FRANCE AND GERMANY

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 January 1933, Page 5

FRANCE AND GERMANY

STRAINED FEELING ANALYSED. How do the Germans see themselves to-day in relation to the French? asks “The Times’s” Paris correspondent. I It would seem that they realise better than the French the vast difference between the settled conditions of France, where almost every citizen has some reserves of wealth, and those of Germany, where, since the collapse of the mark and the extinction of the accumulations of wealth, three-quarters of the population are proletarian. As between Germans and French the spirit of equality has broken down. The Germans complain

l that promises made to them have not been kept, and that their country has been forced into a position of in- * feridrity unbearable to a sovereign people. They know that they will ' come through the present turmoil i without either bloodshed or - Bolshevism. They know that • the Germany of the future in its political structure will differ greatly from the old, while the new £ social and' economic foundations will be different also if only because the old ones have been shattered past re- " pair. They are in a fluid state, and they see a static France trying all the time to render the present order rigid arid permanent. Since they regard the Treaty of Versailles as conducive to an artificial state of affairs, they are opposed to anything tending to petrify it. They regard France as the symbol of the maintenance of an order they refuse to recognise as .permanent, reasonable, fair, or just. France seeks security that can only be attained if Germany becomes resigned to the existing order. To the rigidity of the French the Germans oppose what they call a “dynamism,” result of a rush of forces they cannot resist or control. They liken it to a river that has burst its banks under i insupportable pressure. The German voices which float across seem to convey a conviction that France is suffering from a psychosis of fear. It is strange to read the reassuring message of a German writer that France need not be afraid, that German dynamism conveys no menace, and that the modest Reichswehr means no harm. It is equally strange to come across the suggestion that a good line of proach would be for the general staffs of the two countries to engage in conversations , coupled with a declaration that Germany’s Russian policy is not directed against France. It implies an assumption of fear on the part of Frenchmen that is groundless, and it suggests that Germans have a long way to travel if they are to find the approaches that will bring them nearer to the French mind. But more than anything they seem to resent the lofty moral tone they detect in the attiude of successive French Governments towards Germany. No advance can be made, they say, if moral considerations are allowed to intervene.

THROUGH FRENCH EYES. Next the question of how the French see the Germans. In spite of the many missions, exchanges of professional visits, special correspondents sent on voyages of discovery, and all the wealth of mutual explanations in the Press, the two countries still seem, in the eyes of the detached observer acquainted with both, to know surprisingly little of each other. The French are the more confident. Indeed, some French writers declare that, amid the internal chaos' and welter of excesses in Germany, Frenchmen may claim to know that country better than the Germans themselves. Most French people, it is safe to say, know almost nothing about the strange ferments at work i» Germany to-d'ay. They see it all in terms of disorder and license, whether it be the return of youth to naturism, parades’of Reichsbanner or Stahlhelm, street fights between Communists and Nazis, economic jugglery, or political experiments on the principle of trial and error. The French are not in the least afraid of the German demonstrations and infractions to which

they attach no military value. But they are profoundly distrustful of those who provoke them and thereby endanger the world’s peace. They realise the importance of a contented, well-ordered Germany, and still more the valuable help it could' bring to the maintenance of peace. They even desire, very heartily and in the general interest, to help Germany to this end. But they are disconcerted at the rebuffs they receive in the process. The Stahlhelm parade and the outburst of nationalism that followed immediately upon France’s gesture in evacuating the Rhineland left a. deep scar on French opinion: subsequent events, in which Parliamentary Government has Been submerged and Germany has returned to absolute rule by a, Camarilla in the best Wilhelmine manner, have fortified the mistrust. They see no excuse in the plea of German dynamism; it is in their eyes merely a dynamism of instinct, and they have a dynamism of their own wholly intellectual, which they think far more effective in the long run.