Day After Day. By Odd Nansen. (Putnam. 21s.)
THE puzzle of the German national character has not ceased to pesturb Europe ; in Day After Day, which is a meticulously kept diary of three years of internment in German hands during the war, German behaviour at close hand and in detail is an important secondary interest. But the author's chief concern, and the primary importance of the book, lie in the sensitive observation of men, not as Germans or Norwegians, but as human beings under the stress of internment. Dr. Nansen is a distinguished Norwegian whose internment was probably caused by his own position in Norwegian life as well as by his father's celebrity. He was arrested early in 1942, and spent the rest of the war in camps in Norway and Germany. During most of this time he kept a diary, portions of which were smuggled out of camp periodically in hollowed-out bread-boards. The physical conditions of camp life have been described often enough and well enough, but it is doubtful if the psychological atmosphere and the neuroses of internment have ever been so sensi- tively conveyed.. Dr. Nansen was able to sec with detachment as well as sympathy the disintegrating pressure which imprisonment exerts on the character of the average man ; this is conveyed, and the temptation to whitewash or dramatise his companions is avoided scrupulously. He was able to observe, too, how the German warder was himself imprisoned by his task. His warders behave sometimes well, for the most part badly, and always as miserable men, pursued by their own pretensions to authority, haunted by their isolation- the victims, more and more, of their collective and individual neurosis.
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