GERMAN WRITERS
Sig,—Yesterday I read in The Spectator, No. 6003 (May 16th) an essay a Alan Ross, Books in Germany, and I read: "The second (class) con- sisted of mainly bad, but much publicised Nazi writers, like the anti- Semitic Stapel, Rosenberg and Blunck, president of the Nazi Writers Committee." I wonder that a distinguished English review publishes an evidently ill-informed writer. (For example, he names Ernst Tunger as "novelist." Tiinger is not a novelist. His Abenteuerliches Herz is not a " novel," as Ross says, but a -collection of Betrachtungen, Gedanken now. Auf Den Marmorklippen—not Auf die Marmor Klippen—may scarcely be named a novelette ; it is a secular apocalypse.) As to myself you will allow me to set right: (1) I never was a member of the N.S.D.A.P., not even of the Reichsschrifttumskammer. Some of my books were forbidden, diffamiert or not allowed to be published. (2) Rosen- berg's book, Der Mythus des XX yahrhunderts was criticised and rejected in my periodical, in 1937. Since the Machtergreifung, 1933, Rosenberg was always persecuting me. (3) When the S.S. in their weekly paper Das Schwarze Korps attacked me as being an enemy of the Nationalist Socialist Weltanschauung (1935), Blunck (not a president of the Nazi Writers' Committee ; he was the president of the Reichsschriftturnskarnrner) did no longer know me. (4) In the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (1937, May) I was attacked in an essay Wilhelm Stapel and die 7udenfrage (7 pages) for being not anti-Semitic. These facts can be proved.
Excuse my English. I am reading Shakespeare as well as The Times, but I regret to have not any opportunity of English conversation.—Yours
faithfully, WILHELM STAPEL. Hamburg-Grossflottbek, Samdkamp, 5.
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