THE GERMAN OUTLOOK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 633, 17 August 1951, Page 5

THE GERMAN OUTLOOK

Sir-I wish to answer the misrepresentations made by Dr. J. A. Asher in his letter on my 1YC talks, "Some Impressions of the German Liberal Middle Class." First, I did not, as Dr. Asher says, speak on "The German Outlook." I particularly dislike the glibness with which people talk about "The German Outlook," "The New Zealand Point of View," and so on, and even if I had known the subject exhaustively I should never have permitted myself to use more "general terms than "Many Germans show a tendency." As it was, in the first talk I gave, I said I did not know enough "to make general pronouncements,’ and I thought I had s-made it clear to even ‘the least attentive of listeners that I considered I was "entitled to give only personal impressions of the beliefs and attitudes i found among a small, fairly homogeneous group of people." Furthermore, I said my impressions must necessarily be "superficial," "tentative" and "incomplete," and explained the reasons for this. Then, at intervals I repeated I had been in Germany "only a short time" (it was weeks, by the way, not months), and had "met only a few. people," and I listed some important groups such as rural workers and the wealthy, with whom I had no contacts, and emphasised the fact that "they might well have thought differently" from the group I met. Secondly, Dr. Asher implies that in order to give "a distorted picture" I have "carefully selected" from my exriences. Now, I object to that most harply. It is not my habit to edit experiences in order to arrive at conclusions that please me. (Just why Dr. Asher should think that painting a "dismal picture" should please me is, of course, another matter.) I assure him that if I say I found "despair" and "poor morale" and "paralysis of will" among the "small homogeneous group" I met (and a number of whom I have written to from time to time over the last five years) it is because I did find them. Not even to please him can I say I met "vigorous" and "hopeful" Germans, though from my own feading and the feports of some friends'I am prepared to believe a number of such people exist. Finally, Dr. Asher makes the observation that "the truth is, of course, somewhere between the two extremes" of gloom and rosiness. Of course it is likely.to be. If one collated my experiences with a small homogeneous group, with those of observers of factory employées, wealthy* business men, clerks, rural workers, and the dozens of other groups which go to make up a complex Western society, it is probable one would then be entitled to generalise about "the German outlook.’ and probable: also that one would find that outlook "the strange mixture" Dr. Asher writes about, somewhere befween his "carefully selected rosy picture" and my unedited "sombre one."

PHOEBE C.

MEIKLE

‘Auckland).