Old Testament Threatened

Pictures and books and toys insidious were the "exhibits" piled high last week upon a great round table in the lobby of the German Reichstag and labeled Schund und Schmutz (Trash and Smut). Deputies, austere or mirthful, looked at them. To do so was their duty. They were about to vote upon the third and final reading of the bill creating a censorship committee (TIME, Nov. 29), Irate, the opponents of the bill pointed out that the Bible and at least half the classics of German literature could be suppressed as "obscene" if the law went into effect. None the less the measure passed 250 to 158.

Later 5,000 adolescents of both sexes, their leader clad in the bright green jacket and corduroy breeches of the "German Youth Movement," assembled in their Berlin hall where neither smoking nor drinking is allowed, and voted by acclaim a resolution condemning the Schund und Schmutz bill as "a blow to German Kultur"