Abstract

Youth of the Continent

The article presents information about the books "The Gateway to Life," by Frank Thiess and "Dusty Answer," by Rosamund Lehmann. Frank Thiess follows the fortunes of his group of youngsters with so tender a sympathy that his thesis, though unspoken, becomes obvious. To him these adolescent idealists who have read Goethe and Nietzsche at sixteen and examine each slightest experience with a conscientious morbidity to him these boys are the future of Germany. Lehmann's widely heralded opus, dealing with a very similar group of young people in England, does not possess even this praiseworthy quality. Her style and outlook suffer from the same melancholy anemia which is the keynote of her character. She is so sadly aware that her young people are decadent and rotted at the core. Here one has a group of young men and women in whom the subconscious acceptance of a failing national destiny is so strong as to make them wearily impervious to all experiences save one, and that the most devitalizing and hopeless of them all, romantic love.