The immediate reaction of the SSB, or at least my part of it, was to bring the duplicating apparatus to my aunt’s flat. I like to think it may have been the very one on which the last issues of the Schulkampf had been produced. The comrades concluded that, since I was a British subject, I would be less at risk; or perhaps that the police would be less likely to raid our flat. I kept it under my bed for some weeks, a largish brown wooden case of that now antediluvian type where specially typed stencils had to be placed on a permeable inked surface, and each leaf had to be printed singly. Then someone came to take it away. I don’t think any printing was done on it while it was in my charge, for if there had been any, even my undomestic aunt would have protested at the almost inevitable spreading of fatty ink in my bedroom. It was that sort of machine.
Presumably a more efficient printing press must have been used to produce the leaflets which we were supposed to use for the election campaign. I suppose taking part in that campaign was the first piece of genuinely political work I did. It was also my introduction to a characteristic experience of the communist movement: doing something hopeless and dangerous because the Party told us to. True, we might have wanted to help in the campaign in any case, but, given the situation, we did what we did as a gesture of our devotion to communism, that is to say to the Party. Much in the way that I, finding myself alone in a tram with two SA men, and justifiably scared, refused to conceal or take off my badge. We would go into the apartment buildings and, starting on the top floor, push the leaflets into each flat until we came out of the front door, panting with the effort and looking for signs of danger. There was an element of playing at the Wild West in this – we were the Indians rather than the US cavalry – but there was enough real danger to make us feel genuine fear as well as the thrill of risk-taking. A year or so later I described it in my diary as ‘a light, dry feeling of contraction, as when you stand before a man ready to punch you, waiting for the blow’. What might happen if a door opened on a hostile face, if a brown uniform came down the stairs, if our exits to the street were blocked? Distributing election appeals for the KPD was no laughing matter, especially in the days after the Reichstag fire. Nor was voting for it, although over 13 per cent of the electorate still did so on 5 March. We had a right to be scared, for we were risking not only our own skins, but our parents’.
The Party was officially banned. The unofficial concentration camps became official. Dachau, the first, was set up on the same day that the new Reichstag (now minus the banned communists) passed an Enabling Act which handed total control to the Hitler regime and abolished itself. Then, in late March, my sister and I heard that we were to go to England. Whatever plans Uncle Sidney had in Barcelona had not come off. Hitler had just announced a boycott of Jewish businesses in early April, and as I said good-bye to my friends, I arranged for one of them – probably Gerhard Wittenberg – to send me news of it. (He gave me the address of the kibbutz organization he would join on emigrating to Palestine.) Then we left. Aunt Mimi had also decided on yet another migration. Her Berlin venture had not been more successful than usual, and my sister’s and my going removed a vital element in her income. I have a vague memory that Nancy was supposed to join Gretl and little Peter – could it have been in Barcelona? – from where they would follow Sidney and me to England. It was another disorientating move in the uprooted life of a displaced child. Sidney came for me. Political as my primary passion was by then, I still arranged that the old bike with the bent frame, the present from my mother that had caused me so much embarrassed teenage anguish, should be lost when the Hobsbaum effects were packed for storage.
I was not to return to Berlin for some thirty years, but I never forgot it and never will.
6
On the Island
I
The most unexpected thing about coming to Britain was the sheer size of London, then still by far the largest city in the western world, a vast shapeless polyp of streets and buildings stretching its tentacles into the countryside. Even after seventy years of metropolitan-based life, the size and incoherence of this city still astonishes me. In my first years in Britain I never ceased to marvel at the distances I traversed in it as a matter of course: by bike, north and south, to school in Marylebone from the heights of Crystal Palace, and later from Edgware; by car east and west, driving my uncle between Ilford and Isleworth, never out of sight of rows of buildings.
Somewhere among these ‘hundred thousand streets beneath the sky’ (as the gifted but alcoholic communist writer Patrick Hamilton called his London novel of the 1930s) the Hobsbaum family had to find a footing. We were subjects of King George V, and therefore – as I still have to remind interviewers and other enquirers – not in any sense refugees or victims of National Socialism. However, in every other respect we were immigrants from central Europe, even provisional immigrants – for we did not reclaim our Berlin possessions from storage until 1935 – in a country unknown to all of us except Uncle Sidney, and even he had not lived in it since the Great War. Apart from relatives we did not know a soul. We were not even former emigrants returning to their native country, for the future situation of the Hobsbaums remained as cloudy as it had been until 1933. The first place after Berlin where all the family came together in the spring of 1933 was in one of Mimi’s multiple ventures into the world of guest-houses, this time in Folkestone. It could have stood for any of so many temporary staging-posts on the endless migrations of the twentieth-century uprooted. A German refugee lady expressed incidental appreciation of the charm and physique of a Swiss teenage boy, evidently about to go to school somewhere in England. A German refugee of my age, on the way to a Zionist agricultural training camp, tried to teach me a little judo. A grey figure from Carpathian Europe, one Salo Flohr, stranded by Alekhine’s refusal to accept his challenge for the world chess title, played chess with Uncle Sidney, while waiting to travel to Moscow to confront the Soviets’ Mikhail Botvinnik. Flohr never made it to the top, but was to become a well-known figure in the Soviet chess world and, presumably, one of the few people for whom emigration to Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s was not a disaster. There, on sunny mornings on the lawn, I discovered English lyric poetry through the Golden Treasury and read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass for the first time. For, already at school in London, I joined all of them in Folkestone for a few weeks, while I prepared to sit the examination of the London Matriculation in unknown or strange subjects, conducted in a language I had hardly used outside the household.
In fact, except for me, and for my indomitable aunt Mimi, coming to England in 1933 turned out to be yet another of many failed attempts by the Hobsbaum–Grüns to find a landfall in the stormy seas of the interwar world. Gretl died in 1936, a little older than my mother but still in her thirties. In 1939, after a few years of variable success, Sidney, aged fifty, abandoned the struggle to make a living in England and emigrated to Chile, taking Nancy and Peter with him. Santiago, where he remarried, remained his home. Nancy, whose life really began in South America with the war, returned to Britain with her husband, Victor Marchesi, in 1946, but as a naval officer’s wife continued the peripatetic life for some years and ended it as a retired British settler in Menorca. Peter, qualified as a chemical engineer in Canada, spent most of his life as an expatriate oil company executive and ended it in Spain. Only my future was decided for good in 1935 by the decision to sit the Cambridge scholarship exam, and my aunt Mimi’s, not much later, when she fell in love with an available site in an enchanting and protected corner of a South Downs valley a short bus ride from Brighton, on which she realized her life’s ambition, a place of her own, namely the collection of sheds and stalls she built into the Old Vienna Café. There she died herself, defiantly red-haired, in 1975 at the age of eighty-two, leaving the modest proceeds of the sale of her property to Nancy and myself. It was the only money either of us ever inherited from Gruns or Hobsbaums.