Dangling
Stranger Within. By Sir Francis Oppenheimer (Faber, 42s.) SIR FRANCIS OPPENHEIMER, writing at ninerY' cuts short his autobiography. Stranger Withlr,,i' with apparent finality at 1920. Ii is a sill. strained account of an uneasy childhood ,pent as ,'8 British-Jewish boy in a German school and 013 frustrated career in the British diplomatic service as a man whose ability could never make MI for, , his German-Jewish surname. It was Oppenheimer senior, a merchant who had made a small fortune in London and taken British citizenshirl who first suspended him between nationalities' With a sharp sense of educational values he seal his son from a Frankfurt Gymnasium, Vi3 a 'these Bayswater crammer, to Jowett's Balliol. were supposedly the best of. both worlds, but t",9 young Oppenheimer felt a stranger in each dg not surprising that he made a break for MI where he set up as a commercial .artist. This might have been the answer, but his father died he returned to Frankfurt to aut minister the estate. He took over his father's Pdse as British consul, and was ,soon sending h°,111, reports on German economic conditions so Pain; taking and professional 'that they must have seemed, at that time, almost in bad taste. Ild,,"; ever, they made it possible for him to make I. difficult transfer from consular to diploma°, service, and, when the Great War broke du"
recommended him as the man to organise the blockade in Holland and Switzerland. He worked like an ant and had his successes; but that gave him no protection against prejudice. By the end of the war he had been edged out of office. It's depressing to think of someone forty years later setting down each compliment by his superiors, and remembering each rebuff—still trying to put the record straight after another war has passed. But it's the resentment (vigorously denied) which makes the book difficult to put out of your mind: that, and the gathering effect of the unhappy official phrases and the corrosive detail.
GEOFFREY NICHOLSON
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