MODERN GERMANY

Taranaki Daily News, 1 December 1932, Page 6

MODERN GERMANY

CONDITIONS IN BERLIN. WAR CLOUD LOOMING. Is Berlin a fair sample of modem Germany? In India and the U.S.S.R. I do not believe that the great cities reflect the mind of the people, but in the West they do; the little things I have seen and sensed between the glitter of the Kurfurstendamm and the squalor of Koeslinerstrasse are, at any rate, symptomatic of what Germany is doing and thinking, writes Major F. Yeats-Brown in the “Spectator.” I can only write of the little things; anything political would be out of date by the time it'is printed; it is impossible to predict the moves of Storm Troops, Steel Helmets, Reichswehr, Red Fronts, but the day-to-day life of the masses follows a more equable course than the manoeuvring of contending parties. The masses are tired of politics, I fancy, and if it were not for the dire compulsion of want they would not be

extremists. That there are 13,000,000 Navis and 6,000,000 Communists is due chiefly to hunger, although, of course, there are idealists in both parties, particularly among the Nazis, who number in their ranks some of the best brains of Germany. That is an objective fact which we should not shirk in England. A philosophy is being built up round National Socialism which will not be shaken by the sneers of intellectuals. .. . It is a movement in time with the popular will. To shut our eyes to the threat of war it involves is very foolish. Germany intends to have Dantzig and the Corridor; I have no brief for her. I deplore the fact that several million Germans would shed their blood for this cause, but since it is a fact, and since the Poles certainly cannot be talked out of their territory, how . will the matter be settled except by arms? I believe there must be a war in Europe; the best we can hope for is that it will soon be over, and that it will not spread. NEAR BRINK OF RUIN. The German people have been living on the brink of ruin for the last fifteen years. Hitler promises them a way out; eventually they will go his way rather

than toward Communism, provided he adopts, a more moderate policy toward the Jews, to whom the country owes much prosperity. German Communists are at -present receiving very little support from Moscow, because the Soviet Government relies on the capitalist system to supply it with a large part of its technical services and equipment; time enough to proceed with “the ruthless extermination of the exploiting classes” when those classes have themselves forged the weapons for their ruin. Someone has said: “You can smell the steppes in Berlin as you can smell the sea in London.” That is true, but it is the observation of a poet rather than a politician. The Slav against the Teuton sets up a good tension in the German soul. . . . Nothing that' I have seen recently in Berlin, neither the ostentation in the West End nor the squalor in the North, has shaken my impression of a sane, strong, rhythm-loving disciplined people. ... The mass of the people are' patient. I visited a very poor family in the Communist quarter; the man had been unemployed for a year; his allowance had continued to diminish until now he was in receipt of 30s a week for himself, his wife and nine children. They were living in two small rooms. Three ■cabbages foe their daily; meal soup

were simmering ,in a cauldron. A homemade wireless . set stood bn . the' only table. In a window-box some thirty asters and a wilted geranium proclaimed that the constant: struggle , against overcrowding and poverty' had lnot yet,, defeated the family, as I have;.sometimes seen a family defeated in our slums. They seemed to have hope. They; believed that things, would come right . • WANTED A DICTATOR..: I asked the wife if she was a Communist?: . . “Why do you suggest that?” she inquired suspiciously. “She thinks that the private relief she is receiving may be cut off if she talks politics,” explained my guide. I was sorry I had asked the question, and reassured her. Presently she fetched her husband, who was nursing a sick child in the adjoining room. “I come of a family that has always served in the Army,” he said, “and I myself served the whole four years of the war. I voted for the Social Democrats last time, but what do these parties mean? They don’t bring us any food. I want a dictatorship', and the Kaiser to come, back,”' i' .■ What of the rent? I asked. Yes, that had been paid regularly, every fortnight, out of unemployment pay, even if they had all to go hungry for a day, as sometimes happened at the end of the week. (It was about 5s a week). They had never had quite enough to eat since the husband was out of work. But the children were, healthy. It was true that the children were healthy. Soup and bread is the diet of the majority of the populations of the vast tracts of country lying between Hamburg and Vladivostock.. The Germans and the Russians , have not starved. But the Germans, at any rate, have been accustomed to better things, and they are not unnaturally discontented. . . After I had left my poor friends I heard that only a week before the husband, weary with the hopeless quest for .work, had tried to commit suicide by putting his head in the gas oven. His wife had been only just in time to save him. Neither his bearing nor his wife’s, disclosed ’ . the tragedy of suffering that lay behind their polite demeanour. The previous day I had been, to a large literary teaparty in. one of the most beautiful parts of Berlin. Thinking over 'our. conversation there, I feel now that so must the Romans have talked at Herculaneum. Volcanic forces .are close •to us in every one 'of the capitals’ of Europe. If we' neglect . th'em, . dally with small palliatives, pursue the dangerous delusions of internationalism instead of . the more laborious path of national prosperity and pander to Socialism with its cruelly false promises and its brutal materialism, our too comfortable, too sententious civilisation will be overwhelmed by the fiery ashes of revolution—and it will serve us right.