OUT of the morbid depression which was the result of the Great War came a torrent of cynical and hopeless literature. The theater was beseiged with it, and even today the relies of that grim period linger on in all the arts. Little of this cynicism will be "noted or long remembered" except as something which typified the Twenties. But a few works stand out as having truly lasting qualities. One of these is Heinz Liepmann's "Nights of an Old Child" which has been translated from its original German by A. Lynton Hudson.

Published without the consent of its author, the novel achieved huge success in Germany until, after twelve editions, Liepmann returned to the country and immediately put a stop to further publication. The story is in the main taken from the author's own diaries--the diaries of an introspective child of the war. "It is one of those books which can never be forgotten never as long as you live," were the words the late John Galsworthy addressed to the author after reading the book in the original German.

Martin, the sensitive over-thoughtful boy whose early life makes the substance of the novel, lost his parents and friends at a time in his life, and in the life of everyone in Germany, when he needed them most. He was thrown into the world on his own to do with his life what he could without the guidance of others who might have saved him from the mental agonies which he was forced to suffer. His experience as an apprentice to two manufacturers, his final attempt to escape from everything when he himself was his own worst enemy, and his final realization that life after all held some beauty for him make a tale so touching in its sincerity and so gripping in its tragedy that the reader lives over the experiences with the author.

Throughout all his early years, Martin tried to find a release from himself. Possessed with the mind of an old man, and never allowed the joys of childhood companionship, he at last seeks writing as a means of unburdening himself. At first he writes for newspapers, magazines, or any sort of publishing business he can find willing to accept his work. In this venture he finds no outlet, and when he meets the one woman whom he can really love, he agrees to her proposal that they cheat life by taking their own lives. It is only when he realizes that by exposing his soul, by writing his innermost thoughts and emotions, he can find happiness, that he sees the folly in this. Thus out of the gloom and depression of his adolescence, he finds the joy of living, and sees at last the way out of the depression of a Post-War world.