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Almost anything that one may say about the situation in Germany today is trite and commonplace. It has all been said a thousand times already, and everyone would seem to be quite well aware of what is happening. Certainly many people have by now heard most of the facts; yet comparatively few seem to realise what they mean for Germany. Somewhere at the bottom of this gap in our minds there is the very understandable view that we have enough worries to deal with in our own country at present, and that we cannot spend ourselves wholeheartedly in trying to solve Germany’s difficulties; ‘Who won the war anyway?’ Then of course the older generations have seen all this before; ‘We became too sentimental after the 1914-18 war’, we are told, ‘with the result that on the first possible occasion the Germans armed again and got their own back; do you think we want to let them start again?’ But one does not need to be very worldly-wise to know that an excess of sympathy is always as dangerous as an excess of severity. It is however no cure for emotional stupidity in the past (if this indeed was the case) to refuse to be troubled over present matters which are bound to touch our feeelings, if we are human at all. I have no expert political or economic knowledge, I have no specialised ‘inside information’; I only want to mention one or two of the problems as they strike someone who has seen something of what they mean to the Germans, and who is afraid that the public conscience is insufficiently aroused.
