Murmurous Germany

REACHING FOR THE STARS--Nora Waln --Little, Brown ($3).

You cannot indict a whole people, but unless you do you cannot start a war against them. For the common people on both sides in the World War, that lesson seemed bitterly evident for all time. Today it is apparently being forgotten all over again. Few men-in-the-street nowadays make much distinction between Hitler and the German people. For the majority, all Germans are 100% Nazi goosesteppers.

Nora Waln's Reaching for the Stars would do this majority good. A 43-year-old Pennsylvania Quaker, Nora Wain married an Englishman in the service of the Chinese government, went with him to Germany when he resigned to study music. They arrived a few days before the Blood Purge of June 1934, returned to England last April.

In 1934, she admits gloomily, Germans echoed the sentiment of her hotel maid, who gave thanks that "we Germans have Adolf Hitler sent by God to help us." But by the next year Germans had begun talking in words that were oblique and ambiguous. They sang more than they cheered; they read new symbolical meanings in the little literature left to them. Germans, decided Nora Waln, were developing a resilience to Hitler as cunning as that of Chinese peasants.

Shortly before she left Germany, she received a visit from two Hitler Youths, ardent Nazis of the year before. They said they wanted to ski over into Czechoslovakia. Pumped for their reason, 16-year-old Otto said: "I'll now quote Herr Abraham Lincoln: 'You can fool all the people some of the time,' " etc. Later that day Otto smashed the teeth of another Hitler Youth he caught baiting an old Jewish woman, got a warm handshake from the Nazi cop who rushed him to a quiet side street, told him to scram.

Said a Hitler Maid, recently promoted to undercover agent, as she dialed a German news broadcast: "You may think that our radio is the voice of our. people, but it is not. The voice of Naziism is trumpeted, but the true voice of Germany is a murmur. . . . We are listening now to news that is never published. What we learn we are passing from one to another."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.