Peace Movements Between the Wars One Man’s Work for Peace

In this memoir, William Solzbacher remembers his youth, as a member and leader in the Catholic Youth Movement, the German Youth Movement, and the Esperanto Movement. He worked as organizer, speaker, journalist, editor, and interpreter in many of the movements, and at many of the international conferences striving for peace, reconciliation, and disarmament. The people he knew well included Marc Sangnier, Dr. Max Joseph Metzger, Ernst Thrasolt, Willi Hammelrath, Nikolaus Ehlen, and Professor Benedikt Schmittmann. The memoir takes him through his student days at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne (where his PhD thesis, Walther Rathenau als Sozialphilosoph, was destroyed almost immediately by the Nazis), his work in radio in its early days, his founding and editing of La Juna Batalanto, his publication of two books (both destroyed by the Nazis) travels in southeastern Europe in 1930, a lecture tour of the United States in 1933, exile from Germany, escape from occupied Belgium and, finally, reunion with his family and arrival in the United States on the ‘hellship’ Navemar. These recollections have feeling of immediacy, and the style is fresh, lively and direct. The book will interest students of the period and of the Peace Movement, as well as an intelligent general reader.