old masters
Damn, but Eric Hobsbawm can still bring it. Have you read, yet, his latest in the LRB--a review of a new history of Weimar Germany, melding personal recollection and historical analysis in his distinctive and fluent prose?
It's hard to beat the opening line: "I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic."
As they say, read the whole thing. Passages like these are what make me want to read history books all day:
I sent this piece to my mentor--the one who first introduced me to Hobsbawm, by assigning me one book or another from the long nineteenth-century trilogy when I was seventeen, and whose old hand-me-down copies of the first two volumes still grace my bookshelves. He wrote back, in wonder, "My god! What writing! ...and he is ninety years old?"
And you know, I hadn't quite realised that he'd reached that milestone, but yes, in 2007. May there be many more essays yet to come.
It's hard to beat the opening line: "I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic."
As they say, read the whole thing. Passages like these are what make me want to read history books all day:
All attempts to make the Weimar Republic look more firmly established and stable, even before the world economic cataclysm broke its back, are historical whistling in the dark. It moved briefly through the debris of a dead but unburied past towards a sudden but expected end and an unknown future. For our parents it promised only an unrecoverable past, while we dreamed of great tomorrows; my ‘Aryan’ schoolmates in the form of a national rebirth, Communists like myself, as the universal revolution initiated in October 1917.Even its few years of ‘normality’ rested on the temporary quiescence of a volcano that could have erupted at any time. The great man of the theatre, Max Reinhardt, knew this. ‘What I love,’ he said, ‘is the taste of transience on the tongue – every year might be the last.’ It gave Weimar culture a unique tang. It sharpened a bitter creativity, a contempt for the present, an intelligence unrestricted by convention, until the sudden and irrevocable death.He ends with a harbinger of that death, evoking the moment--walking home with his sister on 30 January 1933, seeing the news of Hitler's rise to Chancellor--that is also a touchstone for his introductory prelude to The Age of Extremes.
I sent this piece to my mentor--the one who first introduced me to Hobsbawm, by assigning me one book or another from the long nineteenth-century trilogy when I was seventeen, and whose old hand-me-down copies of the first two volumes still grace my bookshelves. He wrote back, in wonder, "My god! What writing! ...and he is ninety years old?"
And you know, I hadn't quite realised that he'd reached that milestone, but yes, in 2007. May there be many more essays yet to come.
posted by kitabet at 2:18 PM
2 Comments:
I've printed the Hobsbawn piece to read on my bus journey home.
It gives me great pleasure to find how many of my eclectic intellectual, artistic and political tastes you share, Elizabeth - across the continents and generations.
dear jean, thank you--and that's what I do love about this medium, both as writer and reader: the chance encounter with kindred spirits, and the hope and pleasure and succor it brings. it's what has kept me blogging despite moments of disillusionment & boredom.
(and I will grant you generations, but continents only in part--I'd need to do the maths to be sure, but I think I've still spent more, or as much, of my adult life in your country as in my own. I'm happy to be in NYC now, but the UK is a home of sorts also.)
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