Tell me about your choices.

I’ve chosen books that are very real to me. All five cover a 30-year-period that had a momentous impact on world history. They also deeply affected my mother’s family. Mine is therefore an intellectual and personal interest. These books represent the scope and drama of these events in a very poignant way.

This period saw a brilliant piece of mankind destroyed. And my mother’s family was the perfect example of the kind of culture that disappeared. Her paternal family were the Wittgensteins of Vienna. They were a colourful and extremely talented cosmopolitan family; they represented the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie that’s obviously gone forever in that part of the world. Her maternal grandfather, Stefan Grossmann, was a Jewish intellectual who represented the same cultural milieu in a different, and less opulent, way. Everything I’ve done in relation to this 30-year period is an attempt, encouraged by my mother, to keep this culture alive and revisit what happened.

How does Manes Sperber’a Wie eine Traene im Ozean relate to that?

He was an acquaintance of my mother. Along with Arthur Koestler, he was probably the best-known communist activist. Sperber broke from the Communist Party in 1937. The book is a fantastic description of the events from the early 1930s to the end of the Second World War. Its main protagonist, Dojno Faber, is a member of the Communist Party, for perfectly good idealistic reasons. Despite leaving the party, he tries to find a basis on which to continue his original work and improve the world. With the rise of the Nazis and the outbreak of war, he ends up in Yugoslavia, the one country in Eastern Europe that rejected Stalin and had a sort of independent existence. Somewhere between Communist dictatorship and total democracy.

At the heart of the book are the conversations between Faber and Baron von Stetten, a cynical but clear-headed historian. From the start von Stetten tells Faber: “You’re wasting your time. It’s impossible to have a good revolution because the revolution will defeat you before you’ve succeeded. And when it does, it will destroy you and all your ideas.” There’s a wonderful core of intellectual discussion that gets to the essence of the problem: how can you combine a very worthy cause with the piece of machinery to implement it?

The conclusion is: you can’t. Faber finds a sense of purpose by looking after a little boy he met while exploring destroyed Europe. If you want a sign of hope, that’s it. The most worthy, realistic way to do good is to focus on the people around you. If you try and focus on large numbers of people, you’ll invariably fail.

It sounds quite bleak.

It’s actually quite a hopeful description of one part of what happened. It’s also a piece of fiction and not political philosophy in the conventional sense. It’s a real piece of theatre – with thousands of actors.

The book’s English title is Like a Tear in the Ocean. Is the English translation of the book a good one?

It’s very good. But it costs around £60 so it hasn’t been used much. 

Tell me about Leopold Schwarzschild’s World in Trance: From Versailles to Pearl Harbour.

Schwarzschild is the subject of the book I recently published. He edited the magazine Das Tage-Buch, founded in Berlin in 1920 by my great-grandfather, Stefan Grossman. He was a very intelligent Jew from Frankfurt and, though he abandoned the Orthodox faith, he came from from a very orthodox family. He was an economist and probably the most brilliant German journalist of the inter-war period. He moved to Paris in 1933 and relaunched the magazine with the help of a wealthy Dutch lawyer. Churchill was a great admirer of his; the French and Russian foreign ministers used the magazine as a source. He wrote in the first edition of Das Neue Tage-Buch – in July 1933 – that everything about the Nazi regime was designed to produce violent conflagration.

He wrote World in Trance in New York in the early 1940s. It’s a history of the inter-war period and it’s the best book on the subject. As the realities sank in over the next 50 years, his facts and arguments stood the test of time. But he’s also writing about his own life. He was writing about the destruction of his own past – the history of a class embodied in a family whose last representative was him. But he was not just a voice for an old culture. He added to it in a magnificent way. Of course, it didn’t prevent the destruction that followed.

In England, the orthodox representation of the inter-war period is that the poor Germans were crushed by the nasty allies after the First World War, the reparations destroyed the economy, the inflation caused Hitler and Hitler caused the Second World War. Hence the Treaty of Versailles caused the Second World War.

That’s what I’ve been taught.

That’s wrong. Every reasonable person, when presented with the facts, must surely agree.

What are the facts?

The reason it’s presented like that is largely attributable to John Maynard Keynes, the leading economist, He was a young, arrogant guy at that time. In Versailles he met Carl Melchior, a Jewish banker at M. M. Warburg & Co in Hamburg, who was advising on reparation payments. Keynes was in love with Melchior. Melchior completely pulled the wool over Keynes’ eyes. Keynes consequently wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, one of the worst books ever written about this period of history. It’s an appalling piece of analysis and virtually everything in it turned out to be wrong. The French economist Étienne Mantoux, who was killed a week before the German surrender in May 1945, elegantly dismantled it 20 years later shortly before his death.

Keynes said Germany would be destroyed by paying the reparations and it wouldn’t have enough money to buy imports.