GERMANY: A Man

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Through twisty streets and between the high-gabled houses of quaint old Weimar, 74 national flags flapped last week on short staffs sprouting from the mudguards of statesmen's limousines. The nations of the world were doing homage in this small Thuringian city. Here in 1919 the Constitution of the present German Republic was adopted. And in Weimar 100 years ago last week died Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Not only a poet, this lusty, lyric German philosopher was also a resourceful statesman, ever at the elbow of Weimar's reigning Grand Duke.

Today Thuringia is one of the federated German republics. Nonetheless, Her Royal Highness the widowed Grand Duchess Feodora of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach is still very much alive. Last week the Premier of Thuringia yielded gallantly to the regal Duchess who is 41. She sailed sedately into the Grand Ducal Mausoleum (where Poet Goethe lies buried near her husband) on the arm of no less a personage than the Chancellor of all Germany, pale, ascetic, thin-lipped Dr. Heinrich Bruning, 47. As Democracy thus squired Autocracy to the tomb of Genius, a witness was Comrade Anatoly Lunacharsky representing the Soviet Power. All over Russia on this day last week Soviet celebrations honored Goethe. Communism celebrated not because it approves Goethe's bourgeois works or his grand ducal associations, but because the Russian Government tries to keep on friendliest terms with the German Government and wanted to make amends for a recent attack in Moscow by a crazed Russian on Dr. Fritz von Twardowski, Councilor of the German Embassy.

In Weimar the most striking floral tribute, everyone agreed last week, was an enormous sheaf of real Greek olive branches laid on Goethe's tomb by the representative of Greece. Ordinary flowers were bestowed in the name of India, Haiti, South Africa, Finland and 70 more nations. The U. S. wreath—not laid by Ambassador Sackett. who was in Paris-was deposited by a grave personage whose dry wit is concealed on public occasions by his Buddha-like mien. Councilor John Wiley, chief prop of Ambassador Willys in Poland. Read the wreath which Mr. Wiley deposited at the foot of Goethe's sarcophagus: The United States of America in commemoration.

Author Thomas Mann, famed German novelist and Nobel Prizeman, orated in Weimar on Goethe last week, though not in such towering terms as were used by President Julius Peterson of the Goethe Society in a broadcast heard with delight by all Germany. "Goethe was the greatest poet of all time!" declared President Peterson. "He was the forerunner of Charles Darwin in evolution theory; he was the forerunner of General Goethals in foreseeing the construction of the Panama Canal; and he was the forerunner of Prince von Bismarck in visualizing the creation of a united Germany!"

Goethe as a scientist was crisply eulogized in Weimar by Physicist Max Planck, author of the famed Quantum Theory. Clap, clap went the hands not only of all the foreign diplomats but also of all the rectors of all the German universities, of all the premiers of all the German states except Prussia, of Professors Schreiber of Yale, Woodbridge of Columbia and the Rector of the Academy of Paris at the Sorbonne, Professor Sebastien Charlety.