WAR GUILT AND WAR AIMS
SIR,—" Cest du choc des opinions que jaillit la lumiere." Mr. Felix Fries considers my- suggestion to inform the German people of the responsibility of its own Government for the last War a monstrous one, while Mr. A. R. Cripps, I gather, seems to believe that, if anything, I don't go far enough. May I be allowed to use your invaluable forum again to try to reconcile these views into a synthesis which may perhaps be of some practical value with regard to our present problems?
The well meant plea of Mr. Fries against what he calls " enforcing truth at the point of the bayonet,' entirely fails to take account of the German temperament, which accepts commands when sternly enforced, but is deaf to suggestions and pleas. It is to be bitterly regretted that this was not understood by the appeasers of all denominations who have tried to buy off the Germans with good words and good deeds.
On the other hand, I venture to disagree with Mr. A. R.
Cripps's belief that the war guilt of 1914 never oppressed the Germans ; to my mind, it was largely the reaction against the intolerable feeling of guilt in them which made them so eager to follow Hitler, who stumped the country preaching that Germany had neither started nor lost the War, but had been " knifed in the back," and then bled white by her ruth- less enemies. The lamentably misguided, but nevertheless potent, idealism of many Germans revolted at this picture of utter denial of justice, which made them eager to accept any sacrifice in order to redress it.
In this connexion, may I be allowed to correct one passage of Mr. Rom Landau's sweeping indictment of the whole German people? The " popular German proverb " he quotes is not a proverb at all, but a truncated misquotation of Emmanuel Geibel's poem, " Deutschlands Beruf," first published in 1861, the last strophe of which reads :
" Macht und Freiheit, Recht und Sine, Klarer Geist und sc..harfer Hieb Ziigeln dann aus starker Mine jeder Selbstsucht wilden Trieb, Und es mag am deutschen Wesen EMmal noch die Welt genesen."
which, as every reader understanding German can see, is (or was at the time of writing), not an expression of over- weening arrogance, but one of pious, wishful and idealistic
thinking.
I submit that it is this idealism we shall have to appeal to if we want to find some kind of modus vivendi with the Germans, 70 or 8o millions of whom will, after all, still be living in the very midst of our continent even though the Nazis are defeated. And the only solution that can appeal to them and offer an alternative to the continuance of Nazi domination is that Federation of free peoples which the fetish of national sovereignty has so far rendered Utopian, a Federa- tion under which the German people, liberated from their execrable present rulers, should be allowed to enjoy our com- mon heritage and to attain, together with the rest of the world, that lasting peace, that true freedom and that durable prosperity which the most smashing Nazi victory could never achieve for them. Needless to say, whereas Germans as such should then be admitted to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States of Europe, their Government would have to give all proper guarantees to, and be controlled by, the central body of the Union while passing through the transitional novitiate status of what would be the equivalent to an American " territory." A wise and firm hand would then be needed to harness the very real idealism of Germans to the service of their larger community.
It is, I feel, most urgent that some concrete and definite scheme of this kind should be publicly announced and com- municated by all available means to the German people.
Difficult of realisation it certainly is, but there is no other solution.—Yours faithfully, RENE &vim z38 Kensington Park Road, W. z z.
Previous page
