|
· Eric
Hobsbawm - Stories my country told me
|
|
 |
Production:
BBC-TV; GB 1995
Director, Script: Frederick Baker
Camera: Christian Mehofer
Cut: Colin Kniff
Colour,
52 Minutes
Eric Hobsbawm the great historian,
travels on the Pressburg Railway from
his native Vienna to Bratislava
(formerly Pressburg). A journey of a
mere 35 miles takes him through a tiny
landscape that has seen some of the most
turbulent political changes of the
century - from the lost world of the
Habsburgs to Europe's newest state,
Slovakia. |
|
|
Eric Hobsbawn - quotes:
I'm bound to say that virtually everything that nationalists say
about the past is wrong. As the famous 19th century French
expert Ernest Renan said: 'Getting your history wrong is part of
becoming a nation'. Essentially nationalism is a fairly modern
phenomenon but it gets its emotional validity by pretending to
have existed there from all time.
The danger in a nation state which is based on ethnicity or
something like that is that the State belongs to one of these
groups and the others are less important. For instance,
Slovakia. Slovakia belongs to the Slovaks and the others are, at
best, tolerated. lt's a historian's job to apply the rules and
the rules are essentially that you mustn't tell lies.
Nationalism is not compatible with the progress of
history.
I think the new South Africa is an enormously hopeful
and encouraging phenomenon, largely because it runs dead
against the grain of what is at present considered
standard nationalism, namely ethnic, linguistic,
cultural separatism. It is in some ways a return to the
tradition of the French Revolution and the American
Revolution.
Human beings need a lot of identities because human
beings are not one dimensional. The problem arises if
you believe that one of these identities has a privilege
of dominating all the others. |
|
|
