Nora Waln

Nora Waln (1895 – 27 September 1964) was a best-selling American writer and journalist in the 1930s–50s, writing books and articles on her time spent in Germany and China.

Quotes

• "There is where the Germans were. They succeeded in seizing all our land except a tiny corner. German orators now moan over the radio about their bleeding frontiers — but who first tore at the frontiers? Do they forget that they snatched as much as they could from their neighbors and clung to it as long as they could hold? They groan to high heaven about the Ruhr and Rhine occupation, yet they made use of everything in each place they invaded as if it were their own. Quartered on other people's homes, they shouted, whipped, and shot if their commands were not obeyed. More than four years they sat on us. It took the allied help of half the world to move them out of Belgium and France. They would have been here still if America had not helped. You may feel that the Treaty of Versailles is bitter. So it is. The Nazis contend that Germany would have written a less vindictive settlement had she won the war. That should be so. It should be easier for conquering invaders to be magnanimous than for the nearly exhausted invaded and their allies."
  * * *
  "What is your opinion about war?" she requested abruptly.
  "It is uncivilized."
  "I agree with you — but who is right and who is wrong when it does occur?"
  "Nobody is right. Everybody is wrong."
  "That is loose thinking. The invaders are wrong. The German Kaiser sinned against civilization when he gave orders for his soldiers to march beyond his own frontiers, and every man who obeyed that command and set his foot on neighboring soil sinned against his fellow men."
  "It would seem from the book he has written," I offered lamely, "that Kaiser Wilhelm II did not want war."
  "Perhaps not," she conceded. "I have read his book. I imagine he saw himself as the conductor of an orchestra of Siegfrieds. He may have believed that he had but to send them forth in operatic step, blowing a heroic E flat on shining trumpets, and all Europe would awaken to join joyously in a Pan-Germanic chorus. But they were equipped with bayonets, hand grenades, machine guns, bombs, poison gas, and submarines for an emergency." She shrugged her shoulders. "Wilhelm II is an old man now. He is no longer important, except as an example of the self-deceptions the emotional Germans permit themselves. A young conductor has picked up the baton he dropped."
  We were silent, each busy with her own thoughts — I longing selfishly, as I have done so often since I came to live in Europe, to run away from this war-scarred continent with its clatter of weapons now being collected for future fights.
  "I have a boy of three," she began. "I would be content if I could be confident that he could have a life free from war. A few years ago here in Europe we founded a league of women pledged to bring our sons up never to kill each other. The German women were keen about the idea. We numbered many thousands. There was a member in Germany as companion to every member in Belgium and France. When the Nazi government came into power they outlawed our society. Pacifism is treason in Germany now."
  "Do you think that a people so intelligent as the Germans will long endure such autocratic rule?"
  "A dictator does not rise," she asserted, "unless his temperament, technique, and objective are in tune with the people from whom he emerges. Power and glory are certainly the aim of many Germans, otherwise they would not have been tempted to listen to Nazi theories, and in Belgium we hear that Monsieur Hitler is a master in the art of shaping the state to this end. The Germans desire to be hypnotized by their leaders so as to feel sure that what they want is unquestionably right. He seems to possess this ability. Under such circumstances they will surely bear all that he imposes upon them, not only willingly but with enthusiasm, just so long as he inflates German importance."
  • Reaching for the Stars (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1939), ch. 1, pp. 4–7. Conversation with a local Belgian woman in Spa, June 1934

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Nora Waln on Wikipedia