THE TABLET, February 20th, 1954 VOL. 203, No. 5935

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

F O U N D E D I N 1840

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 t h , 1954

N I N E P E N C E

Politics â S a Profession : The Larger Question Behind the Proposed Increases o f Pay

Religions in the Holy Land: Impressions o f a Visit to Israel. By Christopher Hollis, M .P .

A Letter from Paris : Monsieur Vincent and the Abbé Pierre. By René de Champeaux

H O W Catholic is Germany ? : III : Emergence from the Defensive

The French Dominicans : Background to the Recent Changes. By Lancelot C. Sheppard

The English Reformation: The Second Phase. By G o rdon Albion

B o o k s R e v i e w e d : The Prophet Armed, by I. Deutscher ; The Price o f Fuel, by I. M. D. Little ;

Pleasure o f Ruins, by Rose Macaulay ; What Law and Letter Kill : The Spiritual Teaching o f Father Francis Devas, S J . ; That Yew Tree's Shade, by Cyril Hare ; Refuge, by Seaforth Mackenzie ; Perdu and his Father, by Paride Rombi ; Honey Seems Bitter, by Benedict Kiely ; Marriage is M y Business, by Heather Jenner ; School Design and Construction, by J. A. Godfrey and R. Castle Cleary ; and a selection o f recent reprints. Reviewed by J. M. Cameron, Colin Clark, Peter Watts, Mgr. Canon G o rdon Wheeler, John Biggs-Davison and Philip Jebb.

AFTER BERLIN

T HE most important result of the Berlin Conference will not be the discovery that agreement on Germany or Austria is as remote as it ever was, but the effect of the Conference on public opinion in the world. M. Molotov was very conscious of this effect. He was disappointed in his expectations of French support for his policy of German and European neutralization. It may be that he was not so unsuccessful in regard to Germany.

For some time there has been a growing body of neutralist opinion which has now been confirmed in, rather than discouraged from, the view that the only way out of the deadlock between East and West is for Germany to go her own way. A number of the West German Socialists and Free Democrats seem to have agreed that such a neutral Germany could be both self-sufficient and strong enough to maintain its own independence and the peace of Europe. These trends of thought have an easy popular appeal to Germans weary of their unsettled and explosive political conditions. They also explain the critical German response to the Western Ministers’ rejection of the treaty of collective security for fifty years which M. Molotov proposed. These Germans would apparently have liked the Western Foreign Ministers to make formal counter-proposals, despite the fact that previously their proposals regarding free German elections had been flatly turned down by M. Molotov. There is in all this some wishful thinking about the historical parallel provided by the Locarno Treaty of 1925, which became possible when the concept of collective security broke down as implemented in the Geneva Protocol of 1924. These German critics do not seem to realize how unhappy and exposed would be a reunited Germany within a collective security system in which the Soviet Union dominates and from which the United States are excluded.

More than any other recent event, the Berlin Conference has demonstrated to the Germans the difficulty and helplessness of their situation. And it would be giving in to an old temptation, deeply ingrained in the history of Europe, if some of them now found that the German readiness to forget the past and adopt the cause of European unity has not had the expected response in Britain and France. It is the old temptation that it is no use being unselfish if others are concerned only with their own national interests, and that Germans too must again “howl with the wolves,” meaning Soviet Russia. Long before a nationalist Germany was conceived of this was also, though with a different object, the temptation in the conflict between the idea of the Emperor’s function to be the judge of peace in Christendom, the supranational head o f many nations, and the political reality which early undermined this concept of the Holy Roman Empire. This was a historical process in which the work of Cardinal Richelieu, thinking exclusively of France, could not but evoke the similar response of Bismarck’s Reich in the nineteenth century and o f Hitler’s in our own. Modern Germany drew the logical conclusions from a general trend of European national self-absorption. The shock produced by Hitler and by the last war has changed that, but perhaps only too superficially and too emotionally. It clearly lies with the Western Powers now, by their own determined continuation of their policy of European unity, to nurse these seeds of a better political future.

They came close to surrendering these prospects in Berlin, when M. Molotov elicited their admission that a reunited Germany need not regard itself as bound by the European alliances now entered into by the Federal Republic. M. Molotov might well ask what was the point of creating such alliances if they were not intended by the Western Powers to