Deutschland, Deutschland'
MOST humorists achieve their effect by exaggeration, by extravagance, and by absurdity. Georges Mikes' method is,just the opposite: he _produces funny sensations by sound good sense and by direct assault; 'by suddenly exposing a hiddeh but obvious truth he shocks us into laughter. His innumerable readers know by now how his mind works and how he approaches a subject. His comments on the English, the Americans and the Israelites are as delightful as they are enlighten- ing. Undaunted, and with disarming candour, Mikes now tackles the most controversial and explosive theme of all: Germany. David Langdon sends us off to the right start with an excellent jacket. This report on a car trip through Germany in the spring of 1952 teaches us, in fact, at much about ourselves as about the Germans. And half the laughs, too, are produced by the exposure of our own befogged foolishness. Right at the beginning Mikes admits that ho did not succeed in solving the "German question," but he succeeds in clarifying the basic issues to an astonishing degree; and that already leads more than halfway towards a solution. With admirable detachment he sees and understands—and makes us see and under- stand—a great many of the wretched problems. He cuts right through the tangle of prejudices, of shame and guilt and horror, which hangs, a thick cloud, over the whole "German question." These short icuts—sometimes over-simplifications—help us in the face of ,palling difficulties to find once more our own sense of proportion. A sense of proportion the Germans, in spite of having produced in Wilhelm Busch their own Edward Lear, do not possess, because the humorist in Germany is a solitary bird and not as in England the culmination of a people's attitude. Mikes warned us, this time there would not be a laugh on every page. For once he is
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