CURRENT LITERATURE
If the four distinguished sponsors whose names appear, with that of the introducer Mr. Wickham Steed, on the dust-cover of The War Against the West (Gollancz, as.), have really ploughed through the volume, they have deserved well of the author, for it is surely one of the dullest books ever published. Mr. Kolnai with immense patience has examined the works of some two or three hundred German Nazi and pre-Nazi writers, a few of them well known, but most of them obscure, and has extracted from them their worst absurdities and monstrosities. _ The product is highly unedifying, but not particularly illu- minating. Those who are already familiar with the Nazi " classics " will not find enough new matter here to com- pensate for the utter boredoni of . perusal. Mr. Kolnai has classified his extracts under general headings. But he has made no attempt. to analyse the background and development of German political thought, the 'reasons for its belated and hypertrophied nationalism, and the peculiar distortions introduced into it by the War and the revolution. Instead of such analysis, we are treated to purple patches like the follow- ing : " The Third Empire is to the Reich of William H what pure stuff is to adulterated ware, what gorgeous nakedness is to hybrid disguise, what the unrestrained roar of a lion is to a muffled snarl." The book leads up to the conclusion, stated on p. 20 lest the reader should.fail to persevere, that " if we are to preserve Western civilisation, then we must make up our mind to destroy Hitlerism."
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