Cure for Germans?

Norman Raymond Frederick Maier is a man who has made his name & fame by driving rats crazy. For his experiments in rat frustration, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1938 awarded him a $1,000 prize. Now Professor Maier, a University of Michigan psychologist, believes that his studies of rats have led him to a solution of the No. 1 contemporary problem in human frustration: how to cure a defeated Germany of the disease of Naziism. Though his plan leaves many a question unanswered, it is a stimulating contribution to the simmering debate on a generous v. a vengeful peace.

Maier's plan derives from experiments which upset orthodox psychological notions. He forced rats to jump at one of two differently marked cards, one of which led to food while the other only bruised the rats' tender snouts. Then he switched the cards. Result: the rats became wildly neurotic. When repeatedly frustrated, a rat would throw itself blindly again & again at an unyielding card, even though there was food in plain sight beside it.

Maier concluded that the behavior of a completely frustrated creature differs from that of a normal one not in degree, as most psychologists have supposed, but in kind. Normally, a human being prevented from getting what he wants either finds a way around the obstacle or gives up his goal in favor of an attainable substitute. But a thoroughly thwarted individual loses all reasoning capacity and attacks his obstacle like a blindly baffled rat. The more he is punished, the stronger his fixation becomes.

From Rats to Nazis. Such, says Maier, was the condition of the German people after their defeat in World War I and the ensuing economic depression. Adolf Hitler's strategy was psychologically brilliant. He heightened the Germans' belligerence by increasing their frustration through Gestapo-enforced Verbote, then gave them objects of aggression: the Jews, the Communists, more Lebensraum. Maier observes significantly that even after the Germans had crushed the Jews and annexed Lebensraum in Austria and Czechoslovakia, their aggression continued; their fixation would not let them rest. Against such pathological aggressiveness neither appeasement nor persuasion could have any effect.

Fortunately, thinks Maier, German frustration is likely to lead to its own partial cure. As bombing and invasion intensify the German people's frustration and reduce their capacity for external aggression, Maier predicts that they will turn their pent-up fury on their own leaders, kill Hitler and other conspicuous Nazis. If they do not thus take matters into their own hands, he believes the solution of the German problem may be indefinitely prolonged. For he fears that war-guilt trials by the United Nations would only heighten the frustrated furor Teutonicus, while failure to punish the Nazi leaders would play spiritual havoc with the Allied peoples in their own long-frustrated desire to get at Hitler & Co.

Postwar Prescription. For these reasons Professor Maier suggests that, instead of trying to create a "docile and crawling Germany," the United Nations postpone a final peace treaty for a cooling-off period of ten years, meantime take steps to save Germany from economic depression and turn the new German generation to constructive and attainable goals. On benevolent Allied parole, the German people must work out their own salvation. Otherwise their frustration will fester on, and some day explode again in another ratlike rage.

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