Dr. Thomas G. Long Bandy Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology tells about the great historian Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm remembers when his safe and secure world became a world of terror. He grew up as a Jewish orphan in Berlin. On a cold January day in 1933 when he was only 15 years old, he was walking his little sister home from school when he saw at a newsstand a headline bearing frightening news that would change his life, change the life of all Jews, change the life of the whole world.
“Adolph Hitler Appointed Chancellor of Germany,” the headline read. Later in his life, Hobsbawm reflected on that moment and said it was as if “we were on the Titanic and everyone knew it was going to hit the iceberg.”
As Europe hurdled out of control toward World War II, the old world was violently ripped apart, and the new and uncertain world began to be born. Hobsbawm said that it was difficult to describe “what it meant to live in a world that was simply not expected to last.” It was like living, he said, “between a dead past and a future not yet born.”
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