Slouching · Towards · Bethlehem

From The Times of London, 29 July 1935:

Lemon v. Rhubarb.

Nazi Attack on "Alien Fruit"

From our own correspondent.

Berlin, July 28.

"Off with the alien lemon, on with our German rhubarb." Like a clarion call this slogan may yet resound through Germany if the author of a stern farewell to the foreign and corrupting fruit in the "race, heredity, and health" column of the Frankische Tageszeitung (the Nazi official organ for the northern half of Bavaria) gets his way. "Parting from a mistress of many years' standing--she can go and need not come back again," is the title of this epoch-making and informative renunciation.

We Germans (says the writer remorsefully apostrophizing his discarded flame) do not think now as we did during the years of our love affair with thee. We have grasped the meaning of "blood and soil," and know that our people can survive the life struggle between the nations only if they do not squander their wealth on foreign mistresses, and preserve the type bestowed on them by the Creator. Type, character, and accomplishments are determined by the constitution of the blood, and the blood, in turn, is determined by the soil. Only the fruits of the German earth-clod can create German blood. Through them only are transmitted to the blood, and thence to the body and the soul, those delicate vibrations which determine the German type. That type is unique the whole world over, because there is but one German soil on the earth.

Farewell lemon, we need thee not! Our German rhubarb will take thy place fully and entirely. He is so unpretending that we overlooked and despised him, busy with infatuation for foreign things. In all our shires we can have him in masses, the whole year round. We get him almost for nothing; his tartness will season our salads and vegetable dishes. Slightly sweetened he provides us with delicious refreshment, and, what is more, he is a blood-purifying and medicinal agent true to German type. Let us make good with German rhubarb the sins we have committed with the alien lemon.

So, out with thee, ingrate daughter of the South; out with thee from our German shires and homes! We will not see thee more, thou wanton creature. After all the catastrophes and sufferings into which our dealings with the alien spirit and its products have driven us, let us fashion new German offspring out of the only material which can make them marrowy, true to type, and German--out of the fruits of our German Mother Earth.