Report on the November 22 Psychohistory Forum Autobiography/Biography Research Group Meeting

Discussion focused on Eric J. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. ISBN 0-375-42234-X, i-xv, 448 pp., $30.

The eight members of the Autobiography/Biography Research/Discussion Group had a lively meeting at the home of Lee and Connee Shneidman as they returned to the subject directly related to their origins as the Research Group on Communism: The Dream that Failed. The group wondered how the brilliant Eric Hobsbawm (1917-) could remain a communist after the Molotov/Ribbentropp Pact (1939), suppression of the Hungarian Revolution (1956), and military destruction of the Czech Spring (1968), and into the final years of Soviet Communism. For over 60 years, despite its repeated failures, Hobsbawm remained faithful to the creed of his youth.

The three historians in the discussion group did not share intellectual Tony Judt’s assessment of Hobsbawm as “the best-known historian in the world” (Judt, “The Last Romantic,” The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2003, p. 43). Indeed, we all noted that we had inclined to start, rather than finish, this English historian’s best-known works on the 19th century, such as Primitive Rebels, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, or Industry and Empire. Interesting Times, however, appeared to have been read from start to finish by all involved. Like Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, his fellow members of the British Communist Historians’ Group, he has an impressive mastery of the English language. The first hundred pages of this volume are wonderfully written and as self-revealing as a non-introspective man can be. He provides the information from which our group formed its own analysis. First, I will discuss his life and then some of our speculations about his motivations.

There is a Chinese proverb that says it is cursed to be born during interesting times, which one can readily agree with when looking at some of the difficulties of Hobsbawm’s early life. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to an English father and an Austrian mother, though his first memories of are of Vienna where he lived until the age of 14. There was never enough money in his childhood and his father died suddenly one freezing February day when his son was 11. His mother, who he still thinks of when he makes an important accomplishment, was stricken with a lung disease and died before his 14th birthday. He and his younger sister, with whom he never appeared to be close, were shipped off to relatives in Berlin, where he soon became enamored of communism in the dying days of German democracy. Eric had the thrill of fighting the Nazis on the streets. As Hitler took over Germany, he was shipped to relatives in England where he became a scholarship student. The young man’s Cambridge University college supervisor told Tony Judt that “‘Hobsbawm was the cleverest undergraduate he had ever taught’,” but added, “‘Of course, you couldn’t say I taught him—he was unteachable. Eric already knew everything’” (Judt, “Last Romantic,” p. 43).

The Forum Research Group felt that the intensity of Hobsbawm’s early loss and his frequent moving left Eric desensitized and, in a sense, untouchable. He established his kinship with the family of the “Communist Brotherhood of Man” and was very much in the Marxist tradition of the intellectual who found his cause among the workers. He felt at home all around the world, because there he would find Communist Party members, sympathizers, or those influenced by communist, anti-imperialist ideology. To me, it seemed that the Party had become his family. He was a dutiful son of the Party. Thus, he declares, “We did what it ordered us to do … whatever it would have ordered, we would have obeyed … if the Party had ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did it” (p. 135). When he discovered, after 1956 and 1968, that his “family” was far from perfect, he remained steadfast in his loyalty to it, keeping

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his doubts to himself. After all, a good son would be remiss in abandoning the family that has given him life and nurtured him. Thus, we have the paradox of the brilliant rebel who is also a dutiful son. I came away from the book feeling that Hobsbawm would remain the forever-talented student, but one who was both unteachable and untouchable. He would live very much in the world he created in his childhood.

In retrospect, Hobsbawm is willing to admit “that failure was built into this [communist] enterprise from the start” (p. 127). However, in a romantic vein, he still wonders if humanity could “live without the ideals of freedom and justice” which throughout virtually his entire life was embodied by the Communist Party (p. 151). He wrote with great zest about communists out of power and somewhat less of those in power. Hobsbawm felt he has a home in the left-wing movement around the world, considering Paris to be his second home and teaching half the year in New York. He writes enthusiastically of his travels in Italy, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Hobsbawm appears to me to be a classical example of the intellectual who identified with the downtrodden of the world, despite having had little contact with them, and always being a part of the intellectual elite. He clearly came from middle-class origins, even if his parents and his mother’s sister’s who looked after him never seemed to have had enough money. His contact with the workers of the world was slight and mostly in his boring years in the army on the World War II home front. To Hobsbawm, as with his comrades, the Communist Party represented the workers, so what was the need to have more direct contact? The nature of such identification is something which needs to be investigated carefully in every case. Like so many other communists, Hobsbawm was and is very much a part of the British intellectual elite.

Hobsbawm’s Jewishness is an issue that appears repeatedly throughout the volume, though he recalls no “personal anti-Semitism,” even when living in Vienna in a period where distain for Jews was intense (p. 22). His index has over 30 references to Jews, many of which are multi-volume works. Many of the people he writes about were not only Jews, but were identified specifically as Jews. He makes various references to his own Jewishness, as when he writes of his “ancestral Jewish experience of moving from place to place among strangers” (p. 310). He provides a valuable discussion of the two Jewish historians, Mounia Postan and Lewis Namier, who did much to revolution views of history.

Though Hobsbawm is neither very introspective nor psychologically attuned, the raw materials for psychological analysis are present. Interesting Times is well worth reading. The other members of the group might not mostly agree with this judgment, but I noticed that all had read the book closely and were eager to discuss it and offer many valuable insights.

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