Nevertheless, on reflection, home was not anchored in Berlin as school was. As will be clear by now, the Hobsbawm household lived, not in Berlin, but in a transnational world, where people like us still – though the 1930s were to make it much more difficult – moved from country to country in search of a living. We might have roots in England or Vienna, but Berlin was merely one stop on the complicated route that might take us almost anywhere in Europe west of the USSR. Nor did home in Berlin – three addresses and two different forms of household in eighteen months – have the continuity of school. My window on the world at its moment of crisis was the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium.2
It was a perfectly conventional school in the conservative Prussian tradition, founded in 1890 to meet the needs of a rapidly growing middle-class area. Prince Henry, whose name it bore, a brother of Emperor William II, was a naval figure, which may explain why the school rightly prided itself on its boat club on the Little Wannsee (a model of its boat-house ‘in the Spreewald style’ had won a gold medal at the Brussels World Exposition of 1908). Rightly, because, while providing good training it was not, unlike its British equivalents, particularly interested in competitive races and it provided a wonderful opportunity for junior and senior boys to meet on equal terms. The club had somehow acquired a meadow, known as ‘unser Gut’ (our estate) on the small fishery-protected Sakrower See, accessible only by special permission through a narrow waterway. Groups of friends made up crews to row there or meet there at weekends, to talk, look at the summer skies and swim across the green waters before returning to the evening city. For the first and only time in my life I could see the point of a sports club. An old boy of the school, Dr Wolfgang Unger, a physician at the Spandau hospital, kept an eye on the training of new recruits. I understand that, after being removed from his hospital post on racial grounds in 1934, he committed suicide, unwilling to leave his country, Germany.
A Prussian school with military connections was naturally Protestant in spirit, deeply patriotic and conservative. Those of us who did not fit this pattern – whether as Catholics, Jews, foreigners, pacifists or leftwingers, felt ourselves as a collective minority, even though in no measurable way an excluded minority.3 Nevertheless it was not a Nazi school. (Few of the boys I knew showed much enthusiasm for Hitler and the Brownshirts, except Kube, the unusually dense son of a man who was Hitler’s Gauleiter of Brandenburg, and who made it his business to get a literature teacher at the school fired on the grounds that he ‘favoured’ the surviving Jewish students and taught chiefly the degraded literature of the Weimar Republic. He was to become the notorious boss of occupied Belorussia during the war, until eventually assassinated by his patriotic local mistress.) On the contrary. Whatever sympathy the school might have had for the national revival promised by Hitler did not survive the forcible purging, not long after I left for England, of the highly respected and popular headmaster, Oberstudiendirektor Dr Walter Schönbrunn, a political undesirable under the new regime. He was replaced by an imposed and bitterly resented Kommissarischer Leiter. One can hardly call the PHG of the 1930s a centre of dissidence, but it is characteristic that Franz Marc’s ‘Tower of Blue Horses’ – I remember it well from the school hallway – banned as ‘degenerate art’ by the new authorities, was rescued from a storeroom by one form and hung in its own classroom. Pupils protested against the dismissal of Professor ‘Sally’ Birnbaum, the popular mathematics and science teacher: signatures were collected all over the school for a petition to retain him. In the winter of 1936–7 the entire lower first form still made a collective visit to his home in the Rosenheimerstrasse. (He survived in Berlin until 1943 when he and his wife were loaded on to 36. Osttransport, destination, presumably, Auschwitz.) Indeed, there is some evidence that the school went out of its way to treat Jewish students and teachers well, at least while they remained. However politically unacceptable to a would-be teenage revolutionary, who would never have dreamed of wearing the peaked school cap (rather in the yachtsman’s style with a soft top), it was a decent school.
This was undoubtedly due to what the Hitler regime recognized in Schönbrunn (generally known as ‘der Chef’ or ‘the boss’) as the anti-hierarchical and socially suspect spirit of Weimar. The boat club was one expression of it. The stress on student self-government and participation in disciplinary cases was another. The unforgettable camping and youth-hostelling class journeys through the Mark Brandenburg and Mecklenburg were a third. (Not for nothing had Dr Schönbrunn, equally qualified to teach German, Latin, Greek and mathematics, published a work with the title, whose tone is virtually untranslatable into non-German languages, Jugendwandern als Reifung zur Kultur (Youth Ripening into Culture by Hiking). I did not, personally, warm to this smallish man with sharp eyes behind rimless glasses and a receding hairline, who wore plus-fours when he joined his charges on a Wandertag or school journey. (But then, as every reader of the Tintin books knows, this was in Europe the era of plus-fours.) He dismissed my admiration for Karl Kraus and his journal Die Fackel with the phrase: ‘Der Fackelkraus, ein eitler Schwätzer’ (‘vain and garrulous’), which, in retrospect, is not 100 per cent off target. He criticized my prose style, which he regarded as excessively mannered.
Perhaps I would have forgiven him, had I known that he was an admirer of the architecture of the ‘neue Sachlichkeit’ (new sobriety) and regarded both its uncluttered lines and ‘the conscious austerity of modern creative writing … as signs of a return to a new classicism’, an apollonian spirit welcome to a teacher of ancient Greek. He chose the communist Ludwig Renn’s novel Krieg (War) as an example of this new classicism. (He had of course, like most of our teachers, served in the 1914 war.) Still, if I did not exactly like him, I respected him. And I unquestionably benefited from his efforts, finally successful in the year before I came to the Grunewaldstrasse, ‘finally to get truly modern works into the school library’.
Several of these works shaped my life. In a large encyclopedic guide to contemporary German writing I discovered the poems (as distinct from the songs and plays) of Bertolt Brecht. And it was to the school library that an exasperated master – his name was Willi Bodsch, and I remember nothing else about him – referred me when I announced my communist convictions. He told me firmly (and correctly): ‘You clearly do not know what you are talking about. Go to the library and look up the subject.’ I did so, and discovered the Communist Manifesto …