''On 25 January 1933, the 16-year-old
Eric Hobsbawm marched with thousands of comrades through central Berlin
to the headquarters of the German Communist Party (KPD). When they
arrived at Karl Liebknecht Haus, on the Bülowplatz, the temperature was
–18°C. They shuffled and waited in the bone-numbing cold for four hours
to hear the podium speeches of the party cadres. As Hobsbawm would
recall much later, there was singing – ‘The Internationale’, peasant war
songs, the ‘Soviet Airmen’s Song’ – with intervals of heavy silence.
The red flags and banners could not dispel the greyness – of the shadowy
buildings, the sky, the crowd – or the realisation that ‘the
inevitability of world revolution’ had been postponed, that what faced
the beleaguered movement in the short term was a reckoning: ‘danger,
capture, resistance to interrogation, defiance in defeat’.1 Not the New Jerusalem, then, but a new circle of hell..''
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