Word: prussians
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Last July 14 the people of France, by order of Vichy, were forbidden to celebrate Bastille Day, the hallowed festival of French democracy. But in the ancient city of Caen, Normandy, an automobile sped to the Franco-Prussian War memorial. A man uniformed as a French officer jumped out, placed a wreath on the memorial stones, made a quick getaway...
...from underground struggles in Europe's political depths; treason in the highest places; deserters running from all sides to all camps - in the ten years before World War II these curiosa were not merely foretastes of war and the collapse of nations. They were evidence to one East Prussian farmer that "an age has come to its end," because the moral sanctions by which until then men had lived had lost all meaning...
...devout Lutheran, he nevertheless felt in the presence of "the mystery of the fertility of the arable land," the stirrings of an ancient paganism. An authority on sacred music, he wrote voluminously about it. He also wrote, never published, a monumental history of the end of the Prussian order (since confiscated by the Gestapo), dabbled in local agrarian politics, became president of the Danzig Senate, pondered upon that passage in the writings of the late great Austrian poet, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which describes the growing revolt against Europe's arid intellectualism: "The process of which I am speaking...
...Conservative Revolution, ex-Nazi Rauschning this week told why. The book, his second in six months, was a Prussian Apologia Pro Vita Sua, describing in a series of autobiographical letters (to an anonymous British friend) why "even men of good will [were driven] into Naziism" - and why they later left it. Like Cardinal Newman, who was a leader in the religious revival ("Oxford Movement") in 19th-Century England and eventually changed from the Anglican to the Catholic faith, Rauschning could write his apologia only in terms of the great issues of which he has become a spokesman. His book...
Only once does Rauschning comfort himself bitterly with what Prussian Baron Stein said wittily: "One must be able to lose one's luggage several times in life." But Rauschning's crisis is the crisis of conservatives everywhere; he states fearlessly and frankly their difficulties, mistakes, defeats and failures in battle with revolutionary Bolshevism and Naziism. The Conservative Revolution helps to restore to the conservative position the basic sense in which it is acceptable to all men -the sense of conserving human civilization...