Professor Eric Hobsbawm

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a historian. A lifelong Communist, his series of books on the history of the nineteenth century are regarded by many as seminal works of scholarship. In his latest work, The Age of Extremes, he's turned his attention to the twentieth century to equal critical acclaim.

Presenter0:47

His Marxist beliefs have not made his life easy, and in the early years particularly, academic promotion came slowly. He takes a detached view of these matters. Much of my life, he admitted recently, has been devoted to a cause that has plainly failed. But there is nothing that can sharpen the historian's mind like defeat. He is Eric Hobsborn. So you admit defeat, do you, Professor Hobsborn, that Marxist Leninism is a dead duck?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm1:14

The Soviet Union and the October Revolution to which in my

Professor Eric Hobsbawm1:19

Very young teenage I committed myself, has obviously been defeated and won't return again.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm1:26

I don't think the cause has been defeated.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm1:29

But at least it will not be realized, if at all, in the way in which we thought it was going to be realized.

Presenter1:36

And why was it defeated, if I can ask you a a a very simple question, which I'm sure has a complicated answer. But its its principles, of course, you would still argue, are are right. Ar would you say that it's therefore been distorted in practice?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm1:49

Yes, it was attempted, it seemed to me, in a country in which none of the conditions for trying to build a Socialist Society were present.

Presenter2:00

But you've spent practically all of your conscious life devoted to

Presenter2:06

the principles, the dream of this Communist Utopia. Is your ability to intellectualize the reasons for its demise constant, or do you sometimes have you ever reacted emotionally to it? Have you ever felt you must have done racked with disappointment that it hasn't worked?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm2:23

Of course, I've been depressed.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm2:27

continue to be depressed. It was a good cause, and in the last decades, it seems to me, the cause of social justice and social equality has retreated.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm2:38

repeated rapidly. I can't be other than depressed under these circumstances.

Presenter2:43

Tell me about you and music. How important is it to you?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm2:48

Pretty important. Initially, uh I think I took mostly to jazz.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm2:55

I think when I was very small my parents tried to press my nose into the classics more than I was prepared for.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:05

That's Central European background.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:08

But then eventually I discovered the classics too.

Presenter3:11

So the sum of both in in your selection of eight. What's the first record you want to play?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:16

Charlie Parker's

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:18

Parker's mood.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:21

not only because Parker is an extraordinary artist,

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:26

but also because in some ways it reminds me that people must continue to learn.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:32

Like most people who started going on jazz in the nineteen thirties, I didn't like modern jazz initially.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:39

didn't understand.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:41

Didn't see what it was about.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:43

And yet because I discovered that people like Parker had their roots in something which I did understand,

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:50

The blues

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:52

I got converted.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm3:54

and I got converted in what was, I suppose, already verging on middle age. So it shows you that you never have to stop.

Speaker 44:18

Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun.

Speaker 44:32

Um

Speaker 44:37

Uh

Presenter5:03

Charlie Parker and Parker's Mood. Can we talk first about your origins? You you were born, in fact, in the year of the Russian Revolution, nineteen seventeen. Where, and to what kind of parents?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm5:16

A mixture. My uh father.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm5:20

was British, born in London, the son of immigrants, sort of small craftsmen immigrants. The family trade was cabinet making. My mother was Austrian, more middle class I think.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm5:36

And they both met in Egypt before the war?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm5:39

Got engaged?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm5:41

The war broke out. They couldn't marry.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm5:44

In either of their countries?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm5:47

And so they married in Switzerland and went to Egypt and I was born there.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm5:52

But after the war We decided to go back, in this case, to Vienna.

Presenter5:56

To Vienna, where where you spent your early childhood. So you were you were British, always have been, you were a Jew, and you spoke fluent German.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:03

Absolutely. Yes.

Presenter6:05

Uh and

Presenter6:06

Then at the end of the twenties both your parents died within a couple of years of each other.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:10

Within a couple of years of each other, yes. I mean

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:14

I was twelve and fourteen, that sort of thing.

Presenter6:17

What what did they die of?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:19

My father collapsed in the street heart attack, I suppose it must have been, in one of the very bad winters.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:26

My mother died of T B, which in those days was a killer.

Presenter6:30

We don't know.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:30

And we didn't have a lot of money.

Presenter6:31

And what happened to you and your sister?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:34

We were taken over by an aunt and an uncle. It so happened my father's brother had married my mother's sister, so there was a closer relationship between

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:44

uh these uh uncles and aunts and uh they more or less took us over and um

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:50

went on educating us and looking after us.

Presenter6:52

And this was in Berlin.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:53

This was in Berlin.

Presenter6:55

which of course was a historic time, early thirties.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm6:58

It was an extraordinary period, absolutely extraordinary. I mean, this these few years are in many ways the absolute

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:06

Crucial period in at least in my life.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:09

It was living through what we knew to be

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:13

An extraordinary

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:15

dramatic turning point in history.

Presenter7:17

You knew then, even then.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:18

Yes. We knew what the stakes were.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:22

I remember the afternoon when Hitler came to power, you know, seeing the headline as myself and my sister were walking back from school.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:31

I was already politically

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:34

organized in some kind of schoolboys' association.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:38

Communist type.

Presenter7:39

Can you remember your reaction in that moment when you saw that headline?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:44

The reaction was, what if anything could be done?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm7:48

meetings, distributing leaflets, all the rest of it, didn't do much good.

Presenter7:53

And what do you remember of those months after Hitler came to power in january thirty three? How did things change?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm8:00

As far as I myself was concerned, obviously they didn't change. We weren't affected by it. We were we were English. We were not German. Consequently, the worst that could conceivably have happened is being expelled.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm8:11

But, as far as other people are concerned, we knew that in some ways this was the end and the terrible

Professor Eric Hobsbawm8:17

Dangerous period had begun.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm8:20

Otherwise it so happened

Professor Eric Hobsbawm8:22

that my family left a few months after that, not for political reasons, because uh my old man's job folded in the Depression, and uh went back to England to try and reconstruct his life there.

Presenter8:36

That was the summer of'thirty three' and you would have been sixteen.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm8:39

Not quite sixteen, yes.

Presenter8:42

Let's have record number two.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm8:44

Well, record number two, I suppose the moment has come to have a bit of militancy. I'm sorry to say that Johann Sebastian Bach, whom I'm going to play, never did a cantata about the international.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm9:00

Uh so I'm doing the next best thing. I'm going to play something, the opening of Bach Cantata No. eighty, Ein Festeburg ist und Zagott, which is the great Lutheran militant hymn of the Reformers.

Presenter10:14

The opening of Bach's cantata No. 80, Ein Festeborg ist Umsegott, with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra and Academic Choir. How many of your family were left behind when you came to England?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm10:26

Oh, a number of em were left behind, and I suppose at least four of em disappeared during the war and in in the camps.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm10:34

But that is the situation of every uh Jewish person in the West that I know.

Presenter10:41

So those were the years, you say, which which determined your politics irrevocably?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm10:46

Yes.

Presenter10:48

And in in that sense, then, for you

Presenter10:51

Being a Communist has been an an emotional commitment or was an emotional commitment before it was a rational commitment.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm10:58

Yes, that's the way these things happen. It's a bit like music, a bit like falling in love, but except falling in love doesn't necessarily imply uh a subsequent intellectual elaboration.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm11:09

Um

Presenter11:10

But you go on to find out more about it and decide whether it's true love or not, which is obviously what you did with with the CP.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm11:16

Well, I was told by one of my schoolmasters that I obviously didn't know what I was talking about, and he pointed me to the school library and said, read some of this stuff, like the Communist Manifesto and something, and discover what you ought to be knowing about the things that you claim to believe in.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm11:36

And that's what I started doing.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm11:38

And that's how I got interested in history.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm11:41

Because the school history that we were taught in Central Europe was of no interest whatsoever.

Presenter11:41

Right.

Presenter11:45

So both of those things, your histr your interest in history and your interest in communism, were determined then and then were confirmed when you came to this country and went to Cambridge.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm11:56

Yes.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm11:58

I think so.

Presenter11:58

And and your dedication was total. You you would I mean, would you say you would have done anything that the party told you to do?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm12:05

Of course we all would. The commitment particularly in the nineteen thirties, we were all deeply, profoundly committed there wasn't anything that was more important in life.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm12:15

then the great cause.

Presenter12:17

And if you'd known the terrible things that were taking place in the Soviet Union at that time in the name of Communism

Presenter12:24

Terrible indiscriminate suffering and mass murder Would you would you still have remained loyal?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm12:31

Well, in the first place we didn't know we didn't know the extent of it.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm12:34

Um

Professor Eric Hobsbawm12:36

In the second place, insofar as people told us, we

Professor Eric Hobsbawm12:40

Didn't believe them.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm12:41

Didn't want to believe them, perhaps. We didn't believe them.

Presenter12:45

So you're saying i i that such was your commitment and your dedication that that if there was a chance of bringing about this this communist utopia which was your dream, it was worth any kind of sacrifice?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:00

Yes, I think so.

Presenter13:02

Even the sacrifice of millions of lives.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:05

Well, that's the w what we felt when we fought World War Two, didn't we?

Presenter13:10

Isn't there a difference between killing someone in war and killing your own?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:16

We didn't know that.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:20

Daddy's dead.

Presenter13:22

Should we have record number three?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:25

Record number three uh actually fits in with this rather gloomy uh note.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:32

Uh it's by Schubert.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:35

And it comes from, I suppose, one of the great

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:39

creative ages of uh history.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:43

the period from the seventeen eighties to the eighteen forties, which I wrote my first volume of the nineteenth century about.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:52

And it's a bit of the Schubert Quintet with Casals.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm13:59

And I suppose it brings out that

Professor Eric Hobsbawm14:03

The world is an extraordinary place and a place of deep emotions but not necessarily of fun.

Presenter15:08

Part of the first movement of Schubert's string quintet in C major, played by Pablo Casals, Milton Catims, Alexander Schneider, Isaac Stern, and Paul Tortellier. You you were right in the middle, Eric Hobsworm, of of Red Cambridge, but your name doesn't seem to have cropped up in all the spy literature that's been written about it since, why is that?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm15:26

I was too open and militant a Communist to for anybody, even the most conspiracy minded, ever to accuse me of having been a spy.

Presenter15:38

So you were never approached, you wouldn't have been any good to them at all.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm15:42

Don't know but at all events I was never approached.

Presenter15:46

But but did you know Burgess Philby Blunt?

Presenter15:49

Yeah, and

Professor Eric Hobsbawm15:49

I knew a few of these people, I mean, in various capacities.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm15:54

But uh obviously I didn't know that there were spies. However,

Professor Eric Hobsbawm15:58

The point about Cambridge is that politics wasn't the only thing in Cambridge. One did an enormous amount of things.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm16:05

And it was a marvellous time to be there, an absolutely extraordinary time.

Presenter16:09

We've got a double-starred first at the end of it all.

Presenter16:12

And and then came the war. Your politics ensured that you were kept out of intelligence. You you served instead with the Royal Engineers, and you found yourself in what you've described as a working class unit, which you said converted you to the British working class. What did you mean by that?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm16:30

I didn't know much about the British working class, in spite of being a Communist.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm16:36

but actually to live and work among them

Professor Eric Hobsbawm16:39

I thought they were good eggs.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm16:42

And it's tremendous.

Presenter16:43

Of course what you admired, it seems to me, in those people, was was their loyalty and and and that warm heartedness, that the working class culture, really, did you?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm16:52

the solidarity, a a very strong feeling of class, a very strong feeling of belonging together.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm17:01

A very strong feeling of not wanting anybody to.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm17:06

Uh put them down.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm17:08

But alas they were not Democrats.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm17:11

They did not believe that they were as good as the next man.

Presenter17:16

But do you believe that that feeling that you so admired in them

Presenter17:20

is, albeit, beneath the surface, because war brings these things to the surface, obviously adversity, but do you believe it still exists?

Presenter17:28

Today.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm17:29

I hope so.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm17:31

One of the important things about the working class in those days is the feeling of solidarity around unions, around neighborhoods, around communities.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm17:45

These have been weakened.

Presenter17:47

That's what worries you about the twentieth century, isn't it? That that that we are so divided, we are so disparate that unless we do something

Presenter17:57

There is only darkness ahead.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm17:59

Yes, it worries me.

Presenter18:01

Let's have the next piece of music.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm18:05

The next piece of music is a song by Billie Holliday.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm18:10

He's funny that way.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm18:12

Partly because I cannot conceive of the rest of my life when I cannot listen to Billy Holiday.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm18:20

who was a genius.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm18:24

Not to mention I happened to know as an old friend the man who discovered her.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm18:29

and who on his deathbed said when I asked him what is the thing that he really is proudest in his life of and he discovered virtually every new jazz artist of the nineteen thirties as Billy Holiday.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm18:42

The others would have made it without me. Probably she would have continued to be a hooker if I hadn't discovered her.

Speaker 418:57

Crazy ball

Speaker 419:03

He's funny that way.

Presenter19:16

Billy Holiday, and he's funny that way.

Presenter19:19

Whatever else you wrote about in the late forties and fifties when you were teaching and by this time you were teaching at Birkbeck College in London, weren't you? You you never wrote about the Soviet Union. Why not? I mean, your political views were well known, so you couldn't do yourself any more damage, as it were, or or

Speaker 419:26

Yeah.

Presenter19:35

Delay your promotion it was already known and delayed.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm19:41

There was no way in which in the first place you didn't know enough about uh the the Soviet Union, in the second place the official line in the Soviet Union, Communist parties

Professor Eric Hobsbawm19:51

uh simply was indefensible. So I decided to

Professor Eric Hobsbawm19:55

stick to something which uh

Professor Eric Hobsbawm19:58

Cause less problems, besides.

Presenter19:59

So you you would have had to have promulgated, perpetuated untruths, would you?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm20:04

I would have got had to got into into rows with uh my comrades and friends.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm20:11

Unnecessary Rows.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm20:13

I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the Soviet Union by this time, may say so, after having visited it shortly after Stalin's death.

Presenter20:20

But you you didn't uh I mean, you still believed in in communism as a principle?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm20:27

Oh, sure. I still believed obviously in the movement, but I mean, I had stopped being a militant for a very long time. I as it were, from about nineteen fifty six on I c carefully recycled myself as a sympathizer rather than as a militant, because by that time I I stopped

Professor Eric Hobsbawm20:46

following any official party line.

Presenter20:48

But a lot of your friends resigned then in the invasion of Hungary. I mean, that was just the last straw, wasn't it? Why didn't you?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm20:57

I think

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:00

I didn't wish to deny

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:02

The whole of my life?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:05

We had substantially exactly the same views, my friends and myself, those who left and those who didn't.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:12

and we remained friends afterwards.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:15

I can't explain why personally I decided, perhaps also,

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:22

I didn't want to suggest to anybody that I was trying to get an advantage.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:28

by abandoning uh views which in the past had could not have been said to bring me anything except disadvantage.

Presenter21:40

But isn't there surely also in all of that a an element of also not wishing

Presenter21:46

To say that perhaps you'd been wrong.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:48

No.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:50

Don't not at all.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:51

What I said, what I wrote, was as critical as I would have written and said outside the Communist Party.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm21:59

Um

Presenter22:00

But here is a party, you say, who were p promulgating untruths, who were invading countries, taking actions that you thoroughly and deeply disapproved of were utterly unjustified.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm22:13

and protested against.

Presenter22:16

But why did you still want to belong?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm22:21

I think one of the great advantages of having been alive as a Communist.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm22:27

is that nobody can accuse you of having been in it for the sake of careerism, or for the sake of making money, or for the sake of getting famous or a celebrity.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm22:39

I didn't wish to lose that moral high ground.

Presenter22:45

Roll Music, number five.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm22:49

Offenbach, minuet from the Orpheus in the Underworld.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm22:54

Firstly, because it reminds me of Paris, and I suppose

Professor Eric Hobsbawm23:00

For about sixty years I've gone to Paris from time to time, stayed there, taught there.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm23:06

Enjoyed it.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm23:08

regarded it, as you might say, my second home.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm23:12

Secondly, because Offenbach is consistently unsentimental.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm23:18

and knew

Professor Eric Hobsbawm23:19

the difference between a good librettist and a bad librettist, unlike poor Johann Strauss and third, because he's consistently funny and witty and a good composer.

Speaker 423:38

Good old search bad.

Presenter24:30

The minuet from the final act of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, with the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Rene Leibovitz. How happy do you think you'll be on your desert island, Professor Hobsborn? Do you do you like the idea?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm24:44

provided I could choose a desert island with a hill or two on it.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm24:48

I don't like absolutely flat ones, especially as the C is going to be completely flat.

Presenter24:53

And are you a walker?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm24:55

Yes, a bit.

Presenter24:56

Run up and down the hills a bit. You you you have family here in London, but you spend three months of the year at the moment teaching in New York.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm25:03

In New York, yes, I've done that for some years.

Presenter25:05

So does that mean you spend a lot of time alone?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm25:07

I'm perfectly capable of spending a great deal of time by myself.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm25:13

The whole of the rest of one's life I'm not so sure about.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm25:17

But otherwise, uh a month or two on a desert island, for instance, I wouldn't mind too much. Anybody that is an academic and spends a good deal of time reading and writing is used to spending a good deal of one's time alone.

Presenter25:32

And do you feel these days that you are properly recognized? I mean, you had to fight for it, as we've said, in the early days. You were

Presenter25:39

held back because of your politics? Do you feel these days that that the air has cleared and that you receive proper recognition?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm25:48

How much recognition I've had, and all this. I mean, it's not up to me to judge, as it were, what I've done.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm25:56

But I wouldn't wish to complain about it.

Presenter25:58

Record number six.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm26:01

Record number six is a bit of nostalgia, I think, suitable for a desert island.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm26:07

And it reminds me of

Professor Eric Hobsbawm26:10

A splendid day in Italy.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm26:14

In Tuscany,

Professor Eric Hobsbawm26:15

With some friends.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm26:17

We were all sitting after lunch looking out over these marvellous hills in the sky,

Professor Eric Hobsbawm26:23

and somebody decided to turn the record player up high.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm26:27

And these were the sounds which went over the

Professor Eric Hobsbawm26:31

sunny valleys of that particular part of Tuscany.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm26:37

And it's Maria Callas singing Castadiva from Bellini's Norma.

Presenter27:34

Maria Callas singing the Aria Castadiva from Bellini's Norma and that was recorded in nineteen fifty five at La Scala, Milan.

Presenter27:42

Um you were rather taken up by Neil Kinnock as a kind of intellectual mascot in the eighties. Did you enjoy that role?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm27:52

Uh I think uh Kinnock found it useful.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm27:57

To play out somebody with a known track record of being on the extreme left.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm28:05

Against some of these sectarian left-wingers in the Labour Party who wanted to.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm28:10

uh stop the Labour Party being in some sense modernized.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm28:15

or at least brought back to common sense.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm28:20

It wasn't a question of enjoying it. I approved of what he was trying to do, and so consequently I'm

Professor Eric Hobsbawm28:26

Happy to have been of some use.

Presenter28:28

Indeed, you what you were saying must have been music to his ears, because you were saying, weren't you, that that the party had to become a

Presenter28:34

uh a broad church, really, is what you were saying, which was his message. Yes. But that must have alarmed a lot of people on the left, people whom you would normally be aligned with.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm28:39

Yes.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm28:44

No, I don't think so. Uh on the whole, uh the policy of uh Communists they are sectarian Communists and they are common sense Communists, and I hope I was always a common sense one.

Presenter28:56

And what does the common sense Communist say today, three if not four defeats later? Is Tony Blair right to warn the Left that if they defeat his plans to get rid of Clause four, then that will be the end of the Labour at the next election?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm29:15

Reflecting on a desert island is not the moment to start talking about Labour politics. Uh what I think people of my historic background always uh say think is that uh the best way

Professor Eric Hobsbawm29:30

is to unite all men and women of good will as far as possible against the greatest political dangers.

Presenter29:38

Let's have some more music.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm29:40

I've heard this very artist

Professor Eric Hobsbawm29:43

With this very trio?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm29:46

More than once

Professor Eric Hobsbawm29:48

A month or two ago in New York,

Professor Eric Hobsbawm29:51

I can listen to this stuff for ever.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm29:53

Once again, it's a blues.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm29:56

And it's Kenny Barron, the pianist, with his trio.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm30:00

Here it is.

Speaker 430:07

Uh

Presenter31:02

The Kenny Barron Trio and Slow Grind.

Presenter31:06

One of the truths about the twentieth century is that all ideologies, not just Marxism, have been discredited. Communism, fascism, Christianity has been marginalized. Democracy is hugely tarnished by sleaze and corruption. What in your view can we believe in now? What are your values?

Presenter31:27

for the the last part of the twentieth century.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm31:31

I still believe in the old values of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm31:37

In reason

Professor Eric Hobsbawm31:39

In education,

Professor Eric Hobsbawm31:40

in the improvement, if not the perfectibility, of human beings

Professor Eric Hobsbawm31:45

and in the attempts at any rate to establish liberty, equality, fraternity, or life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or any of these other marvellous slogans which we owe to

Professor Eric Hobsbawm31:59

Uh the late eighteenth century.

Presenter32:01

But you fear what you feared in nineteen thirty three, which is barbarism.

Presenter32:06

And and your message uh at the end of your book is that that

Presenter32:11

We must change, and if we fail to do that, you say, the price is darkness. What do you mean?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm32:19

I think the price is an increase in the conditions of barbarism which have been

Professor Eric Hobsbawm32:27

gradually creeping up on us.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm32:31

and to which we have become used to an intolerable extent.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm32:36

We now habitually live under circumstances which at any rate

Professor Eric Hobsbawm32:42

My

Professor Eric Hobsbawm32:43

Parents

Professor Eric Hobsbawm32:45

Certainly my grandparents would have regarded it as intolerable. For instance,

Professor Eric Hobsbawm32:50

What has been happening in

Professor Eric Hobsbawm32:52

Northern Ireland over twenty five years, which is now fortunately being stopped.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm32:58

These are not ways in which anybody in the nineteenth century would have regarded it as fit for human beings in a civilized society to live.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:07

We live constantly with this sort of thing happening.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:11

And uh I fear that if we don't change we shall simply get used to living under

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:18

conditions which ought not to be tolerated by civilized people.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:24

but will be tolerated because human beings can get used to almost everything.

Presenter33:29

Last record.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:32

The last record

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:34

I find deeply moving.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:36

And

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:37

Curiously enough.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:39

I discovered this record and

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:42

the Billy Holiday on the same day.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:46

in the room of the same student friend in Cambridge,

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:51

in must have been nineteen thirty nine or something like this.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:55

Its Mahler's Lead von der Erde.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm33:58

which I find profoundly moving.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm34:02

And I hope you're as moved by it as I am.

Presenter35:07

The end of the final movement of Mahler's Song of the Earth, sung by Kathleen Ferrier, with the Vienna Philharmonica conducted by Bruno Walter. Now if you could only take one of those eight records, Prof. Hobsbaum.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm35:19

I think I'll take Kenny Barron.

Presenter35:21

Would you?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm35:22

Yes, you can listen to it for ever.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm35:25

And you don't have to think too much about it.

Presenter35:28

But you've been so moved by the Shubas and the Mala. It's

Professor Eric Hobsbawm35:32

That's exactly why I take the Kinney Baron. I don't want to be moved all the time.

Presenter35:37

And your book.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm35:40

Probably I take a

Professor Eric Hobsbawm35:43

Big book by the Chilian poet Pablo Neruda, the best of the one of the famous communist poets of Latin America, called Canto General.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm35:54

I've read some of it, and I read some of it on, I'm told, where you have to do it, on a sort of semi-desert island situation, like on the hills overlooking Machu Picchu. It's written about Machu Picchu.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm36:07

But there's so much in it that I haven't read.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm36:09

Take me a long time to read, and so, anyway, that would be something to get on with.

Presenter36:14

A new luxury.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm36:16

Some good binoculars to watch birds with.

Presenter36:19

That's easy.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm36:19

It's easy.

Presenter36:19

Professor Eric Hobsbawm, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 236:31

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.