THE PRIVATE LIFE IN GERMANY
What Hitler Did To Us. By Eva Lips. (Michael Joseph. tbs. 6d.) MRS. LIPS is the wife of the distinguished anthropologist who was once head of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, wrote The Savage Hits Back, and now occupies a post at the University of Chicago. Her book is the story of " how, in the course of the Hitler Revolution, Professor Lips-lost his job, his income, his friends, his students, his home' and his -country." She is not a wholly sympathetic author ; her writing is riddled with the whimsicality which is the curse of many cultivated women and betrays a naive self-satisfaction which is not entirely justified. But even her faults are so typical of the environment she describes that they add • to the value of her narrative as a historical document. As such, it has very great merits. It illustrates one extremely important aspect of National Socialism—the war against culture—and describes the inevitable fate of the middle-class intelligentsia under a Nazi regime. Professor Lips suffered neither torture nor imprisonment : the lesson of his experience is that even without her concentration camps Nazi Gernitiny would Still have no claim to be called civiliged. Professor Lips' sin was that he believed a scientist and a scholar should be exclusively interested in truth. He refused to use his position, and to allow his museum to be used, to propagate official doctrines which he knew to be false. National Socialism cannot tolerate such men. • And as an anthropologist Professor Lips was particularly exposed to. danger. 'For to Nazis anthropology is merely a means of giving authority to the lies of " racialism " ; and Professor Lips' book was designed to show how ridiculous Nordic Pre- tensions often seem in ' the childishly penetrating eyes of their savage subjects. The Savage Hits Back is an admirable book which shows the Nordic Man as a King who has no clothes. Professor Lips' position soon became untenable after Hitler came to power. He lost the salary and pension to which he was legally entitled ; he was deprived of any oppor- tunity of continuing his scientific work, and he was forced into an exhausting struggle to retain possession of the original material arduously collected for his book. The weapons of the authorities were the lies, threats, blackmail, slander, police persecution, delation which make up the liberties of the subject in Germany today. One of the most important points of Mrs. Lips' story is to show how quickly they became a normal feature in German life ; one of the most repulsive is the servility and cowardice of the great mass of German academicians in a crisis which challenged everything for which they are supposed, and once claimed, to stand. They evidently have not changed much since the days when they were attacked for precisely these faults by Nietzsche.
• , Professor Lips' case is the clearer because he was neither a Jew, nor a Marxist, nor a Pacifist. It was simply and purely devotion to scientific truth that the Nazis attacked in him. For he was what is called " completely unpolitical," which to many people will make his misfortunes the more unjust. Yet in one sense this was the real seed of these misfortunes. For it was the attitude of the entire class to which Professor Lips belonged, the famous intelligentsia of Germany, which in its search for truth completely ignored what was happening in the street, the misery of millions and the sinisfer pretensions of the few. The orator from Brannan was despised as an ignorant demagogue, the aspirations and sufferings of the workers were not worth the attention of University Professors. It is not surprising that when their doom stared them in the face they hardly recognised it, did not understand it, and could do nothing against it. Their fate may be tragic, but not for the reasons given in this book. It is of no importance that Professor Lips and his wife lost the possessions so lovingly described, the pretty little villa in the suhurbs with the roses in the garden, the books in the library, the artistic objects, the devoted servant; the dog almogt human, the week-end cottage. is important that, . through " political indifference," the - German intelli- gentsia. after the War proved. themselves so utterly incapable of comprehending and mastering the problems with which they were faced. Their complete collapse, sordid and shame- ful, before the brutality and barbarismof the Nazis after Hitler had forcibly solved their problems for than is only a sign and result of their -impotence to solve them for themselves. A few, like Professor Lips, emerged from their terrible ordeal with their personal honour and integrity saved ; but even this cannot acquit them of their great responsibility for the degrada- tion of culture from which they were the first to suffer.
GORONWY REES.
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