Poles in Germany
Finucane, James
Poles in Germany The Return of Germany: a tale of two countries, by Norbert Muhlen. Regnery. 310 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by James Finucane THIS is principally a book attacking Communism, as it...
...But pooh-poohing this bogey, he conjures up another with his story of covert connections between German nationalists and Soviet agents...
...THE REVIEWERS DAVID FELLMAN is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin...
...JAMES FINUCANE is executive secretary of the National Council for the Prevention of Warj he recently made an extended survey in Germany...
...In even attempting the subject, he has rushed in where braver, and more experienced writers, such as Alfred Grosser, have feared to enter...
...ALFRED WERNER is the well-known art critic...
...On neutralism, Muhlen is heartless...
...But there is here no more than a paragraph on the ten million uprooted expellees who constitute the heartbreak of Central Europe...
...JOHN S. THOMSON specializes in Far Eastern international relations in the University of Wisconsin's political science department...
...On anti-Semitism in West Germany, Muhlen is tdps...
...These are the real neo-Nazis, the author writes, and they have become "a secret German battalion of the Soviet power...
...More than one-third of Germany is still in ruins...
...A macier of paradox, the author plumps for Germany as "an independent free country integrated with a tree Western union...
...West Germany is 4,200,000 dwelling units short of what minimum decent housing standards require...
...When facts are scarce, epithets and lurid rumors are understandable...
...Perhaps Muhlen is to be as much admired as blamed...
...He has felt his way into this situation in a manner bound to open the eyes of many American observers, as it has this reviewer's...
...MAX C OTTO, the distinguished philosopher, wrote "The Human Enterprise...
...Reliable information about the East Zone is hard to come by...
...He speaks derisively of German neutralist arguments against "Germans killing Germans," as if they were somtnow sinister and selfish and not >ust healthily patriotic...
...He writes off the towering Pastor Niemoeller as "Eastward looking...
...The author sets out to teach a lesson by comparing East and West Germany in terms of their respective economic and social systems...
...But although he produces much interesting material, West Germany is, he admits, so far from pure capitalism that it is difficult to make it serve as a classic contrast with its neighboring planned economy to the east...
...As for the American scare-headlines about "neo-Nazism," Muhlen says they're bunk...
...What goes by the name of anti-Semitism in Germany today is not a racially based prejudice, he tells us, but is rather chiefly the dislike of some of the hard-trading, in-group living, often criminal, foreign refugees stranded in Germany, some of whom happen to be Jews...
...Nor is there any discussion of reassembling Germany's lost territories beyond a concluding recommendation that America "liberate the suppressed...
...Without explaining how the top echelons in the "Red Reich" are replaced, he reports "the totalitarian Communist society knows only the downward movement...
...Reviewed by James Finucane THIS is principally a book attacking Communism, as it takes shape and substance in Germany today, and not mainly about Germany and the problems of the Germans...
Vol. 17 • September 1953 • No. 9
