December 1,1967—Recife. After flying all night from Miami, I arrived in Recife this morning.’ I wanted to see the town, the shanty towns which are called “favelas” (the word is the Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish “barriadas”), the dry “sertao” of the interior if possible and one or more of the coastal sugar plantations.

The northeast of Brazil is divided into two general regions: the coastal sugar plantations, owned by powerful but not always prosperous sugar barons and worked by illiterates, most of whom receive less than the Federal minimum wage of $26 a month; and the interior sertao, populated by illiterate and extremely poor farmers who, in the frequent droughts, often starve or pour desperately intd Recife or other cities.

It might be well to begin with a confession. I have something of an intellectual “investment” in the book I propose to discuss here. Carl Amery's principal thesis finds a rather neat summary in the title given the English edition of his book, Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism (Herder and Herder, 1967). In the course of developing his thesis and teaching the “lesson,” he reinforces and broadens the findings of some of my own published efforts of the past and, to make matters more embarrassing under the circumstances, includes a generous number of citations from those works. The occasional differences in interpretation between us are minor; and in the general implications he draws from the history of the “capitulation” of German Catholics of all ranks to the demands of National Socialism we are in almost total agreement.