CLEAR PICTURE OF GERMANY

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21536, 27 July 1935, Page 19

CLEAR PICTURE OF GERMANY

Germany in My Tim*. By W. Beaton Wagner. Elch and Cowan- M 9 pp. <6/- net.) Thronßh Whltcombe and Tombs Ltd.

Since human beings are human | beings, there is no difficulty in understanding why all the scores of books about Germany written in the iast two years have been mainly emotional. More mjid and less feeling than man can have would be required to write of events in that tortured country without prejudices showing through, or even dominating, the story. The effect of this great mass of fanatically pro-Nazi or bi-terly antiNaz. propaganda has been to make most people distrustful of everything written about the country, which is not a bad thing, and to see all the inhabitants of Germany as part of the National Socialist movement, which is ; very bad. The common-sense Mrs Wagner, an Englishwoman who has lived in Germany since 1910. serves her adopted country well by making her readers | see Germans of to-day not as Jew- j slaying fiends or crusaders in the noble cause of the Swastika,' but as people much like Englishmen, Americans, or, presumably, Bulgarians or Nicaraguans. In her early chapters, where she miraculously gives the atmosphere of pre-war, wartime, and early post-war Germany in 67 pages, she shows why Germany is Nazi now. There is no specia' pleading in her book; the small pieces of life she saw need no comment to help ihem explain Hitlerism. The tragedy of the tenement house in Berlin after the war is so dark that *he reader wonders that people tried so far beyond what people think thty can bear found refuge in nolhing worse than National Socialism. All the other chapters help. The rich, the poor, the children, morals, humour and the reverse, the theatre, books, and the press, each is given a short history, and all do their share to make comprehensible the reactions of a tortured country. Many more learned people hwe written books about Germanyrbut none of them have shown it so clearly.