June 9, 1917

Eric Hobsbawn, the Marxist historian, (June 9, 1917 to October 1, 2012) is the subject of  a popular interest, which extends beyond his books:

'It is a little over half a century since Eric Hobsbawm, the intuitive pattern-maker of modern history, gave his first lecture at Birkbeck College in London. ....[Five] decades ago his radical socialism almost kept him out of university life altogether. A lifelong member of the Communist Party, he suggests that he got in to academia 'under the wire'; a year later, after the Berlin Airlift in 1948, his story, he believes, would have been markedly different. As it was, partly because of his political affiliations, he did not get promotion to a professorship until 1970.

'He has never needed any lessons, however, in the virtues of playing a long game. His landmark trilogy on the nineteenth century synthesised myriad competing social swells into great epochal waves: the Age...of Revolution, [1962] and of Capital [The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, 1975], and of Empire [The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, 1987]. He has characterised his own time and tide as the Age of Extremes,[1994] the tempestuous force of which conspired to deposit him on the shore of the present as the Last Marxist....

'Hobsbawm... was born in Alexandria to a middle-class Jewish family in the year of the October Revolution, 1917, and he has lived to see the full tragic narrative of the Bolshevik utopia unfold. It is characteristic of him that he remains sentimental about its origins, but clear-eyed over its outcome.

'Before the war, his family moved first to Vienna and then to Berlin, where Hobsbawm came of age. He says he still recognises in himself the kernel of the 14-year-old boy who read on a newspaper board the headline announcing the accession of the Third Reich. 'Anybody who saw Hitler's rise happen first-hand could not have helped but be shaped by it, politically,' he says now. 'This is still there in me. That boy is still somewhere inside, always will be.

'Hobsbawm's parents both died during the Depression and he and his sister were taken in by his uncle, who worked for a Hollywood firm in Berlin. Almost immediately, the family moved to England, following his uncle's job, and for three years, Hobsbawm experienced what he has rarely felt since - that history was happening without him. He was bored and dislocated by the transition from the intensities of pre-war Germany to the complacencies of a south London grammar school. It was not until he got to Cambridge that he sensed he could carry on with the conversations that he'd started in Berlin.

'Hobsbawm has defined and explained the progress of the last century as mankind learning to 'live in expectation of apocalypse'. He responded to those intimations in himself by joining the Communist Party. He would, he says, certainly have become a member earlier, but that his uncle was 'rather stiff' on the subject. ....

'You could imagine that the gangling young émigré, uprooted and orphaned, might have been attracted to the certainties of the party as a surrogate family and consequently begin to explain the strength of the attachment as a powerfully emotional as well as an intellectual one. Looking back, he suggests that 'probably that kind of security was one of the appeals', but also that he 'never felt short of family... it was more that you just felt things were going to pieces, and you felt it needed a revolution to re-create it, to put it back together'.

'After the war, these political commitments no longer seemed quite so innocent. Hobsbawm applied for a series of Oxbridge jobs, and was 'turned down right, left and centre' He fetched up instead, happily, at Birkbeck, .... In some ways, Hobsbawm still views the world as the semi-detached, cold warrior he was then, or at least the legacy of that rhetoric continues to inflect his memories. 'Of course, physics tended to be very Left,' he will say, recalling old common-room divides, 'and obviously so did crystallography'; or, speaking, of one mathematician colleague: 'I'm not sure if he didn't become a Maoist at about that time...'

'One of his friends of that era at Birkbeck, Barbara Hardy, now Professor of English, remembers Hobsbawm in his late thirties, as 'very sexy and amusing, and wonderfully candid'. Lectures at Birkbeck, whose student body is part-time, are in the evenings and the challenge among the faculty was to keep its audience awake in the graveyard slot between eight and nine. Hobsbawm, by all accounts, achieved this effortlessly and sustained his intellectual energy after hours. '....

'There would be sudden jaunts to Ronnie Scott's (Hobsbawm was at the time an impassioned jazz critic for the New Statesman) or on, one occasion, she recalls, to listen to Billy Graham. 'Eric always wanted to be seeing something new,' she says, 'or to know something new. He was always fully engaged.'

'Throughout this period, Hobsbawm maintained his commitment to communism, a fact which some of his colleagues, including Hardy, found, at best, mysterious. Though he never proselytised unlike many of his comrades, Hobsbawm did not leave the party after 1956. His concession was to argue that even the most monolithic members had, given events, to 'reconsider the equation: party = life'.

'Hobsbawm appears to have resolved that equation for himself in part by pursuing a more limited kind of personal utopia. His standing in Central Europe and Latin America as an 'important revisionist' allowed him the freedom to travel and establish a network of friends, who later became regular visitors to his home on the flanks of Hampstead Heath. There were - are - dinners at which British intellectuals could find themselves outnumbered by German publishers, Czech historians and Latin American novelists. The driving force of north London's most distinctive Central European salon is Marlene, Hobsbawm's second wife, who, friends say, 'provides this remarkable gregarious atmosphere around him'. One regular recipient of this hospitality, Neal Ascherson, says: 'Eric is still very much a Fifties bohemian, in a way. He loves, say, the idea of some weird drink brought back from Slobodnia in an odd -shaped bottle. You have to watch yourself or you are falling over before the food arrives.'

'In part, this stubborn microcosm of conviviality explains why Hobsbawm has kept the faith. As the walls were coming down in 1989, Hobsbawm was often asked to explain his continued commitment. Typically, he replied both as a conviction historian - 'I think the movement has achieved at least one absolutely major thing, and that includes the Soviet Union, namely the defeat of fascism,' - and as a rose-tinted loyalist: 'I don't wish to be untrue to my past or comrades of mine, a lot of them dead, some of them killed by their own side, whom I've admired [as] models to follow, in their unselfishness.'

'The end of the Cold War and the new public relations-led world order that followed brought to a close Hobsbawm's particular influence over more domestic battles, too. In the Eighties, he had become the unofficial philosopher and intellectual conscience of the Labour Party....But if he despairs of the present government,.... he can laugh when he says he 'finds it hard to envisage not voting Labour, put it that way'....'

The words above are from an Guardian article, by Tim Adams, titled "The Lion of the Left."

I believe we have a biography of Eric Hobsbawm soon to be released:
Eric Hobsbawm: a Life in History (2019) written by Sir Richard J. Evans