RICHARD Grunberger, who has died aged 81, will be remembered chiefly for his book A Social History of the Third Reich, a stalwart in school and university libraries.
Translated into four languages, it was part of a new wave of histories that examined the everyday lives of everyday people, rather than the politicians and leaders they lived under.
But he didn’t just write about it – he lived it. At the age of 15 he arrived in London from Vienna on the very first kindertransport in December 1938. His bookkeeper father had died when he was 10, while his mother, from whom he inherited his love of the arts, was to be murdered in a concentration camp.
After a short stint in a Lowestoft refugee camp, his assured English landed him a handyman-cum-butler job with the family of Anthony Eden, lasting only three months before Mrs Eden concluded he was not a hard worker and sent him back to the camp.
He soon moved in with the Friedes, a first-generation Polish-Jewish family with three children of their own living in the East End. Mr Friede, a tailor, took his new charge on as an apprentice.
The war years saw him dividing his time between munitions work and leading Young Austria, a communist youth group of Austrian émigrés that met at a Belsize Park church.
It was there that he met, or more precisely re-met, his future wife and fellow Viennese émigré Liesl Kober – their first, brief, encounter had been as children sat on opposite park benches back in Vienna. He had shone a pocket mirror in her eye. She – after conferring with her girlfriends – had decided he was not pretty enough to pursue.
Though a more dashing figure by his late teens, it was his intelligence and impressive rhetoric at Young Austria meetings that won her heart. They married in 1947, after five years of courtship, and moved into a home in Stamford Hill.
Still tailoring during the day, he studied A-levels in History, Latin and German at Birkbeck evening classes. He came top of his class and won a scholarship to King’s College London where he read history. In 1953 he became a teacher at Hasmonean School, lecturing occasionally at the Spiro Institute and the Worker Educational Association. Whilst teaching he worked on his first history book: Germany 1918-1945, published in 1964. He followed this with Hitler’s SS in 1970.
Taking a sabbatical away from teaching, he travelled across Germany conducting research for his next book: A Social History of the Third Reich which included testimonies from those who had lived under Hitler, and had chapters devoted to the era’s music, health and humour.
It met with great success, appearing in the US and overseas, and has rarely been out of print in this country. The fourth edition appears later this year.
Two further books appeared, although to quieter acclaim: Red Rising in Bavaria, about the Munich Soviet in the early 1920s, and Old Adam, New Eve, a collection of essays on leading women thinkers, writers and political revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In 1988 he joined the journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees as editor, noticeably steering it in a more cultured, more worldly direction, his ideal reader perhaps a member of the circle of Viennese coffee-house intellectuals that enthralled him as a boy. Over the next 17 years, almost right up until his death on February 15, he penned hundreds of pieces for the journal and reviewed books for the Times Literary Supplement and the Jewish Chronicle.
Writing plays served as an outlet for his love of literature, though to his regret his own were never staged. However, his translations of Brecht and Martin Walser were produced by the BBC.
He is survived by his wife, three children and grandchildren.
Jonathan Allen