German Finishing School

RESTLESS DAYS--Lilo Linke--Knopf ($3).

Lilo Linke was a little German girl of seven when her Fatherland became World Enemy No. i. Her childhood and youth were spent in the nightmare atmosphere of defeat, starvation, revolution. Not because she thinks her personal War history extraordinary but because millions of her generation went through the same painful process, she has written this straightforward report on her dark lexicon of youth. Even Teutophobes will find her account human and moving.

Wartime was normal life to Lilo Linke and her contemporaries. Substitute food, standing in line, semi-starvation were more exciting than dreadful. Every day brought some change, some new restriction to be got around somehow. What she principally minded were her ragged clothes. Adolescence and the Armistice made her more aware of events. By the time street-fighting started outside her own Berlin tenement she knew she was living in an abnormal day. Her parents, bourgeois of the old regime, saw their world collapsing around their ears, but to her the ruins were a new world, however sinister. Freed at last from the long drudgery of school, she got a job in a bookshop, just in time for the inflation.

Like nearly everyone else, Lilo Linke was morally affected by the insanity of inflation. She stole books, sold them, began to slip towards the maelstrom of Berlin's delirious night life. What saved her was the Youth Movement. Into this earnestly idealistic confraternity Lilo Linke threw herself with desperate fervor, gave all her interest and every spare moment to its passionately serious meetings, its Spartan week-end jaunts. Her ambition and ability soon made her a leader, and at a national gathering her girls' group was judged the best in Germany. But even Youth Movements grow up. Leader Linke fell in love with a handsome fellow-Youth, went on walking trips with him that remained platonic but caused dissension in the ranks. She resigned, went to Hamburg to another job and a new beginning.

The Youth Movement had been proudly nonpolitical, but as its members came of age more & more of them felt the impossibility of staying out of politics. Lilo Linke joined the Young Democrats, plunged with her customary energy into the hopeless fight to stem the rising tide of Nazidom. She became secretary to Ernst Schwarz, a Jew high in the councils of the party, finally his sweetheart. But she soon saw the Democrats were getting nowhere. "Not for a moment did I consider turning Communist, but I knew that the truth must lie somewhere in that direction." She left the party, joined the slightly more radical Social Democrats. But by this time Hitler was winning all along the line. Lilo Linke's friends and lovers were splitting up among all the parties; the solidarity of youth was gone forever. Because "if I stayed in Germany any longer, I should suffocate," Lilo Linke took the exile's road to England, more than half knowing it would be a one-way trip.

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