Books in Brief

The Incredible Krupps, by Norbert Muhlen (Holt, $5.00). The firm of Krupp, if not indeed the backbone of modern Germany, may well be called its steel brace. And what a perdurable dynasty, surviving the Kaiser’s empire, the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich, the loss of two world wars, aerial destruction, Allied occupation and even dismantling. Now once more under its fifth titular head the three-ringed Krupp emblem emerges again over one of the great heavy-industry empires of the world, the toast of Khrushchev, maintaining what it considers its rights of trade even against the stern-minded Adenauer. A curiously unattractive family, the Krupps. They remained sterile in the arts, sterile in the humanities, deficient in affections, unhappy for the most part in their family relationships, true only to themselves as the frock-coated Vulcans of the industrial age that spawned them. Five of them span 173 years from the founder who was paradoxically a failure to Alfried, Krupp V, who emerged as a war criminal from an American prison to reconstitute and streamline the old firm to a new eminence. Mr. Muhlen, German by birth and American by background, has given us a fascinatingly detailed account of the Krupps and their ways.

F. RUSSELL

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The Incredible Krupps, by Norbert Muhlen (Holt, $5.00). The firm of Krupp, if not indeed the backbone of modern Germany, may well be called its steel brace. And what a perdurable dynasty, surviving the Kaiser’s empire, the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich, the loss of two world wars, aerial destruction, Allied occupation and even dismantling. Now once more under its fifth titular head the three-ringed Krupp emblem emerges again over one of the great heavy-industry empires of the world, the toast of Khrushchev, maintaining what it considers its rights of trade even against the stern-minded Adenauer. A curiously unattractive family, the Krupps. They remained sterile in the arts, sterile in the humanities, deficient in affections, unhappy for the most part in their family relationships, true only to themselves as the frock-coated Vulcans of the industrial age that spawned them. Five of them span 173 years from the founder who was paradoxically a failure to Alfried, Krupp V, who emerged as a war criminal from an American prison to reconstitute and streamline the old firm to a new eminence. Mr. Muhlen, German by birth and American by background, has given us a fascinatingly detailed account of the Krupps and their ways.

F. RUSSELL