Verboten Volumes

To teach democracy to postwar Germans, the United States Information Service set up 40 Amerika Haeuser and stocked them with a wide selection of reading material in English and German, including books banned by Hitler. Last year some 15 million Germans flocked to the U.S. libraries, and the then U.S. High Commissioner, John J. McCloy, praised the scheme for counteracting twelve years of "one-sided information."

By last week the works of 25 or 30 authors had vanished from the USIS bookshelves, and some Germans chuckled wryly at the news. To Americans, Germans frequently remarked: "We had to go through this under Hitler." The order came from the State Department, just before Senator Joe McCarthy's two young investigators, Cohn and Schine, took off for a quick look at U.S. library shelves all over the Continent. Removed were works by Reds, fellow travelers, controversial figures, "et cetera." Some of the blacklisted authors are Communists like Howard Fast, who writes propaganda novels; others are Communists whose works are not party propaganda, e.g., Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. Some were by notably non-Communist authors whose works or opinions had apparently annoyed somebody (in a similar shelf cleanup in Bombay, books by Bert Andrews, Clarence Streit and Walter White were removed).

Germans as well as State Department employees were less amused, wryly or otherwise, by the news that a State Department investigator, acting on his own, was drawing up a list of all who attended a farewell party for Theodore Kaghan, the HICOG official forced to resign after he tangled with Senator McCarthy. Kaghan first got into trouble by calling Messrs. Cohn and Schine "junketeering gumshoes." The investigator would have quite a list when he got through, for the party was widely attended by U.S. officials in Germany as a show of sympathy for Kaghan. Among those present: new High Commissioner James Bryant Conant and his chief deputy, Samuel Reber.

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