THE TABLET, March 6th, 1954 VOL. 203, No. 5937

Published as a Newspaper

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FO UNDED IN 1840

MARCH 6 th , 1954

N IN EPENCE

Old W ine in New Bottles: The Constant Search for New Methods o f the Apostolate

Self-G overnment in the Sudan: A Beginning in Bloodshed

Welfare and Taxation: II : Heads o f Expenditure. By Colin Clark

Regina Pacis: A Poem by Alfred Noyes

Portrait o f P io Nono : “Creator o f the Modern Papacy.” By Philip Hughes

How Catholic is Austria ? : II : Town and Country

W ider Horizons : Dialogue with the Philosophers. By W. J. O’Hara

Lenten M ed ita tions : I : A Means to an End. By Gerald Vann, O.P. B o o k s R e v i e w e d : The Burning Glass, by Charles Morgan; The Doors o f Perception, by Aldous

Huxley ; Medieval Essays, by Christopher Dawson ; The Gospel According to St. John, by R. A. Edwards ; Pope Joan, by Emmanuel Royidis ; The Tudor Age, by James A. Williamson ; Selected Poems o f Winthrop Mackworth Praed ; and The Phases o f the Sacred Passion, by Mgr. J. M. T. Barton. Reviewed by T. S. Gregory, Elizabeth Sewell, Paul Foster, O.P., A. H. N. Green-Armytage, J. J. Dwyer,

Patrick McGrath and J. Lewis May.

SOCIALISTS DIVIDED

T HE spectacle of the Labour Party voting for German rearmament one week and British disarmament the next is part of the general confusion by which the Socialist movements of Europe have become affected after Berlin. There are special and traditional reasons for such confusion in the German Socialist Party. It was founded almost at the same time as Bismarck’s Reich of 1871. Prussia was its enemy, but equally and more so, its strong and dangerous ally also, and the affinities between the centralized and powerful Prussian, the Nationalist and the Socialist Germany and their eastwardlooking tendencies have been well explained by Oswald Spengler.

It was the great mistake of the German Socialists, when they came into their own, in the days of the Weimar Republic after the fall of the Prussian Monarchy, to perpetuate this inheritance. The end of this political ghost of the nineteenth century was not the coming of Hitler. It took place one year before, in 1932, when, together with the Centre Party, the German Socialists elected Hindenburg as President, that idol of the Prussian past, who later handed over his powers to his own opponent in the presidential elections, which was Adolf Hitler.

The German Catholics and Protestants learned their lesson in the persecutions that followed. The Socialists had learned nothing. The result was the Christian Democratic movement of 1945 and a Socialist party fundamentally the same as it had been in the past, and with a Prussian, Dr. Kurt Schumacher, at its head. There was the same red flag and the same centralized party organization and policy of State controls. Different ideals, however, were needed to revive Western Germany after the war, and it was not the Socialists who recognized that Socialism had had its fullest run under the

Nationalist Socialist regime, and that, however valid the Marxist social analysis might still be in the eyes of the SPD, the Marxist conclusions were no longer applicable to postwar Germany.

This has been made symbolically apparent in two events. The first was the rebellion of young workers in Eastern Germany and Berlin on June 17th last year, when the red flag was hauled down in many places ; the second was the Socialist defeat at the German general elections in September. But there were no signs that the German Socialists were prepared to face these facts. Herr Ollenhauer appeared to have learned little during his exile in this country ; he and his party, with some few but unimportant rebels, continued to look to Berlin for salvation for Germany. It was a Berlin partly occupied by the Soviet Union, and so it had to be not a Prussian Government but M. Molotov from whom they hoped such salvation might come. They were again disappointed.

At Brussels last week, at the European Socialist Conference, the German Socialists found themselves out-voted by ten to one, Switzerland, Sweden and Finland abstaining, on EDC. M. Mollet, speaking for the French Socialists, argued the case for a German integration into a united Europe as the only solution for the German problem and for a settlement of Franco-German relations. Germany cannot, he said, remain a political and military vacuum in the heart of Europe. If the West does not make the interests of Germany its own, Soviet Russia will do so. Unfortunately, M. Mollet’s views are not shared by all members of his own party. His position in Brussels was, in fact, not very different from that of the British delegates, Miss Bacon and Mr. Burke, who also voted for a German defence contribution, explaining, perhaps