From Mr C.A. Latimer Sir: George Szamuely says in his
article that `no one could have predicted the rise of Hitler'. Giles MacDonogh (Don't let's be beastly to the Germans', 4 September) sug- gests that 'crude Vansittart propaganda' could be responsible for anti-German feel- ing. I think they are both wrong. Certainly Germans can be attractive — I grew to like the working-class Berliners when I worked with them during the airlift in 1948-49. They were good Germans, the bedrock of the old Social Democratic party. But when I read Friedrich von Hugel's book, The German Soul, published in 1916, I recog- nised something which Szamuely and Mac- Donogh both ignored. Von Hugel, a distin- guished Catholic theologian who died in 1925, saw Hitler coming. He referred to `fundamental peculiarities of the German soul: an imperious need . . . of theory, sys- tem, completeness at every turn and in every subject matter; an immense capacity for auto-suggestion, and an ever proximate danger, as well as power, of becoming so dominated by such vivid projection of the racial imaginings and ideals as to lose all compelling sense of the limits between such dreams and reality, and especially all awareness, or at least alertness, as to the competing rights and differing gifts, indeed as to the very existence, of other souls and other races. . . '. He emphasised 'the high pitch, strain and cost, and hence danger, of the German's psychic life'.
I feel he would hardly have been surprised at anything that happened after his death.
C.A. Latimer
3 The Street, Melton, Woodbridge, Suffolk
Previous page
