A Spectator's Notebook
NOTHING astonishes •me more than the genuine inability of Germans generally to understand in the least degree the feeling the actions of the Nazi party have aroused in this and other countries. They harp on the word revolution and seem to think that ought to end the matter. What has in fact happened is that Herr Hitler, having been appointed Chancellor without a Parliamentary majority, forcibly monopolized all means of publicity during big election campaign, and being returned to power by virtue of . his alliance with the Nationalists, whom he is now steadily throwing over, entered on a fierce campaign of repression against Jews, Socialists and Communists—a campaign marked by hundreds or thousands of individual outrages any one of which would have made a public sensation in a country like Great Britain. Today the Press is dragooned and freedom of public speech has disappeared. The result is that, as Mr. Walter Lippmann, quite the most influential publicist in the United States, points out, Germany has inevitably regained in America the unenviable reputation she enjoyed during the later days of Kaiserdom, and lost all the friends the new democratic Germany after the war made for herself. That, of course, is as true or truer of this country: Public sympathy has swung sharply away. from Germany and towards France. Nothing is more significant than that the Manchester Guardian, most Germanophile of all daily papers in Great Britain, is now banned in Germany as result of its journalistic honesty in describing the situation in Germany as it is.
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