Eric Hobsbawm, once a Berliner

Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), a distinguished British historian, spent part of his youth in Weimar Berlin. Here, an excerpt from Interesting Times, his memories.

Not that the Berlin of the last Weimar years was much to write home about architecturally. It was a boom city of the nineteenth century, that is to say essentially heavy late Victorian (in German terms: Wilhelmine), but lacking the imperial style and urban cohesion of the Vienna of the Ringstrasse,or the planning of Budapest. It had inherited a rather fine neoclassical stretch, but most of it consisted, in the heavily proletarian East — Berlin was a centre of industry — of the endless courtyards of giant 'rent-barracks'  (Mietskasernen) on treeless streets, and in the greener and solidly middleclass West of more decorared and (obviously) more comfortable apartment blocks. Weimar Berlin was still essentially William II’s Berlin which, except for its sheer size, was probably the least distinguished capital city of non-Balkan Europe, apart perhaps from Madrid. In any case, intellectual teenagers were unlikely to be impressed by the imperial efforts at memorability, such as the Reichstag and the adjoining Siegesallee, a ridiculous avenue of thirty-two Hohenzollern rulers immortalized in statues, all indicative of military glory and — this was a source of endless Berlin jokes—invariably with one foot behind and one in front. It was destroyed after the war by the victorious but humourless Allies, presumably as part of the elimination of Prussia, and all that might remind Germans of Prussia, from the post-1945 memory.

The Berlin in which the young of the middle class lived in 1931-33, was a place to move about in, not to stand and stare, of streets rather than buildings — the Motzstrasse and Kaiserallee of Isherwood and Erich Kästner and of my youth. But for most of us, the point of these streets was that so many led to the really memorable part of the city, the ring of lakes and woods that surrounded and still surrounds it : to the Grunewald, and its narrow tree- and bush-lined lakes, the Schlachtensee and the Krumme Lanke, along whose frozen surfaces we skated in winter — Berlin is a distinctly cold city— to Zehlendorf, gateway to the marvellous Wannsee system of lakes in the west. The eastern lakes were not such a regular part of our world. The West was where the rich and the very rich lived in grey stone mansions amid the trees. By a paradox not uncharacteristic of Berlin, the 'Grunewaldviertel’ had been originally developed by a millionaire member of a local Jewish family that prided itself on a long left-wing tradition, going back to an avidly book-collecting ancestor converted to revolution in I 848 Paris — he had bought a first edition of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto there.