Tourist Class CARLO LEVI visited Germany in the year of

the hula-hoop craze, before the building of the Wall. Yet some of the problems raised in his deeply thought-out book, The Two-Fold Night (trans. lated by J. M. Bernstein, Cresset, 16s.), are as alarming and real now as they were then; per- haps more so. An invitation to lecture in Munich led to a journey including Dachau, Ulm, Stutt- gart and, above all, Berlin: to many Germans `an ideal, a symbol, an intellectual image of glory.' Believing that Germany is in every sense Europe's heartland, and that, since her problems are forever our problems, we are each one, guilty or innocent, young or old, in some way diminished as a result of the fact of the Nazi experience, he wanted to find out first what sort of rebirth there had been, and second why it was that in Germany 'this cataclysm, this world- wide epidemic' had broken out.

He visited the Munich beer-halls and caroused with gluttonous, coarse-featured blondes, gorging food and beer, unafraid of ugliness, fatness, de- formity or old age. He drove through miles of East Berlin streets and pondered over Nefertiti and on the minds that were responsible origin- ally for assembling so many priceless museum treasures. Germany is still in shock, he con- cluded; she is hiding from herself—a centre, she is an empty centre, despite her great 'intestinal' wealth. Her chronic, inner disunity springs per- haps from her people realising that they never have been and never can be loved, and it is this that is responsible for carrying to the extreme all the problems and divisions, all the instincts and death wishes, all the institutions: army, rank, family; anarchic freedom as well as imperial rule; categories and universals—and, in the dense forest of these absolutes, dark anguish.

Strangely enough, compelling and admirable though this account of a first impression is, one cannot but help feeling that Carlo Levi's very earnestness and frantic note-taking, even after dinner parties, are in themselves a bit Teutonic.

Aderogba Ajao's fluently written On the Tiger's Back (Allen and Unwin, 21s.) is a worrying book, too. A Nigerian who became attracted to Com- munism when a disgruntled student in Leicester, he was spirited away to East Germany and there trained for subversive political work— which included arms instruction. Mr. Ajao suc- cumbed merely because there was no option. He even tried to escape. The German and Hun" garian risings, the ludicrous 1957 Youth Festival utter lack of humour, the rigged elections and the in Moscow, the lies and double-talk, the urgency restrictions on movement all combined finally to disillusion him. The trouble was that he Was too intelligent, and after six years he seems 10 have been allowed to cross into West Berlin,' leaving his German wife and his child behinu' Not that he felt much more kindly towards the mild, smug British—dealing with them is rather like punching a very soft foam rubbc,r, mattress. You don't hurt your fist, and you don't do the mattress any harm, and the mat' tress quickly resumes its former shape. It is as if you hadn't punched it at all. John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me (CO!' Tins, 18s.) starts off like a journalist's stunt. Whir should he so impetuously decide to disguise himself as a Negro and what was the in seeking out a New Orleans doctor who COsa darken the pigmentation of his skin in a matter of days only? Perhaps the reader should have been provided with a preface, atnplifYing rvirci Griffin's genuinely humanitarian motives all giving facts about the uproar recorded afterci wards in Time magazine and elsewhere• what a pity we are not allowed one cif tid photographs of him turned into that 'fierce, Oa" very dark Negro'! However, because Mr. Griffin has a novelise! gift of dialogue and characterisation, the bcottc. succeeds eventually as an interesting and Pret searing document. When he heard of a lynellt in Mississippi, he deliberately made for the very area where it occurred. He encouraged situation, which brought out the 'hate stare,' like asIdusgr for a drink of water in the wrong place 'lc trying to use a white man's lavatory. T° 1°°t0 at a white woman on a film poster was akin k contemplated rape. Hitch-hiking after dar,,, meant being treated like a pornographic Onn"ci with endless questions about Negro sex-life ans genitalia. No wonder John Howard G°11.,0 neighbours at Mansfield, Texas, hanged bit° effigy, and his family had to leave the district. Only could have initiated Survival of the Free ( anx tr

the Germans, Carlo Levi might consider,

lated by John Coombs, Hamilton, 30s.), iecr5 tensive and sumptuous survey of the w°,r bv chief national parks and game reserves. Edited Dr. Wolfgang Engelhardt, its aim is entirely' tis altruistic: to encourage, or awaken, Po'` interest everywhere in the vital matter of , preservation of wild life. The illustrations u", animals and birds are really magnificent there are articles by experts and game vsarde the with a gazetteer at the end. Actuatty,

with

world's population increasing so alarminglY, au nature reserves will eventually be threatened• least we can prevent such things as the mate extermination of the blue whale-50,000 used al be killed each year, but now 15,500 is lhe 'ego the bisndcohne.rish rare creatures

he European such

(trans' Walter Pause's Salute the Mountains

lated by Ruth Michaelis, Jena and Arthur most

Rat' cliff, Harrap, 45s.) contains undoubtedly the -bs 1 beautiful collection of mountain pholograf best have ever seen. Its sub-title is 'The hundred walks in the Alps,' and the area covered is frail) real agony for him.

whittling down his choice to a bare hundre

Berehtesgals

OS Grenoble to Klagenfurt and from

to Cortina. None of the walks are exacting hat or hazardous, and the author admits , d Was RALEIGH TREVEL