Eric Hobsbawm, who died last year aged 95, was a historian of breathtaking range, authority, linguistic ability and intellectual imagination. However, in the anglophone world, at least as much attention was devoted to his lifelong membership of the Communist Party as to his phenomenal gifts. In Italy, France, Germany or Latin America, where he was equally famous, this was less remarked upon. In his dazzling autobiography, Interesting Times , Hobsbawm remarked that his Marxism essentially arose from a desire to understand the arts. His last, posthumous book demonstrates this in new and unexpected ways.
Fractured Times is surprising on several levels. Most collections of essays have a certain unevenness, a sense of bringing together pièces d'occasion when the occasions are long past. The essays here were written over a long period (1964-2012), but they are closely linked by a governing theme: what happened to the bourgeois high culture of c1870-1914 and how the achievements of that era relate to today's populist, instant-gratification, postideological and maniacally internetted world. Even the 1964 essay, on the idea of popular art, was sharply prophetic. "The mass arts have not yet adequately reflected the growing element of sheer reality-negating fantasy that has become as obvious a part of popular life, especially in the specialised subcultures of the young; the advertisers alone have already set about the process of castration by incorporating it in their commercials."
Fantasy, virtual reality and commercialism continued to preoccupy Hobsbawm, and though he frequently evokes social and cultural critics such as Edgar Morin, Robert Hughes and Roland Barthes, his eye for what is happening at ground level is mordantly sharp; the cinematic references especially are bang up to date. However, it is the essays on the late 19th and early 20th centuries that scintillate: a marvellous piece on art nouveau, a consideration of culture and gender in European bourgeois society, two passionate essays on Jewish achievements on the international cultural scene, and a short but infinitely resonant piece on “Mitteleuropean destinies”, as profound in its way as Mark Mazower’s book-length meditation on the idea of “the Balkans”. Nor is the remit just European; American themes pervade, and the final essay is a tour de force on the myth of the American cowboy.
Tempting as it is to quote from this and other stand-out pieces, the overall impact of the book is worth trying to evaluate, in the light of Hobsbawm's work and life. It is striking how, in this last collection, he turns back to the world that made him what he was: a secularised Jew of English-Austrian descent, communist from his schooldays, orphaned young and moving from Vienna and Berlin to England, aged 16, when he had just witnessed the rise of Hitler to power. The reason for his concentration upon the achievements of that late-bourgeois world may be personal as much as intellectual; it was, as in the title of one of his great synthesising histories, The Age of Capital , but it also witnessed an upward curve in literature and the visual arts rarely seen before or since.
For the youthful Hobsbawm, some kind of apotheosis was also located in the illusory dawn of the 1917 revolution in Russia, which he writes about with distinctly rueful nostalgia in a little-noted passage of his autobiography. And, to some extent, the achievements of the Russian avant-garde were projected forward into the next 10 years of Soviet experiment – one of Hobsbawm's heroes is clearly Anatoly Lunarcharsky, the culture minister who supported their efforts in the pre-Stalin era. But his own politics were distinctly Eurocommunist, and the Soviet Union was one of the few countries where his books did not sell.
Soviet Russia is also a distinct contrast to a reflection of Hobsbawm’s in one of his essays on the history of the Jews: “the passion of emancipated Jews for the national languages and cultures of their gentile countries was all the more intense, because in so many cases they were not joining, as it were, long-established clubs but clubs of which they could see themselves almost as founder members. They were emancipated at the time of the creation of German, Hungarian and Polish classic literature and the various national schools of music.”
Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth and Karl Kraus are at the centre of Hobsbawm's intellectual firmament. And in a feline aside, he contrasts the less stellar creative record of Jews from Israel, in a later age: "it would seem that living among and addressing the gentiles is a stimulus for the higher creative efforts, as it is for jokes, films and pop music." This is of a piece with Hobsbawm's opposition to segregation of any kind, as well as the cold eye he casts upon nationalism (reflected in his 1985 Wiles Lectures at Belfast, later published as Nations and Nationalism ).
The essays in Fractured Times also reflect his scepticism about the achievements of nonrepresentational contemporary art, which is dadaism replayed as farce, in Hobsbawm's dismissive view. His own aesthetic is rooted first of all in the civilisation symbolised by the architecture of Vienna in his youth ("the Stock Exchange, the University, the Burgtheater, the monumental City Hall, the classical parliament, the titanic museums of art history and natural history facing each other and, of course, the heart of every self-respecting 19th-century bourgeois city, the Grand Opera"); and secondly by the early 20th-century reaction against it in developments such as jazz (a passion all his life), surrealism and radical politics.
He also writes brilliantly about the destabilisations brought about by science, in essays on radical intellectuals such as JD Bernal and Joseph Needham.
These essays chart the end of a high-bourgeois culture dominated by a progressive elite minority, the ensuing rise of mass consumer society, and the accompanying growth of a sinister irrationalism in politics and ideology, which, as Hobsbawm points out, has no difficulty in coexisting with advanced technology. By the end of his life his expectations were not optimistic. The Marxist hopes of his youth had been apparently replaced by a sardonic pessimism that, while still Marxian in its view of the underlying impulses of economy and society, took a grimmer view of humanity.
Perhaps this is why the most resonant and passionate essay in the book, never before translated from the German, is about the satirist Karl Kraus, who issued “deadly commentaries” on all aspects of foolishness and hypocrisy in early 20th-century Vienna. He “recognised . . . somehow already the reality of our own era of the media, built upon the emptiness of the word and the image”.
Kraus's obscure dramatic masterpiece The Last Days of Mankind , written during the first World War, is rarely performed and hard to access: in Hobsbawm's view it is "a colossal, unfathomable, documentary- visionary work". He writes passionately of its gestation in the late Habsburg world, of Kraus's nonparty politics, of his reaction to Hitler's rise, which left him with nothing more to say than "the word fell asleep when that world rose". Hobsbawm tells us that he himself first learned world history from The Last Days of Mankind , and still owns his first edition, "bearing on the title page the name of my mother, one of Kraus's many admirers from a middle-class Viennese background". Reading that moving passage, I remembered that the Jewish prayer for the dead, Kaddish, was said, by his wish, at his otherwise secular funeral.
Fractured Times , radiating the sardonic brilliance of an extraordinary mind, conveys how much that mind was shaped by the world of elite culture that dissolved around him as he grew up. And it also suggests that, in the end, the vision of Karl Kraus overshadowed that of Karl Marx.
Roy Foster is Carroll professor of Irish history at Hertford College, Oxford.
