express the characters of their subjects? This was the topic on which the class wrote its compositions; evidently with such loyal success that the Kaiser himself asked to see the essays and commented on them in his own imperial hand. It was an exercise very much in the spirit of Weimar Berlin.