I have often reflected That in the whole of history
no generation can have suffered quite so much as the German generation which is contemporary with my own. Albrecht Bernstorff, for instance, was old enough to have known the splendour of the years before the first German war, while young enough not to have realised the appalling vulgarity of the Germany of William II. One gloriously happy year as a Rhodes Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford, inspired him with a clear understanding of our character and ideals. Then came the first war and the sad humiliation of defeat ; as a young man of only twenty-eight he was sent as representative of the German Foreign Office to the Allied Commission of the Rhine- land. He would often tell me with what severe self-discipline he forced himself to observe with philosophic resignation the huge tricolor being hoisted over the castle of Ehrenbreitstein. "I knew," he said, "that I should become Useless to everybody if I once allowed myself to be dominated by emotions of rancour and revenge." He believed that if Germany were to accept the inevitable, to carry out the Treaty with loyalty and resignation, and to seek gradually to rebuild her economic and cultural position in Europe, she might acquire a leading place among the civilised Powers. • It was thus with undeviating courage that he faced the revolution and inflation, regarding these misfortunes as consequential to the collapse of 1918. Although he realised the many interna! and external difficulties which lay in the path of the Weimar Republic, yet he never, until 1933, lost faith in a possible democratic and pacific Germany. He was able to convince many people, since he was convinced himself ; and his hatred of the Nazis was based, not merely on natural horror at their methods, but also on deep resentment at their destruction of all the hopes that he had formed. * *
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