Interpreting Eric Hobsbawm's History of the Fin de Siècle ‘Twilight Zone’
Stefan Zweig, whose memoir I&#x27;m currently savoring, was born to a bourgeois family in 1880&#x27;s Vienna, and died in Brazil in 1942. He appears to have known absolutely everyone you might have heard of living in this time and traveled globally. He also discovered at one point, that he lived beneath an apartment occupied by the daughter of Goethe&#x27;s physician -- so he even met someone who was personally acquainted with Goethe!<p>The accuracy of word-of-mouth reports has been fixed by folklorists to approximately three generations at the outmost (which is incidentally also considered the shelf-life for any tyranny). Are ideas (like Marxism) tyrannical in this sense? Does life, society, culture make sense unless organized with some internal and imaginative logic? Can we understand the time without understanding the ideas?<p>&gt;&gt; Can scholarly work, viewed from the perspective of its author&#x27;s life story, be therefore perceived as a performative act, rather than as primarily objective analysis?<p>In attempting to get good at latin (not that I&#x27;m close now), I came to appreciate the importance of attested utterances. In a living language, one can simply observe (or be explicitly told) what idiomatic usage may belong to the language culture; otherwise one must peer through the key-hole at what has survived.<p>That people may have intellectual or cultural commitments hardly seems worthy of denigration as &quot;performative&quot;. Rather would I tilt that lance at some 28-year-old history PhD who sets forth righting today&#x27;s wrongs by re-interpreting the past into some incoherent farrago. On the one hand is a person who lived through the bloody ideas himself; on the other a medieval scribe drawing a scene from antiquity in which everyone is garbed as medieval nobles.<p>Barbara Tuchman wrote of the August madness, and I eagerly compared her accounts with that of Zweig. I was born 33 years after Zweig&#x27;s death; Barbara thirty-some years after his birth. I think the preoccupation historians have with &quot;too soon&quot; has to do with the layer of ideas that morph, become refined, become more subtle from generation to generation. With enough time, the subtleties become course.<p>Ultimately, we all want the &quot;binocular vision&quot; sought by Flaubert, or those sense organs more expansive than that of a may-fly which Stendahl hinted at. But to encounter someone with two feet planted in irreconcilable epochs -- what a boon to posterity!<p>Compare with Tacitus. He is both an important historian and an important source, if only due to dearth. &quot;Hobsbawm swept his hand over the page where at age thirteen he had written ‘down with Hitler’ above a rough pattern of hand-drawn Stars of David. ‘I didn&#x27;t regard myself as being particularly politically developed at that stage, but there you are. Clearly something was happening.’&quot;.<p>It seems to be that thinking persons ought not be alienated from their own direct experience and the lively ghosts of their forebears. That we know what some Romans actually thought about the events of their own times, or summing up those of their progenitors&#x27; is of immense value.<p>&gt;&gt; Discussing the history of memory, Stefan Berger refers to ‘agonistic memory frames’ that ‘seek to produce passions for greater social justice and global solidarity’: an emphatic mode of remembering to counter the ‘us versus them’ mentality that often characterizes antagonistic nationalist memory frames.<p>&gt; Quando iudex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus!<p>And the reus here is also iudex, hence the hand-wringing. Or vice-versa. At any rate, I find more value in the summing-up done by someone who lived through the bloody mess. Even in error.