Books: Germany

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Cost. Professor Shotwell of Columbia University, editor of the mammoth Economic and Social History of the World War (150 vols., Yale University Press), has neither Hermann Rauschning's intimate knowledge of the nihilistic Nazis nor the German culture of a Mann, but he has figures. Using them, in What Germany Forgot, to disprove the Nazi propaganda argument that Germany's post-war ills were caused by the Treaty of Versailles, he gives by implication a fairly precise idea of where Germany's future ills are coming from.

According to Professor Shotwell, it was only a few years ago that economists finally got around to finding out just how much World War I cost Germany. The cost: to the German Government alone, $50,000,000,000; to the German people, another $50,000,000,000; in all about four times as much as the total burden of reparations. Because these facts were not known earlier, Germans were easily led to concentrate their resentment on the well-known figures of reparations.

Professor Shotwell agrees with the Manns that given half a chance the German people could cope with their problems intelligently. He recalls the unfamiliar fact that the principle of the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 originated in Berlin. His book is as useful as any in making clear that talk of European federation must sooner or later come down to cases, in particular the case of Germany.