I have recently been thinking a great deal about my long-dead father. I have been writing a memoir of his life for an exhibition being organised by Vienna’s Exilbibliothek (“Exile Library”) in honour of what would have been his hundredth birthday. But I have also been thinking about him because he would have fully understood what is at stake today.

Born in what was then Austrian Poland on April 23 1910, my father’s life began just after the end of the “noughties” of the 20th century, of which I wrote last week. Moved by his parents to Vienna in 1914, he lived through the first world war, the hyperinflation of the early 1920s and the Great Depression, before leaving for London, just ahead of Hitler’s arrival, in 1937. There he survived internment as an enemy alien and the second world war. Nearly all his relatives, apart from his immediate family, were killed in the Holocaust. The same was true of my mother’s family. While she and her immediate relatives escaped by trawler from the Netherlands in May 1940, her wider family was destroyed.

As a central European intellectual born in 1910 – he was a playwright, journalist, broadcaster, documentary filmmaker and writer of television dramas, in his native language, German – my father lived in historic times. Of the countless lessons I learnt from him, the most important is the most obvious: civilisation is as fragile as glass. Moreover, when chaos comes, the worst of human nature will almost always emerge, as it did, to such cataclysmic effect, in his lifetime.

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