PLEA FOR PRIVACY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 February 1940, Page 3

PLEA FOR PRIVACY

"ANTS IN AN ANT-STATE." A reader of the “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung" made some interesting comments recently in a letter to the editor on the disappearance of privacy. A summary follows. Ho suggests that the limitation of private rights is no new feature of German life and points proudly to the discipline of Prussia under Frederick the Great and the rules of the medieval. guilds. He recalls the communal life of the ancient Gormans in the time of the groat migrations. But. lie writes, if all privacy is sacrificed to the community. then the sacrifice of blood and belongings which the individual makes loses all significance. "The individual becomes an atom, an ant, offering selfsacrifice in an ant-State." The writer declares that modern youth has discovered that family life is the last refuge of privacy, the only sphere in which the individual feels himself a human being. After a victorious war this problem will have to be faced. The culture of the people can only flourish if the rights of personality are granted to those who "do not fit comfortably into predetermined limits; a certain minimum of private life must be left to the comrade if a modest but real hum'anity is to be preserved in him,”