Books
Book review: Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History
Daniel Snowman praises a historian’s historian
March 13, 2019 16:05
2 min read
Daniel Snowman praises a historian’s historian
March 13, 2019 16:05Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Richard J Evans (Little, Brown, £35)
Which of the Hobsbawm myths do you prefer? There is the young Jewish lad brought up in Vienna and Berlin who, escaping the horrors of Nazism, is taken by kindly relatives to London where he goes on to become one of the most outstanding historians of his time, living comfortably for many years in Hampstead with his wife Marlene (née Schwarz). Then there is the “non-Jewish Jew” (like Marx, Trotsky or Isaac Deutscher), at home everywhere and nowhere, a dedicated Communist whose writings embody an inherent sympathy for the working classes and an ideological rejection of capitalism. As Richard Evans shows in his massively researched and engagingly narrated biography, there was far more to Eric Hobsbawm than these oversimplifications suggest.
Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in 1917 to a British father and Viennese mother, both non-observant Jews. He spent his childhood in Vienna, moving in 1931 after the early death of both parents to live with an uncle in Berlin. Two years later, the family decamped to England. Those two years in Berlin saw the death of the Weimar Republic, the advent to power of Hitler — and the conversion of Eric to lifelong Marxism.
In England, Hobsbawm did well at Cambridge, enlisted in the army during the War, read incessantly in several languages, wrote poetry and contributed jazz reviews to the New Statesman, eventually taking up an academic post at Birkbeck.
Doubly orphaned as a youngster, Hobsbawm remained a very private person constantly searching, Evans suggests, for long-term personal, professional and familial stability.
Struggling with his Communist conscience, Hobsbawm came to realise he was not the dedicated activist the Party required. Rather, a restless intellectual whose curiosity led to constant travel: to North Africa, across much of Europe, the Americas and beyond.
A frequent essayist, Hobsbawm was co-founder in 1952 of the left-leaning academic journal Past and Present. But it was a further decade before he began to produce the stream of outstanding books for which he remains famous, notably a four-volume history of the previous two centuries that crossed intellectual, national and cultural boundaries.
A Jewish, foreign-born Marxist consistently monitored by MI5, Hobsbawm was never quite “one of us” to the British establishment. But, by the time of his death in 2012, he was probably the world’s best-known and most widely read historian. Controversial? Perhaps. But Hobsbawm stood at the forefront of the great historiographical turn of modern times, from essentially political and diplomatic history to a focus on the lives and times of ordinary people across the social scale.
Richard J Evans, one of today’s leading experts on European (especially German) history, is ideally placed to recount and explain the life and work of his illustrious predecessor. Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History is very long. It is also a wonderful read.
Daniel Snowman’s books include ‘The Hitler Émigrés: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism’