War With The Newts - As Satire and Social Commentary

As Satire and Social Commentary

The book is a dark satire, poking fun extensively at the contemporary European politics, including colonialism, fascism and Nazism, segregation in America, and the arms race. A notable satirical point is the mentioned research of a German scientist who has determined that the German Newts are actually a superior Nordic race, and that as such they have a right to expand their living space at the expense of the inferior breeds of Newts.

The author's opinion of the United States' social problems also appears very pessimistic, as whenever that country is mentioned as dealing with a crisis, American mobs "lynch negroes" as scapegoats. Sometimes the Newts are shown in the same manner as the blacks, as when a white woman claims to have been raped by one of them. In spite of the physical impossibility of the act, people believe her and carry out Newt lynchings.

One passage, depicting the European nations willing to hand over China to the Newts as long as they are themselves spared and overriding the Chinese's desperate protests, seems a premonition of the Munich Agreement, a few years after the book was written - in which the writer's own country suffered a similar fate in a futile effort to appease the Nazis.

Towards the end of the book, however, Čapek himself draws attention to the theme of consumerism and over-production which he addressed also in other works such as R.U.R. and The Absolute at Large. In this way he seems not to have been narrowly concerned with contemporary events but to have been remarkably prescient of the problems facing us in the early 21. century.