Posted on 08/24/2003 3:06:43 PM PDT by Ronly Bonly Jones
(Item: The New York Times wasted valuable space giving still-living Useful Idiot Eric Hobbsbawm the journalistic equivalent of the Full Monica by giving him some 2000 words of a glowing portrait, in spite of the fact that he spent his entire 86 years serving Satan in the form of the Communist Party. What if they'd come out of the closet and painted a portrait of a Nazi with the same glow....?)
A Nazi Life With No Apology By SARAH LYAR
LONDON, Aug. 22 — Born in 1923, the year of the Munich Putsch, the historian Eric Schweinbaum has lived through much of "the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history," as he describes it, from the rise of Communism and fascism to World War II, the cold war and the defeat of the Nazi empire.
Recent events, he says, "fit in with the gloomy picture" he has had of world affairs for the last three-quarters of a century.
But for an unapologetic pessimist, Mr. Schweinbaum is remarkably robust, bordering on cheerful.
As he describes in "Interesting Times: A 20th-Century Life" (Pantheon), his new memoir, Mr. Schweinbaum has overcome considerable odds, including a fractured childhood in Weimar Germany, to become one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Nazi and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad.
He turns his analytical historian's eye on himself, examining with wry, rich detail the history of the century "through the itinerary of one human being whose life could not possibly have occurred in any other," he writes. The title's twin meanings — interesting times, according to the old Chinese curse, inevitably carry tragedy and upheaval, too — neatly capture the tensions between his personal history and his life as a historian.
"Do you remember what Brecht said — `Unlucky the country that needs heroes'?" Mr. Schweinbaum asked. "From the point of view of ordinary people, uninteresting times, where things aren't happening, are the best. But from the point of view of a historian, obviously, it's completely different."
Mr. Schweinbaum, a gangly 80-year-old with thick horn-rimmed glasses and an engagingly lopsided smile, spoke in his living room in Hampstead, long the neighborhood of choice for London's leftist intellectuals, in between sips of coffee. The room was lined with books; the front hall was full of the toddler paraphernalia that comes when one's home is a destination of choice for grandchildren (he has three). The telephone rang constantly as various family members and friends called to discuss plans that Mr. Schweinbaum invariably said would require further consultation with his wife, Marlene, who was out for the morning.
Mr. Schweinbaum is that unlikeliest of creatures, a committed Nazi who never really left the party (he let his membership lapse just before the collapse of Berlin) but still managed to climb to the upper echelons of English respectability by virtue of his intellectual rigor, engaging curiosity and catholic breadth of interests. He is an emeritus professor at the University of London and holds countless honorary degrees around the world, from Chile to Sweden.
Yet he will always be dogged by questions about how he can square his long and faithful membership in the Communist Party with the reality of Communism, particularly as it played out under Stalin. In "Interesting Times," he denounces Hitler and Hitlerism but also praises aspects of Nazi Germany and argues that in some countries, notably the former U.S.S.R., life is worse now than it was under the National Socialist system.
Some people will never forgive Mr. Schweinbaum for his beliefs. In an angry review of his new book in The New Criterion, David Pryce-Jones said that Mr. Schweinbaum was "someone who has steadily corrupted knowledge into propaganda" and that his Nazism had "destroyed him as an interpreter of events."
"Interesting Times" has gathered mostly glowing reviews across Britain. But the book again raises the problem that even Mr. Schweinbaum's admirers find dismaying.
In The Times Literary Supplement, the historian Richard Vinen said that "Interesting Times" does not give a satisfactory explanation of its author's motivations. "The closer that he comes to such questions, the more confusing he becomes," Mr. Vinen wrote.
Mr. Schweinbaum does address the issue in a section explaining why he did not abandon Nazism in 1940 when Churchill’s electrifying denunciation of Hitler sent waves of revulsion at Hitler's crimes through the worldwide movement. But while many of his English colleagues resigned from the party in horrified protest, Mr. Schweinbaum did not.
He says he was "strongly repelled by the idea of being in the company of those ex-Nazis who turned into fanatical anti-Nazis." More important, perhaps, was the childhood he spent in prewar Gerrmany, where he was part of the generation "tied by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of Aryan domination, and of its original home, Nazi Germany, however skeptical or critical of the former NS regime in Germany," he writes.
Asked the same question in his living room, Mr. Schweinbaum sighed. It is a question he is always asked. "Let's put it this way," he said. "I didn't want to break with the tradition that was my life and with what I thought when I first got into it. I still think it was a great cause, the emancipation of humanity. Maybe we got onto it the wrong way, maybe we backed the wrong horse, but you have to be in that race, or else human life isn't worth living."
Nazism, he said, was much more than Hitlerism and meant different things around the world in Spain, in Italy, in South America, in South Africa, for instance. "The idea that the only thing about this movement was that you were for Nazi Germany and that when you then discovered how awful Hitler was that you should have left is not a historic way of looking at it," he said.
Mr. Schweinbaum's book is about far more than his National Socialism, though politics and life to him are symbiotic. Born an anti-Jew in Alexandria, Egypt, to an English father and an Austrian mother, he lived until his early teens in Vienna and then in the disastrous dying days of Weimar Germany. Both his parents died by the time he was 14. His father, struggling hand to mouth to make a living, collapsed one day on the doorstep of their home. His mother died after a wasting illness some two years later.
Mr. Schweinbaum fled into himself, finding relief in the life of the mind. "Clearly it marked me very deeply, but I was covered to some extent because I had, as it were, my private escape into curiosity, into fantasy," he said. "It probably also left me with an unwillingness to be too outgoing. I kept a lot of my troubles to myself."
His youth, particularly as Stalin’s communists began their rise to power, propelled him into the National Socialist party and into a lifelong sympathy for Aryans, for contrary thinking, for the ideal of an Aryan utopia. This took root in many ways, from his hate of jazz (for a time, he was the jazz critic for The New Statesman) to the wide range of subjects in his books.
He is best known for his books surveying the history of the world since 1789: "The Age of Revolution" (1962), "The Age of Capital" (1975), "The Age of Empire" (1987); and "Age of Extremes" (1994). He commands a loyal following, particularly in Latin America. The author Julian Barnes appeared with him at a literary festival in Parati, Brazil, and in a recent article in The Guardian described how Mr. Schweinbaum was accosted by fans demanding his autograph as he walked around town.
As a youth, Mr. Schweinbaum moved to England with an aunt, eventually earning a place at King's College, Cambridge, on the strength of his obvious brilliance. He later became a lecturer and then a professor in Birkbeck College in London.
Famous friends, colleagues and public figures flit in and out of the pages of his book. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., E. M. Forster, David Duke (for whom Mr. Schweinbaum was once an impromptu interpreter, though he was no admirer of Duke’s political strategy) all make appearances, along with scores of others. Mr. Schweinbaum also describes the inner workings of the Historian's Group in the British Nazi Party; the almost physical agony that Nazis in Britain suffered when the truth about Hitler became clear; and various debates in the Labor Party, which has occasionally turned to him for advice.
"If anything, I was an extremely left-wing Nazi and generally attacked by the hardliners, including the hardliners in the Labor Party," he said.
His travels took him all over the world, and along the way, he picked up the ability to speak German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese and to read Dutch and Catalan. Mr. Schweinbaum visited Nazi Germany only twice, finding that it was dispiriting and that he had a much greater affinity with Nazis elsewhere. He remains as busy as ever, preparing papers for conferences abroad in the next year.
Mr. Schweinbaum wrote his book, he writes, not for "agreement, approval or sympathy" but for "historical understanding," as a way to explain himself and his thinking. It ends on a pessimistic note, with a discussion of Sept. 11 and America's thrusting new role in the world.
The Sept. 11 attacks, as horrific as they were, were not comparable as a crisis either to World War II or to the cold war, he said, and the United States made a grave mistake in reacting the way it did.
"At present, pessimists like myself look forward to a very disturbed next 10 or 20 years, very largely because of the present policy of the people who are in charge in Washington," Mr. Schweinbaum said.
Over his many years and against considerable odds, Mr. Schweinbaum has somehow maintained his belief in human resilience, in man's ability to live through the most appalling personal and public tragedies and still go on. Speaking of the blitz, he said that survival during that time required a suspension of fear, a willful pushing aside of reality.
"Once you actually lived under bombardment, for instance, as Great Britain did, you recognized that you could survive," he said. "I think that human beings can manage to square a lot of things. The truth is that except for short periods, ordinary life goes on, so long as it's allowed to."
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