GIBBON BANNED

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 134, 8 June 1937, Page 4

GIBBON BANNED

ACTION BY COEBBELS Whom and what has Goebbels forbidden. Can you guess? writes Arnold Zweig in the "Manchester Guardian." I No, you would never guess it. The spiritual guardian of all Germans, both in the Reich and in the organisations outside, has seized his opportunity at last to proceed against a propagator of tendencious information concerning th" ancestors of Herr Goebbels (the race known by the Celtic word "German"), against one who has been allowed to carry on his base conduct for the last 150 years—the historian Edward Gibbon. • . Born 200 years ago, Gibbon, in spite of Mommsen. and Fcrrero, wrote the first great account, unsurpassed even today, of those centuries of Roman might and power understood by all as marking the decline of the Empire and so akin to our own times. He called his work "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" when it was finished and appeared; it must have been directly before the French Revolution. As in his work the emergence of the German race is of necessity depicted on the basis of documentary research; a German publisher announced the publication of two selected volumes, "Die Germanen in roemischen Weltreich" ("The Germans in the Roman Empire") and "Untergang dcs roemischen Weltreiches" ("Decline of the Roman Empire"). (It would be interesting to discuss such selection as symptoms, thoir arrangement and.success proving much in regard to the state of culture today in German reading circles.) EDITION SEIZED. But those who ordered these volumes, after a long and wearisome period of waiting, received the following notice from a large bookseller outside the boundaries of the Reich:— "We beg to inform you, in reply to your repeated inquiries, that up to the present it . has not been possible for us to get delivery of these two volumes. The new edition has already been printed in Leipsig but, on the instructions of the Minister for Culture and Propaganda, has been seized for the time being. We are in negotiation with the authorities in regard to deliveries for abroad, but our efforts up to now have not been successful. Certainly the picture which Gibbon is forced to draw of the German princes and people is very different from that of Wagner or F. Dahn. Treachery, murder, word-breaking, Roman service, greed for land—all those qualities which result from and belong essentially to those hordes of land-seeking mercenaries-are portrayed in his volumes —without bias, of course, as is to be expected in an historian such as Gibbon, and therefore authenticated and convincing. But to a Reich bu.sting with sickly self-adulation and to a nature like that of Herr Goebbels it is just these qualities of the historian that are undesired and unbearable. Goebbels or Gibbon—there can be no combination. And how wonderful is the sure instinct with which this uneducated man fails to foresee the effect which his antics must have. Who would have thought that this Minister could lay violent hands on this historian? Herr Goebbels allows Ossietzky to be libelled, glorifies the shameful cruelties of the concentration camps, lets loose his Press against the intellectual part of man, and when he forbids a book it is Gibbon. It was what might have been expected" but never guessed. ____________