24 AUGUST 1944, Page 10

My hand strays along the bookcase and rests upon another

volume, also bound in black, Mein Kampf : von Adolf Hitler. I open it at random and find that I had marked the phrase: "While the ability of the politician consists in mastering the art of the possible, founder of a political system belongs to that class of men who o please the gods when they both desire and will the impossible. Goethe, with his unflinching doctrine that man should never seek the impossible, would have regarded such a statement as demonstrably insane. Had he been able, which I doubt, to master the repugnanct aroused in him by the actual illiteracy of Mein Kampf, he would, have been so disconcerted by the whine of hysteria which howl through the volume that he would have dismissed it with the one word." unhealthy,"—a word- which to him represented the maximum of condemnation. Yet if he had forced himself to plough further through those turgid pages he would certainly have been horrified by the "pitiful thoughts" which it contains and, above all, by the ' cynical misprisal of the German masses in which Hitler so. lavishly indulges. Goethe, having read his Tacitus, really believed th liberty was an essentially German conception. "The Germans," he said to Eckermann, "brought us the idea of personal freedom, which was possessed by that nation more than any other." With whit horror would he have read in Hitler's bible that German democracy was the true democracy "since with us the leader is freely cho and the problems to be dealt with are not put to the vote of the majority." No man had a greater sense of individual dignity th Goethe and no man so disliked cruelty. The whole Nazi dour would have seemed to him a denial, not of German civilisation, of all human progress.