Page - 147 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Peter Burke | Cultural displacements and intellectual moorings 147 sense the English would, it is more of an invitation to negotiate. I formulated this contrast: in northern Europe the rules are relatively rational, but they are rigid; in southern Europe they are often absurd, but nobody takes them seriously. And that gives you more flexibility. They say, you can’t have these documents, they are being restored; then you say, but there are a hundred volumes, you are not naturally working on them all at once. Then they smile and say, I will go and have a look, and they bring you something. British historians work on German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian history, not to men- tion Indian or African history. If they didn’t do because they were already interested in other cultures they become interested through these prolonged encounters. Would historians as ambassadors of other cultures make a substantial difference with colonial atti- tudes? I think so. There are immigrant intellectuals. Most of them decide that they will mediate between the culture of their homeland and the culture of the host land. Culture is one thing that they can bring with them, if they do not have any other luggage. A few adventurous ones, especially the ones who came in as teenagers, decide that they will specialise in the culture of the host land, looking at it from a different point of view: Eric Hobsbawm18 is a good example. He left Vienna when he was 16, he had just time to go to school in England and pass the exams to go to Cambridge. And these people often have, as one of them calls it, “bifocal vision”19: Fritz Stern was twelve when he went to the United States. He said that he looks at Germany with American eyes, but he looks at the United States with German eyes. A certain detachment makes academics more original. They haven’t been brought up in the conventional wisdom of the host land. They may take up a position that this conventional wisdom is actually wrong. Lewis Namier20 wrote English history, the history of the English Parliament, but he didn’t believe in the importance of Whigs and Tories, he undermined the English myth about them- selves. He was a real outsider, because Niemirowski, as he originally was, was from Poland, but he was an outsider in Poland because he was Jewish, and he was an outsider among the Jewish community, because his father was a landowner. That meant he was going to have an original take on everything. He tried to become English in a way; he was very pleased to have a knighthood in his adopted country. But he still never saw things in a way that the English did. How can this originality be sustained in an age that no longer honours polymaths? My first job was at University of Sussex. I volunteered to go there because they were interdis- ciplinary. And I felt at Oxford I had been forced to specialise too much, despite having a good 18 Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (1917-2012) 19 Fritz Richard Stern (1926-2016). “I mention McCarthyism to suggest that no country is completely safe from political unreason; some countries have stronger habits of resistance than others. I mention it as well to suggest that perhaps I gradually acquired something like a bifocal view – others might call it impaired vision: I tend to see things German also with American eyes, and things American also with German eyes.” Fritz Stern. Five Germanies I have known. Uhlenbeck lecture 16, 12.6. 1998 (Wassenaar: NIAS), p. 14. URL <http://www.nias. knaw.nl/Publications/Uhlenbeck%20Lecture/16_Fritz%20Stern> 20 Lewis Bernstein Namier, born Ludwik Bernstajn Niemirowski (1888-1960)