I was distressed also by the fact that my German
friend (who is an internationalist and a liberal) should have been betrayed by his rage at my lack of enthusiasm into disclosing his anti-Semitic bias. I am always frightened of anti-Semitism, since it is an epidemic which might infect the United States or even this country. It is indeed one of the major tragedies of modern history that the Jews should have developed such a selective affinity for Germany. This hopeless love-affair has brought much misery to the Jewish people, and has induced the Germans to behave with enraged cruelty. I look back in pity and terror to the decade between 1920 and 1930, when the Jews in Berlin enjoyed their short-lived honeymoon. I recall particularly an afternoon in 1928 which I spent in the company of Emil Ludwig and Erich Mendelsohn. We visited some of the more fantastic buildings erected under the guidance of William II, and as a contrast some of the shops and schools which Mendelsohn had himself designed. We finished up in the house which Mendel- sohn had built for himself in the pine woods, looking down upon the chain of lakes which stretch to Potsdam. It was a house of the most advanced design. Mendelsohn pressed a button beside the tea-table and with a distant hum the whole front of the house slid into the basement and the drawing-room became a loggia Mendelsotin's eyes sparkled with glee. Emil Ludwig (who is a man of less attractive character) smiled slowly with racial satis- faction. I noted that smile at the time, feeling that it portended ill for all concerned. I remember it today. I remember it when Jewish refugees in this country scold me because our General Staff is not always as efficient as General Haider or because our propaganda lacks the offensive spirit of Dr. Goebbels. I feel at such times that their spiritual home, the magnet of their home- sickness, is not the amethyst hills of Palestine but the streets that radiate from the Gedachtniskirche at Berlin. I fear that this unhappy predilection may end by chilling sympathy, and that in the flames and smoke of peace we may come to ignore the Jewish problem or to dismiss it as a minor inconvenience. Here at least is a problem, the unhappy nature of which is constant and predictable. I wish that some of the Princeton professors woted devote their great imaginative gifts to its solution.
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