Youngstown Vindicator (June 25, 1945)
ON THE RECORD —
No-politics plan in Germany
By Dorothy Thompson
PARIS, France – I confess that after the enormous effort crowded into the few weeks spent in Germany, I have no notion of what, if anything, is going on in the German mind. There is despair, there is immeasurable shock and disillusionment, there is terrible and unfocused hatred, there is shame and truculence, there is fear. There are all signs of demoralization, callousness, self-pity and, it seems to me more than anything else, a docile, almost imbecile vacuity of morale, both intellectual and political.
It is as though the whole history of Rome from the Republic through Nero and Caligula to the fall has been crowded into 12 years of national experience and all reactions are emotional.
My overwhelming impression is nothing is going on in the German mind at all – everything is happening in the solar plexus and, like dreadful problem children with unaccountable shifts in mood, the German people are, at one moment, throwing themselves into our arms with low moans and, possibly, in another they may be biting our throats or rending their own garments or holding Holy Roller meetings. I just don’t know. Neither, however, do the people entrusted with military government and obviously they never will know as long as they prohibit any sort of political activity.
No way to find out
When we entered Munich, the Bavarian separatist movement was contending with the free German movement. Our people seem to think neither amounted to anything. Probably we are right, but unless the Germans could speak and publish papers, how in the world can we know?
All life of the mind depends upon communication and reactions of others to the communication. We are living in a world here where there is no communication between the Allied Military Government and the people except for the communication of orders, and there is no communication of the German people with one another.
We select officials by asking them to answer questionnaires, though no housewife would hire a cook that ways. The non-fraternization order holds at the highest levels. The military governor of a province may not sit down and talk sympathetically in a two-way conversation with someone he intends to entrust with an important task, such as forming an anti-Nazi cabinet. But one has to talk sympathetically with people even to find out that they are scoundrels.