■ * An unobtrusive paragraph appeared in one or two
papers a few days ago reporting that the house of Ul'stein was to have all the property confiscated by the Nazis restored to it. What that means remains to be discovered. On about the first day of 1940 Hermann Ullstein, once something like a millionaire, got across the German frontier into France on his way to England, with ten marks in his pocket. A frontier official, dumbfounded, asked "Is this the end of Ul!stein's? " In fact Ullstein's still existed, but in Nazi hands. The vast journalistic enterprise which began when Leopold Ullstein bought a small paper, the Berliner Zeitung, in 1877, and branched out till it was publishing first-rank dailies like the B. Z. am Mittag, the Morgenpost and, most influential of all, the Vossische Zeitung, under the notable editorship of George Bernhard, became merely a servile and unconsidered appen- dage of the Nazi regime. Now the Ullsteins are to get their property back. What property remains intact, what Ullsteins there are to administer it and whether there is any hope of a new Vossische risen from the ashes of the old, I have no knowledge. But the mere paragraph in last week's papers awakens memories of some of the great days of German journalism. If those days have not yet returned it is not for lack of competent writers, but the result of almost insur- mountable material and financial difficulties.
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