Schama interviews Hobsbawm on BBC Radio 4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01g4f87/Archive_on_4_Hobsbawm_A_Life_in_History/

Accompanied by a rich archive of interviews with Hobsbawm from the BBC archives, Schama discusses Hobsbawm's activism and career from his involvement as a teen with the KPD resistance to Nazism in 1930's Germany, through his life at the heights of British academia. The programme also focuses on Hobsbawm's often controversial political affiliation with the Communist Party of Great Britain, remaining a member until its dissolution in 1991, long after many comrades had left following the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Talking about his early political development, he highlights the moment when we was first turned on to Marxism, at the height of a vicious, street-and-ballot struggle between the Communist Party of Germany and a nascent Nazi threat:

That period in Berlin shaped my life. Without this I simply wouldn't be what I am now. It was one of the masters at school who, in fact, turned me into a Marxist. I explained to him that I was a communist and we needed a revolution, and he asked me a few questions and said “You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Kindly go to the school library and see what you can find.” And then I discoveredThe Communist Manifesto, and that was it... Can you imagine at the age of fifteen, reading The Communist Manifesto, the first few pages, and I said “This is it”.

This astonishing and often very touching profile gives a remarkable insight into the influence Hobsbawm had; as Schama admits, even those who weren't members of the Communist Party Historian's Group, or supporters of the democratic centralist communist ideology, were “intoxicated” by the opening up of historical study engendered by what Hobsbawm calls “social-cum-intellectual-cum-structural history”. Hobsbawm, alongside other great social historians such as Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson, changed the way history was approached: not through a knowledge of Kings and Queens, or an understanding of the causes of Great Wars, but in the everyday struggles and entertainments of the vast majority of normal, working people whose lives produce and reflect the great social changes of world history.