Leslie Reade Tells Reporter His Views on Hitler, Women, Etc

The Nazis have “shattered the lamp” of culture and progress in Germany, but they are at least partly responsible for bringing to light that promising young dramatist Leslie Reade.

His stirring play now current at the Maxine Elliott Theater depicts with stark reality the shocking effects of Hitler’s new Germany upon a peaceful family in a small university town.

“It is intended as a sock on the jaw to the more or less dormant public,” admitted Mr. Reade. “A good deal of the material is actually based on Nazi literature and recent newspaper events.”

The young playwright who is an English barrister by profession and a graduate of Oxford University, paid several visits to Germany since the war. He knows that country as it was before the domination of the Furher and understands her people as well. An active member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and an ardent propagandist for the League of Nations, he is a fit commentator on the vital changes now taking place in Germany and their far-reaching results.

“In my opinion,” warned Mr. Reade in an interview last night at the theater, “unless the governments of Europe and even the United States will do all they legitimately can to make life difficult for the Nazi government, that government will not only stay in power for many years to come, but will be the cause of war almost as surely as one can be sure of anything. Since Hitler’s advent to power he has indulged in a number of pseudo-pacific gestures for the benefit of the outside world, such as his speech of last May and his ten year pact with Poland. To the casual spectator this may seem as if the Nazi government were devoted to the cause of peace. But to anybody who cares to read old Nazi literature such as Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ no word of which he has ever disavowed, and the litcrature and propaganda which is still pouring forth unceasingly from the Nazi government, can then have any doubt whatever that one of the main tenets of the part is to build what J. L. Garvin the London ‘Observer’ so aptly describes, as ‘the war mind in the war body.”

THE FIGHTING WRITER

The dramatist spoke with an earnestness that lit up his dark lean face and brought fire into his brilliant brown eyes. He is thirty years old and has that indomitable spirit of youth that does not believe in “taking any knocks from life lying down.” This is his first play ever produced, although he has written others. He hopes that his message in “The Shattered Lamp” will go over not only as a defense of the Jewish question but as a revelation of the German government’s whole attack on liberalism.

“It is not only the Jews who have been thrust back to their position in the middle ages, but the German women too have lost most of their post war freedom,” declared the author.

“Extraordinary as it may seem, the personnel of the Nazi government being what it is, that is composed largely of moral and physical degenerates, there is nevertheless a strong strain of Puritanism in the Nazi cult. As is usual with Puritans the Nazis feel impelled to put woman in her place. Practically all the emancipatory measures enacted for women during the Weimar Republic have been revoked by the present government. It seems as if they are continuing to put into force what is said to have been the ex-Kaiser’s theory, that the interests of women should be confirmed to the four K’s–Kinder, Kleider, Kirche, Kuche.

“The add thing is that the young women of Germany have consents to be pushed back into the nineteenth century domesticity without much resistance. Perhaps it is the result of an instability produced by too little food during the war and too much excitement after it.

“The character of Louisa Muler in the play as so ably portrayed by Jane Bramley, is an attempt to typify this product post-war German feminine hysteria.”