W m the centenary of Joseph Conrad's birth was celebrated on December 3rd, 1957, tributes appeared in immense numbers all over the world. But one question was not, to my knowledge, raised: his relation to Germany. This seemed so straightforward that therc was no reason to deal with it. Germany was to Conrad the power which had participated in three partitions of Poland; in The Crime of Partition he even foresaw the fourth.'Le Prussianisme, vcdi l'ennemi' are the last words of his Autocracy and War. Conrad was arid remained a Pole, conscious and proud of his Polish descent, to the end of his life. His attitude to Germany, therefore, could only be full of enmity, as is clearly seen in the first preface to Victory where reference is made to the wicked innkeeper Schombergh : I don't pretend that this is the entire Teutonic psychology, but it is in-But this is not the whole story. Schombergh appears already in Conrad's short story Falk, written twelve years before Victory, and here he is not wicked, but ridiculous; he is, moreover, not a German proper, but an Alsatian. In addition there is a real German family in Fdk, the Hermans from Bremen, and Conrad treats all of them with evident fondness. They represent the typical German family life of that period, or what Conrad believed it to be, portrayed with a warm humour seldom to be found in his novels: we have the plain, decent master and owner of the Diana, we have his 'Hausfrau', kind and plump, always busy with the chddren, with cooking, mending and the laundry; finally we have the pretty niece who does not speak a word before the last scene. Is not their psychology Teutonic too? There had been, undoubtedly, a change in Conrad's attitude, in spite of what he calls in the preface to Victory his 'old, deep-seated and impartial conviction', a change caused by the outbreak of the war in 1914.There are two more 'good Germans' in Conrad's novels: Jacob Schnitzer &om Hamburg in The End ofthe Tether, the owner of a great trading house in Batavia, highly esteemed for his efficiency and his reliability, and one of the most fascinating of Conrad's figures, the Bavarian Stein, merchant, adventurer and butterfly collector in Lord]im. Are they too not significant for his opinions on Germany and the Germans? Let us, by the way of contrast, consider Conrad's attitude to Russia and the Russians. It was full of hatred. He held them both politically and personally responsible for the death of both his parentshis mother died 81 dubitably the psychology of a Teuton.