Germans on Germans

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 113, 22 August 1941, Page 4

Germans on Germans

HE strangest piece of propaganda that has so far appeared in English must be a book just off the presses of Allen and Unwin, London: German versus Hun, by Carl Brinitzer and Berthe Grossbard. This book, which is most attractively bound and printed, runs to 270 pages, and from the first page to the last consists of bitter things said about Germans by Germans. For example: a remark by Nietzsche in 1887 ("What a treat is a Jew among the Germans!"); one by Schopenhauer in 1851 about German writers (*Doltish, industrious charlatans, scribbling respectable nonsense, without wit or merit"); a now pathetic remark by Borne that "one is freer in prison in France than at liberty in Germany"; a statement by Werfel on the eve of the war that the present generation of Germans would "promptly slaughter their own children if they were required to do so by a philosophy armoured with power and with scientific trimmings." On a rough count there are about twelve hundred of these pronouncements ranging in time over three centuries and in authorship from Luther to the Fuhrer himself. And they have of course been collected by Germans. But this is just attacking an enemy with a backfiring gun. For every bitter remark made about Germany by some German one could, by searching, find two made about England by some Englishman-first because the volume of our literature is greater, and second, because our liberty to speak is many times greater. From Swift alone, or Carlyle, or Dickens, or Shaw an industrious German could collect almost as much verbal explosive ‘as there is in this whole volume; and when Mr. Duff Cooper in the foreword calls it "the truth about Germany," he invites every German, and for that matter every Englishman, to ask if Rudyard Kipling’s notorious remark was the truth about Queen Victoria or one of Cromwell’s speeches the truth about parliamentary democracy. The boomerang in fact hits us harder than that. If these things about Germans are true, as perhaps half of them still are; the fact that they have been spoken by’ Germans makes nonsense of the argument that there are no free German minds. If they are not true, or not true to-day-mere survivals and anachronisms dug up from a part as remote and unreal as our own-the more prominence we give to them the more plainly we show that the people to whom they originally applied are now dead. It is not necessary to fake charges against Germany, and it is tempting Providence to trail our coat back three hundred years.