Author(s): Hans-Ulrich Obrist

History

"""Modern society, the modern economy, operates essentially without a sense of the past. The problems are existing problems which have to be solved...it seems to me historians are essential to modern society because it is their business to remember what other people want to forget"". Eric Hobsbawm was considered by many the finest historian of our times. His brilliant sequence of books on the 19th and 20th centuries are, in the words of Niall Ferguson, the finest introduction to modern history available. In these insightful interviews conducted between 2006 and the month before his death in October 2012, Han Ulrich Obrist, Hobsbawm discusses the practice of history, the central position of Marxism within Hobsbawm's work, his life as a radical thinker as well as a passionate plea for the role of history within modern society: a protest against the age of forgetting. Humane, moving and passionate - this is the most brilliant portrait of Hobsbawm and his position in the intellectual history of the last century.