"The house of the Federal Republic of West Germany is built on quicksand," was the concluding observation of Joachim Gehloff at the International Seminar Forum last Thursday.

Speaking with artist Herbert Pothorn on "No Miracles for Germany," the economic editor of the Deutsche Zeitung cited the lack of capital partly deriving from the ban on its important in his criticism of the "unintelligible attitude" of the Adenauer administration to capital transactions.

At the same forum, the Crown Prosecutor of Ceylon, Neville Kanakaratne, defended his country's so-called "neutralist" foreign policy by asserting that military alliances tend to aggravate tensions while participants lost independence of judgment. He defined Ceylon's foreign attitude as one of "noninvolvement in the military policy of foreign blocs.

The visit of John Foster Dulles to Ceylon's Prime Minister just before the recent election in that country might have been one reason for the Minister's defeat, Kanakaratne said. He pointed out that the government then in power was trying to divorce itself from the stigma of pro-Americanism.

Kanakaratne critized the United States for cancelling Ceylon's right to economic aid after Ceylon was forced to sell rubber to Communist China because no satisfactory prices were offered in the United States. Ceylon slaughtered its rubber trees during World War II to keep the Allies supplied, he added, and now must see itself refused aid that is readily given to Franco Spain.

Describing the unpopularity of rearmament with the German People, Gehloff said that they "cannot see how it will be making any contribution to their own security." He also noted that with 1000-odd generals left over from the Second World War, and with space for only 40 in the new army, there is some danger of a state within a state arising in the military.

Pothorn, in his talk, indicated that the best thing in Germany besides beer and Volkswagens was music. But he promptly disavowed his competence in this field and went on to discuss the topic of painting, with which he was more intimately acquainted.

The emphasis of Pothorn's remarks was that painting, in which communication is not hindered by language differences, cannot be divided into geographical regions. An analysis of German painting must therefore consider all of European painting, he said.