“JEKVLL AND HYDE"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 December 1939, Page 6

“JEKVLL AND HYDE"

GERMAN CITIZEN AND SOLDIER. To lie and bully and be faithless may not be the exclusive privilege of Germany's rulers; there is probably no State in the world that can claim to be without sin in these respects; but 'no State in the modern world has quite such p consistently bad record as Prussia and the empire she raised about 68 years ago. says the Listener. London. Few tilings are more puzzling to the average Englishman than the contrast between the brutality of Germany as a State and the kindliness of the German people as individuals. It seems incredible that the intelligent. warm-hearted, rather sentimental people one has known and liked can be transformed, by the mere act of donning a uniform, into ruthless, sim-ple-minded savages. Yet the popular conception of the Germans as a people as pacific as ourselves, but condemned by some hideous caprice of Providence almost always to be governed by warloving rulers, is a little too naive to be convincing, ft is more intelligent to recognise that this duality is somehow inherent in the German nature, “that “Jekyll and Hyde" can be the parable not only of a man but of a nation.