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Author(s): Olden, Rudolf; Murray, Gilbert (introduction); Bevan, Edwyn (translator)

First edition, first printing. 122pp. In brown cloth-covered boards with title on spine, in its original dust jacket. 12mo. Boards a little rubbed at corners and spine ends. Some tanning on endpapers, else internally remarkably bright, tight, clean and neat. Dust jacket is bumped along upper edge, lightly chipped on folds and joints, chapped along lower edge, and shelf worn. Dust jacket now protected in an archival-quality Mylar wrapper, fitted without the use of tape of adhesives. Olden was a prominent lawyer and journalist of the Weimar Republic, deeply opposed to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. He fled Germany the day after the Reichstag fire in 1933, under threat of arrest by the Nazis. He was invited to lecture at Oxford University by scholar and public intellectual Gilbert Murray, who provided a cottage for Olden. Olden spent some five years at Oxford, where he wrote Is Germany as a Hopeless Case? as a warning to the British public of the dangers of Nazism. When war broke out, he was interned in an improvised camp near Southampton. He was subsequently invited to New York by the New School of Social Studies. Olden accepted. As he left Britain, he watched as his passport was stamped 'No Return'. The ship he was travelling on, which was carrying evacuated children among other passengers, was torpedoed by the Germans, Goebbels claiming it had been targeted because Olden was on board. Olden and his wife were killed. Is Germany a Hopeless Case?, the only one of his works to be published in English in the first instance, has become influential. An important work. Very hard to find outside library holdings. WorldCat identifies 53 copies across libraries worldwide.

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