BERLIN’S SAFETY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 March 1941, Page 6

BERLIN’S SAFETY

. < NOTHING WORTH DESTROYING. 1 t In one sense (the “Manchester s Guardian" said recently) Berlin can ( congratulate itself on being proof ] against reprisals from tiie air; there is ( nothing in tiie city worth destroying j as a return for what was lost in Lon- j don on the last Sunday of tiie old ' year. There are still, presumably, the ' thirty-one marble groups of tile Sieges Allee not yet fifty years old but there *■ arc no churches comparable with those 1 which Wren built and Hitler lias de- s stroyed. There is the armoury built r at the end of the seventeenth century, t but the dates of most of the public j\ buildings speak for themselves. The j "new" Town Hall of 1861-70 hardly f compares witli Guildhall from any ,- point of view. Tiie monument to 1 Frederick the Great is not yet' a con- a tur.y old. Berlin was an inconsiderable town in an inconsiderable State when London was the mart of the - world. Lewis Carroll’s remark that "the beast-killing principle lias been carried out everywhere with a relentless monotony which makes some parts T of Berlin look like a fossil slaughterhouse" is apt enough for its later de- it velopment. ] £