I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic. Last autumn I was asked to recall that time in an online German interview under the title 'Ich bin ein Reiseführer in die Geschichte' ('I am a travel guide to history'). Some weeks later, at the annual dinner of the survivors of the school I went to when I came to Britain, the no longer extant St Marylebone Grammar School, I tried to explain the reactions of a 15-year-old suddenly translated to this country in 1933. 'Imagine yourselves,' I told my fellow Old Philologians, 'as a newspaper correspondent based in Manhattan and transferred by your editor to Omaha, Nebraska. That's how I felt when I came to England after almost two years in the unbelievably exciting, sophisticated, intellectually and politically explosive Berlin of the Weimar Republic. The place was a terrible letdown.'

LRB 24 January 2008 | PDF Download