cover image The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany

The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany

Daniel Guerin, Daniel Gu?rin, Daniel Guerin. Duke University Press, $44.95 (212pp) ISBN 978-0-8223-1457-8

Like Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender, Guerin, a socialist and a homosexual, was drawn to Weimar Germany. It had the strongest workers' party in Europe and, as Schwartzwald points out in his introduction, the emphasis on clean young men had an unmistakable erotic allure (``Sculptured knees emerged from Lederhosen. Legs were deeply tanned, muscles taut and hard. Thick socks tumbled down to strong, monumental shoes.''). Guerin made two trips, one in 1932 and another in the spring of 1933 following Hitler's rise to power. Although Le Peste Brun originally included only the second journey, Guerin decided to add the earlier one. Unfortunately, it is of questionable value to anyone interested in how Germany appeared to outsiders as he decided to rewrite it when it strayed ``from the essential topic: the rise of National Socialism.'' Of greater interest is the later material in which, willy nilly, Guerin's comments on Communists and Social Democrats point to a connection between far left and far right. Not only did the Communist leadership come to see ``Nazism as a necessary transitional stage on the road to proletarian dictatorship'' but Guerin's evidence suggests that workers steeped in the virulent anticapitalism and revolutionary struggle of Communists were ripe for the anti-Semitism and bloody chauvinism of the Nazis. (June)