It’s not often that I can claim to be following in the footsteps of one of the greats of twentieth-century historiography, but this summer we spent part of our holiday in the small town of Weyer an der Enns, just on the edge of Upper Austria. Walking down the side of the river (not in fact the Enns, but a tributary, that joins it about a mile further down the valley), we suddenly came across a pair of information boards at the edge of a small children’s play area:
Eric Hobsbawm! (Ed Miliband!?!) The long extract on the first board from Hobsbawm’s autobiography, Interesting Times, did in fact immediately ring a bell, though I’d had no memory of the name of the place, nor made any connection until this moment.
In the summer of 1930 I made friends in Weyer, a village in Upper Austria where the doctors were vainly trying to deal with my mother’s lungs, with Haller Peter, the boy of the family from whom we rented lodgings. We fished and went robbing orchards together. Since Peter’s father was a railwayman, the family was Red: in Austria, and especially in the countryside, it would not have occurred to any non-agricultural worker in those days to be anything else. Though Peter – about my age – was not visibly interested in public affairs, he also took it for granted that he was Red; and somehow, between lobbing stones at trout and stealing apples, I also decided to become a Communist. (2002, p.13; where the German text from the board deviates slightly from the original, I’ve followed the former)
I’m happy to report that the river is still remarkably full of trout, and there are lots of apples around (this is one of the regions that produces lots of Most and Apfelwein – and also ‘cider’, the technical Austrian definition of which I now understand, but that’s another story). In other respects, this seemed utterly incongruous – especially given that the news that week was dominated by the youth wing of the FPÖ putting out a video that denounced journalists and left-wing politicians as traitors and criminals, agitated about Regenbogenterror, and featured blond youths in front of the balcony from which Hitler addressed the Austrian nation after the Nazi takeover…
Was this a gigantic wind-up by a lone subversive on the town council? Or a tourism campaign of unparalleled desperation, seizing upon anyone vaguely well-known who had ever holidayed in Weyer to promote its charms? Neither. Despite looking like a picture-postcard little Austrian town (with a particular enthusiasm for the beaver, the town’s patron animal with associated legends), this part of the country had long been industrialised, famous for metal-working as well as wood and using the mountain streams to power mills – and was still firmly socialist in its voting behaviour. Hobsbawm wasn’t just a famous person who happened to visit; he was a case study in how Weyer aspired to influence its visitors.
As it turned out, Weyer is also the sort of place where the owner of our Ferienwohnung, to whom we’d casually mentioned our interest in the Hobsbawm commemoration, rushed over in the middle of the Sunday craft market in order to introduce us to the man responsible for it: Dr Kurt Scholz, who’d grown up in the town but then departed at 17 to embark on a distinguished administrative career, not least in leading efforts to commemorate the Jewish families of Vienna and to push for the restitution of their property. He’d met Hobsbawm on multiple occasions, including when he returned to Vienna in 1996 to look unsuccessfully for his mother’s grave (recounted in Interesting Times, p.42) – which Herr Scholz was later able to track down and have restored, though sadly too late for H. to visit.
The particular distinction of Dr Scholz’s public career was something I realised only later, with the aid of the Internet, or our conversation would have lasted even longer. One of his stories was unforgettable; that when Hobsbawm visited Weyer, S. was able to inform him that Peter Haller was still living in the town, and did he want to meet him? Absolutely not; on no account! The explanation, it transpired, was that one of Hobsbawm’s Berlin schoolfriends from 1931-3 had become a Nazi in the end, and he couldn’t bear the thought that the same might have happened with Peter. (It hadn’t, S. assured me. Of course not; Weyer has the opposite effect on people).
Great story, thanks for sharing!