Two Voices

GERMANY Two Voices

He was a gaunt, one-armed man in his worn 50s, and he had to hold his notes close up to his eyes; age and ten years in German concentration camps had all but blinded him. When he began with a polite meine Damen und Herren, a buzz swept over the crowd of British journalists, uneasy at hearing German in a London press conference. As the speaker continued, there was more than his language to make his listeners uneasy. He was veteran Socialist Dr. Kurt Schumacher, who raised his voice on what was technically still enemy soil, and he had some blunt and bitter truths for the victors.

Germany, he said, was being swept by a new nationalism which must be fought. He pleaded: "Do not ... accuse the German Social Democratic Party of being nationalistic itself. . . ." No nationalist, Schumacher urged German unity on European as much as on German grounds: "If Europe is to become or stay united ... Germany must be united. . . . We repeat our determination to pay our reparations, and we are distressed that the Ruhr has now become a center of neurosis in international relations. . . . We recognize the necessity for the hundred percent destruction of German war industry. But we must be able to build up a constructive industry of peace. .. ."

Schumacher warmly maintained that the British people had done more and sacrificed more for defeated Germany than any other nation. "But there really is an extraordinary wide discrepancy between ministerial declarations in London . . . and what is actually going on [in Germany]."

Schumacher's main point: the victors did not know (or could not agree on) what they wanted in Germany. "This fact must be brought to mind when one looks upon this gruesome dance of death that is now beginning in Germany. The victors should at least find a common denominator."

One way or another, this question of Allied disagreement was bound to preoccupy Germans. Hitler fought a war on the assumption Russia and the West could not stay together until victory. Now Schumacher, the first important German spokesman Britons had heard since Hitler, was saying,- with intent exactly opposite to Hitler's, that Allied disagreement must not be allowed to frustrate the peace.

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