LUDWIG ON THE GERMANS
Meyer, Ernest L.
Ludwig On The Germans THE MORAL CONQUEST OF GERMANY, by Emil Ludwig. Doubleday, Doran. $2. Reviewed by Ernest L. Meyer EMIL LUDWIG, versatile biographer, here takes a whole nation as a model,...
...Yet in spite of nonsensical generalizations, Ludwig does have some sound and sane things to say in his chapter on How to Treat the Defeated...
...Yet he writes also that "no one but the Germans was a match for the tenacity and speed" of the Americans...
...Himself a German, Ludwig finds little to recommend in his ancestors, holding that the golden age of Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing is stone dead and beyond resurrection...
...Ludwig writes, Lord Milner, British Secretary for War, was so much attracted by the slogan, "Germany is the anti-Bolshevik bulwark," that he asked for preservation of the German Army even before the war was over...
...How a people can be at tlie same time dull and apathetic and tenacious and speedy Is a phenomenon that eludes this reviewer's simple mind...
...He says, for example, that "beer drinking has become fatal to the Germans . . . there is much less intoxication than in America, but more dullness and apathy...
...Sound is his plea for complete German disarmament with no repetition of the error of the last generation when...
...Reviewed by Ernest L. Meyer EMIL LUDWIG, versatile biographer, here takes a whole nation as a model, and what emerges is a sort of a sinister Portrait of Dorian Deutsch...
...And sane is Ludwig's suggestion that the Berlin building of the General Staff be transformed into a museum for the portraits and manuscripts of Germany's great thinkers, authors, poets, and musicians...
...One wishes that Ludwig had added a fervent plea for the same reconversion in the war offices of Loudon, Washington, Moscow, and Paris...
...And also the proposal that old warlike, junker-ridden Prussia be isolated from the rest of the provinces whose fealty to Potsdam was both fairly recent and reluctant...
...In this picture of a people, Ludwig often lays on the brush with fantastic flourishes...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 29
