GERMAN TRAITS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 January 1939, Page 7

GERMAN TRAITS

MR HILAIRE BELLOC’S SURVEY. The Germans have about them many qualities, few evil, most of them good, writes Mr Hilaire Belloc in his new book, “Return to the Baltic.” They are a people of affectionate hearts, and for the most part of delightful manners in conduct with their fellow beings and with foreigners. They have the happiness to be sentimental, and they have interesting architectural imagination, which has produced beauty in the past when it was allied with a rational philosophy. It is producing monstrosities today when it is allied to the opposite thereof; for the hideousness of modern building is nowhere so hideous as among the Germans. They are masters of a kind of formless music which appeals particularly to modern men. • They are imperturably patient, and this virtue in them has had great effect upon their physical science and has enabled them to accomplish prodigies of research in history. But their reading of the past when it is not mere empty vainglory is all out of gear. They put things in the wrong order and leave out the essentials. Their defects they owe always to the same radical defect; they are immature. It is this which gives them the charm and also the exasperating quality of children. Thus they are not cruel, but they have blind fits of rage and they get specially angry with people who are too much for them. They have no chance intellectually against the Jew, and their “reaction” as the Americans call it is therefore to lash out at the Jew; and, like children, they must always be holding somebody’s hand and be guided and led about. I have heard a man who knows them well and intimately through long residence among them, and with a good acquaintance of them and their idioms, compare them to putty. Anyone who gets hold of them can mould them as he wills. That was the chance of the Prussian military caste; when they broke down it was the chance of the Jew; now it is the chance of a little clique, not very sane and wholly ignorant, who rely upon the natural tribal patriotism of the millions for the moment in their hands.