Books: Ditty Bag

EUROPEAN WITNESS (246 pp.)—Sfephen Spender—Reynal & Hifchcock ($3).

European Witness is a ditty bag of impressions collected by Poet Spender on a tour he made through Germany (with a dip into France) for the British Government in 1945, “to inquire into the lives and ideas of German intellectuals, with a particular view to discovering any surviving talent in German literature.”

If Poet Spender discovered any such talent, he makes no mention of it. European Witness is in the main a routine travelogue. It has flashes of fancy poesy (“poignant deep-green fields through which homesickness seems to bleed with a dark stain of greenish blood”), and a full share of the pedestrian details that pad out most travel books (“During the [week] days I went for three walks . . . once to the Cloisters of the Nikolaskirche, once to the Poppelsdorfer Schloss and once to the Beethovenhaus, which was closed”). It also has passages in which Poet Spender writes like a naive old schoolmaster—e.g., his report of a conversation he overheard between a couple of dreamy German lovers. “They discussed unrealistically how they would spend their honeymoon. They said they would get a Mercedes-Benz and travel. . . . What was extraordinary about this conversation was that . . . it was without the slightest shadow of guilt.”

Most readable are the too-few pages Spender gives to translations of Nazi and proto-Nazi writings—including Novelist Ernst Jiinger’s ecstatic conception of the modern battlefield:

“. . . Iron fields of craters . . . rolling walls made of fire and steel and plains of the dead, over which red storms drive. . . . Everything which causes feeling, from appalling physical pain to the uttermost joy of victory, is melted together here into a burning unity. . . . Song, prayer, rejoicing, cursing and weeping—what more can we wish?”

And equally ecstatic extracts from Michael—a novel written by Propaganda Minister Goebbels in his youthful days. Cries Goebbels:

“Mother!”

“One needs to have nothing else, except a mother.”