The Re-education of Germany
German with Tears. By Peter F. Wiener. (Cresset Press. 6s.)
IT is not Mr. Wiener's fault—not much, anyway—that this is of the most distressing books to be published during the war. mended by Lord Vansittart with fervour, by Dean Inge Wit certain reserve, it provides the former with a documentation V. Black Record and The Roots of the Trouble conspicuously necessarily, lacked. Those propagandist pamphlets asserted German education was incorrigibly militarist and brutalising ; Wiener supplies proofs and examples. As a German who was educ in Germany under the Weimar Republic, still more as, later o German master at an English public school, patiently collect mass of material about German teaching under National Soda he has obvious credentials, and regular readers of this journal not need his reminder that it was his agitation in these pages 14 secured the withdrawal by the Oxford and Cambridge Examins Board of a set book which Mr. Wiener had no difficulty in sh° was undiluted German propaganda.
As an observer with undeniable qualifications, then, Mr. Wi sets out to prove his thesis. He adopts the effective device letter from a former pupil who complains that, although taught German language, he was not properly taught German—that is, German ideology as compared with the English. Mr. 'CO
letters in reply remedy the omission—at least to the extent that, by copious extract and illustration (there are one or two loathsome pictures from Nazi children's books), he shows that the National Socialists captured German youth almost from their cradlps, and cast their minds into moulds of hatred, brute physical prowess, aggressive militarism and contempt for th..t Christian virtues—this last he incidentally traces to its "real roots" in the "evil influence" of Luther.
This is no doubt healthy reading for a certain type of sentimentalist, but it is undeniably depressing. And still more depressing is Mr. Wiener's emphasis—supported by selected quotations—that this aspect of German education is only new in being so intense and systematised, that much inc same sort of thing was going on between 1920 and 1930, that 125 years ago German professors and poets were bloodthirsty, and that the famous German Lehrfreiheit, academic freedom, was all a myth. These are extravagant generalisa- tions. German bloodthirstiness a century or more ago was inspired by French aggression ; there is plenty of testimony to the reality of widely divergent political views in German universities before 1914, and as for education under the Weimar democrats, we have the unimpeachable testimony of Mr. S. Roberts in his The House That Hitler Built, to the liberal, almost defeatist, tendency of a large number of German teachers in those years. The whole trend of German literature and culture for years after the Armistice was radical and internationalist, whatever may have been the unfortunate survivals of aggressive imperialism in certain school-books, and up to the triumph of Hitler there were eloquent and prophetic warnings of the destruction of Western Christian culture which was admittedly being pursued more deliberately and officially in Germany, but was part of a general tendency from which few nations were exempt. Mr. Wiener appears to recognise this in his closing pages, when in the only glimmer of hope in this depressing record he postulates, as essential to our task of re-educating the German people, the formation in this country of "a youth with the highest ethical ideas and ideals." Such a process will hardly be assisted by fostering the belief that no assistance can be found in the entire range of German culture, and that the proved exceptions to his indictment are utterly unrepresentative of the people from whom they sprung and the nation to which they owe allegiance. Mr. Wiener's book has a useful negative function ; his earnestness and sincerity suggest that he could supply something positive and constructive when the
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