Apologias for Germany
Germany's Three Reichs. By Edmond Vermeil. (Dakers. 18s,.) - Germany: From Defeat to Defeat; By Karl Spiecker. (Macdonald. 5s.) Germany and Europe: Political Tendencies from Frederick the Great to Hitler. By F. Darmstaedter. (Methuen. 12s. 6c1.)
DURING the last ten years there has been an abundance—even a superabundance—of books about Germany by English and American writers. Some of them are of permanent vakte, and the time has come for students of foreign affairs to re-read these. But few reliable, solid and well-informed books on Germany by French and German writers have appeared. We therefore welcome these three books, all of which—the first pre-eminently--deserve the adjectives just mentioned. Professor Vermeil, of the Sorbonne,' has for many years been a leading French authority on Germany, and his book, ample in size, is drawn from the fullness of several previous works by him on various aspects of German history, social life, philosophy, religion and psychology.
To English readers anticipating a propagandist bias in a French critic of Germany it should be said at once that Professor Vermeil, in his scholarly and very readable book, approaches his subject with understanding derived from long, .first-hand and sympathetic experience. Except for the significant omission of Richelieu from his analysis of Germany's disunity he is balanced and detached, and it is hardly exaggerating to call his book an apologia, not in the sense of an excuse for guilt, but in that of a -well-reasoned explanation, a pondered interpretation, in the light of history, geo- graphy—which he holds has been terribly " hard on Germans— religion, philosophy and politics. More fairly than any other writer we can recall, he explains the perennial tension between German universalism and nationalism, and the reason why Germany never took up her "true mission of welding together Germanism and the Latin" world." He rightly blames the excessive industrialisation of Germany, but he places it in relation to developments from which England has not been free, and later speaks of post-war Germany
as infected by an excess of both Americanisation and Russianisation. This is not in the least to excuse Germany's leaders, or explain away the fateful docility and receptivity of. the German people. But, like another passage which deserves quotation, it removes from them some of the responsibility for the vileness of the Nazi system. Professor Vermeil, without excusing widespread complicity or abating any demand for appropriately .tevere justice, holds that Nazism was superimposed, and continues:
"Place not faith in the intimate union alleged by the National Socialist leaders to exist between them and the German people. The leaders of the Party miy be compared to a bizarre deus ex machina. They made out of nothing a formidable machinery of power that responded neither to the infinite diversity nor to the trtle aspirations of the German masses. . . . It simplified and rationalised Germany to excess, destroying the country's civilisation and humanism. It made of that country, once so rich in European culture, a sort of monstrous executioner, charged with the destruction of the heritage of thousands of years, supremely the country of iconoclasts."
There are similar passages of balanced perception and temperate judgement on almost every page, and it is regrettable that there is no space to deal with other admirable excursions—always based on intimate knowledge and sometimes affectionate in tone—into German music and poetry, liberal and rational philosophy, the links with - Western humanism which Hitler determined to break beyond repair.
The final chapter should be especially noted. It is entitled "Psychological Sketch and Future Perspectives," and in it Professor Vermeil gives his. reasons for thinking that Germany's "psycholo- gical pluralism" has yielded to "psychological uniformity." Both co-exist in the German mind; hence the "Two Germanier " ' - and he concludes that "the real German problem has been and still is the problem of unity in moderation and moderation in unity." All this, with the pages on German and Russian totalitarianism, the importance of true Polish independence, "watered by the purest currents of Western thought," and the future significance of Austria, are of great interest. The whole book is of real and immediate importance.
Dr. Spiecker disclaims the intention of making an apologia, yet his modest book is an attempt to .remove a universal stigma from his people. In his preface Professor Seton-Watson testifies to the evident sincerity and enlightenment of this former secretary of the Catholic Centre- Party. It is unfortunate that, in an otherwise reasonable endeavour to justify the Weimar Republic against those who treat it as the culpable forerunner of Hitler, he has an uncritical attack on the Versailles Treaty. But two of his points against Allied policy are well made, the first that Germany in 1919 should not have been given a standing army, but a militia, the second that the British and French Governments strained at Weimar gnats and soon after swallowed Nazi camels.
Dr. Darmstaedter's book has rather a misleading title. Implicit in it is, no doubt, the recommendation that a liberated, united Germany must be re-integrated into a renewed Europe, but there is little on the relations between Germany and European tradition, too little attention paid to the deliberate way in which National Socialism has turned Germany aside from Europe's Christian, humanist past. The book is, in fact, a series of separate essays on German politics, political philosophy and education during the past two hundred years. Some of these confirm and amplify Professor Vermeil's chapters, for example the account of the jurist Savigny, while the detailed criticism of the Weimar Constitution is a useful footnote from a specialist to Dr. Spiecker's book.
JOHN STAPLETON.
Previous page
