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Diary of a Man in Despair
"Diary of a Man in Despair is Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's prophetic insight into the turmoil caused by the destruction of the ancient Prussian soul. Lingering on after the deposing of the Kaiser, it was inexorably demolished by the carnal frenzy of the Nazi ideology which gave power to the German middle classes. In this heady cocktail of sexual lust, greed and idealism, the Volk or 'mass-man' was relentlessly driven to its suicidal cause. Not even today has the terror of totalitarianism been described in such powerful writing. Reck's diary opens in 1936 with a spellbinding vision of Spengler, whose Decline of the West was appropriated as official Nazi dogma. The legendary academic is depicted dining in his English tweeds as he solemnly demolishes a whole goose without offering so much as a bone to his guests. On Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's visit in 1936, it transpires that Spengler has been bribed by the Nazis with cash and fine burgundies, and his library is full of pornography. Following this bloated and grotesque image, the author on several occasions encounters Hitler himself in Munich. Once he has the chance to shoot him. He lets the moment pass, realising too late the Nazi stranglehold on Germany."--BOOK JACKET.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
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About the author
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen
19 books16 followersFriedrich Percival Reck-Malleczewen was a German author.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Reck was also a novelist, mainly of children's adventure stories. One book, Bomben auf Monte Carlo, has been filmed twice. Many of his books were banned by the Nazis, and more were not published until years after his death. Today his best known work is Diary Of A Man In Despair (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten), his journal of life under Nazi rule (which he vehemently opposed), which was published in English translation by Paul Rubens in 1970.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Reck was also a novelist, mainly of children's adventure stories. One book, Bomben auf Monte Carlo, has been filmed twice. Many of his books were banned by the Nazis, and more were not published until years after his death. Today his best known work is Diary Of A Man In Despair (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten), his journal of life under Nazi rule (which he vehemently opposed), which was published in English translation by Paul Rubens in 1970.
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March 15, 2025
Essential peri-WWII reading discovered thanks to one of those "readers also enjoyed" recommendations on GR's upper-right margin. I was like, hey, that sounds like a catchy title, an uplifting romp to help me through the recent extreme Arctic freeze. GR was ultimately right: I liked this a good deal, this journal of a country's suicide, a document that every Fox News aficionado and anyone who self-IDs as "deplorable" should have forcibly uploaded into them to debug their corrupted systems of morality (in a Philadelphia parking garage, I saw a huge "deplorable" sticker aggressively rendering the word in proud script across a pickup's back window). Translated by Paul Rubens, I also liked imagining that it was rendered from the original German into an active, erudite, often angry, and always flowing English by Pee Wee Herman.
An aristocratic, conservative, monarchistic gentleman writer who lives on an estate in an idyllic valley in a 600-year-old Gothic house bitterly opposes the Nazis, in part because they're petty thief louts. This is worth it for the portraits of his three encounters with Hitler, particularly the early one where Hitler is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and is accompanied by a collie, rants a lot in some aristocrat's house, and then when he leaves the host casually opens the windows to let in some fresh air to spiritually clear the room. Hitler is presented as a low-life psychopath from the beginning, a man whose doughy face wouldn't have even been respected by servants in the late 1890s. Yet still women scoop and eat the gravel on which he's walked. I could go on and on listing striking images and insights.
Interesting that at no point does he mention the Holocaust although he does witness antisemitism and mentions hearing about the machine-gunning of 50,000 Jews. He's mostly isolated from the war, really, and receives it via rumor and the radio, often unwanted official visitors, and the sound of distant bombs and the occasional shot-down bomber falling to the ground like a leaf in autumn. The descriptions of the American bombing of Hamburg, with a rain of phosphorous burning and shrinking civilians, 200,000 purportedly dead and the city flattened, deliver exactly the sort of perverse "pleasure" I derive from reading these accounts -- the prose elevates as it relays absolute satanic horror and attains the highest levels of heft and lesson but also so often achieves a sort of magic as the text disappears, replaced by a vision of the worst possible world, Bosch landscapes superimposed over what only recently had been perfectly civilized civilization.
The key impression is erudition and anger. The author is insightful, knowledgeable, educated, moral, and always takes a long view of the present, seeing it from the perspective of "the world of yesterday" and a future in which the Nazis receive what's coming to them. He understands that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." For the author, the Kaiser and the fallen monarchy are his Obama; the Nazis are his Trump. This is of course valuable now for its parallels. The lying is most striking, how they twist the truth at all times, how both Hitler and Trump seem like psychopaths addicted to screens (movies for Adolph, Fox News for Trump), how they both are essentially puppets of industrialists/financiers behind the scenes and harnessed lower-middle-class fear and anger and nationalism to gain power and enrich themselves ultimately at great cost to the soul of their countries (I'm hopeful that the parallel ends before "ultimately").
Here's a bit worth re-typing: "It does sometimes happen that a would-be great man is allowed to toy with the levers of the gigantic machinery of history. But suddenly the wheels begin to move, faster and faster, and he is thrown into the machinery and crushed . . . A miserable hysteric may play Alexander the Great before the world for a while. But sooner or later, history comes along and pulls the mask off of his face."
Almost gave it the full five stars but I found his fury repetitive after 150 pages or so. For a journal -- and not a memoir recollected in anything resembling tranquility -- it's surprisingly cogent and moving, filled with anecdotes and history, and it relays a sense of a sort of life lost now to time. I also couldn't find in the foreword or back cover how the journal was discovered and brought into print. A quick Google session now reveals nothing. I suppose his publishers knew where he had hidden it in case he didn't survive the war?
Anyway, after writing this, I feel like I have to give this the full five. It's easy to write a quick review on Goodreads that criticizes our current and most likely comparatively temporary regime in power, but in no way do I imagine that doing so is in any way courageous. Reck absolutely risked his life to write this (if the Nazis had found it he would've been immediately executed, possibly beheaded). So, considering how dangerous the simple act of keeping this diary was, it merits the highest medal of honor available here.
An aristocratic, conservative, monarchistic gentleman writer who lives on an estate in an idyllic valley in a 600-year-old Gothic house bitterly opposes the Nazis, in part because they're petty thief louts. This is worth it for the portraits of his three encounters with Hitler, particularly the early one where Hitler is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and is accompanied by a collie, rants a lot in some aristocrat's house, and then when he leaves the host casually opens the windows to let in some fresh air to spiritually clear the room. Hitler is presented as a low-life psychopath from the beginning, a man whose doughy face wouldn't have even been respected by servants in the late 1890s. Yet still women scoop and eat the gravel on which he's walked. I could go on and on listing striking images and insights.
Interesting that at no point does he mention the Holocaust although he does witness antisemitism and mentions hearing about the machine-gunning of 50,000 Jews. He's mostly isolated from the war, really, and receives it via rumor and the radio, often unwanted official visitors, and the sound of distant bombs and the occasional shot-down bomber falling to the ground like a leaf in autumn. The descriptions of the American bombing of Hamburg, with a rain of phosphorous burning and shrinking civilians, 200,000 purportedly dead and the city flattened, deliver exactly the sort of perverse "pleasure" I derive from reading these accounts -- the prose elevates as it relays absolute satanic horror and attains the highest levels of heft and lesson but also so often achieves a sort of magic as the text disappears, replaced by a vision of the worst possible world, Bosch landscapes superimposed over what only recently had been perfectly civilized civilization.
The key impression is erudition and anger. The author is insightful, knowledgeable, educated, moral, and always takes a long view of the present, seeing it from the perspective of "the world of yesterday" and a future in which the Nazis receive what's coming to them. He understands that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." For the author, the Kaiser and the fallen monarchy are his Obama; the Nazis are his Trump. This is of course valuable now for its parallels. The lying is most striking, how they twist the truth at all times, how both Hitler and Trump seem like psychopaths addicted to screens (movies for Adolph, Fox News for Trump), how they both are essentially puppets of industrialists/financiers behind the scenes and harnessed lower-middle-class fear and anger and nationalism to gain power and enrich themselves ultimately at great cost to the soul of their countries (I'm hopeful that the parallel ends before "ultimately").
Here's a bit worth re-typing: "It does sometimes happen that a would-be great man is allowed to toy with the levers of the gigantic machinery of history. But suddenly the wheels begin to move, faster and faster, and he is thrown into the machinery and crushed . . . A miserable hysteric may play Alexander the Great before the world for a while. But sooner or later, history comes along and pulls the mask off of his face."
Almost gave it the full five stars but I found his fury repetitive after 150 pages or so. For a journal -- and not a memoir recollected in anything resembling tranquility -- it's surprisingly cogent and moving, filled with anecdotes and history, and it relays a sense of a sort of life lost now to time. I also couldn't find in the foreword or back cover how the journal was discovered and brought into print. A quick Google session now reveals nothing. I suppose his publishers knew where he had hidden it in case he didn't survive the war?
Anyway, after writing this, I feel like I have to give this the full five. It's easy to write a quick review on Goodreads that criticizes our current and most likely comparatively temporary regime in power, but in no way do I imagine that doing so is in any way courageous. Reck absolutely risked his life to write this (if the Nazis had found it he would've been immediately executed, possibly beheaded). So, considering how dangerous the simple act of keeping this diary was, it merits the highest medal of honor available here.
October 4, 2023
A conservative German aristocrat and historian kept a diary beginning in 1936, documenting the demise of the German empire through Nazism. Chilling, in the early pages, with resemblance to the rise today of other fascist, populist regimes, including one he himself was studying from the Mddle Ages. And from the first he documents with a sense of shock, anger and, yes, despair.
Reck saw himself as part of a shrinking minority faced with millions of adoring and increasingly manic fans deifying a criminal he finds stupid. He notes many criminal acts denied/ignored by Hitler's adoring populace. He relates with horror a story from the press that some women adoringly swallowed gravel Hitler had merely walked on.
As a person that pays attention to the news/state of the world, I was attracted to the title of this book and its possible wisdom about the present time. I discovered it was written by a German intellectual, and novelist, Frederick Reck, who never emigrated from Germany in spite of the rise of Nazism. He calls it a kind of “inner emigration,” which limited his ability to speak out publicly against the regime. Still, Reck decided to risk his life by keeping a record of his thoughts from roughly 1936 through 1944, when he was finally incarcerated for showing insufficient support for Hitler and his disastrously criminal war effort, and died in Dachau, close to three months before the end of the war he had decried from the first.
Reck was no radical leftist; in fact, he was a conservative, even possibly a reactionary--he was not in favor of democracy, saw himself as part of the elite cultured establishment, but he is nevertheless remarkable in many places in ways I have read from few first hand witnesses from the inside of the Third Reich. The book is a kind of diatribe against the rise of the “vulgar” and stupid criminal Hitler and his henchmen who oversaw the hysterical takeover of Germany and nearly, the world. It’s a series of snapshots of periods of that decade, rants against the regime, naming names in corruption, fraud, theft murder, and so on.
It would seem Reck was unaware of the camps, at least the extent of the horror, insofar as we know from his account, but he does name mass murder when he finds it. What’s not unexpected but still annoying at times is his whining about wartime hardships on the level of food access and quality, or the “vulgarity” of the Nazis and their supporters. Vulgarity was the least of their crimes. But he’s still appropriately outraged at the “thin sauce” of ideology and greed driving the Nazi takeover of multiple countries.
“But we must be completely clear. . . if nationalism is truly the hallmark of a people in the prime of its youth and energies, how does it happen that under its aegis morality decays, ancient customs die out---that men are uprooted, the steadfast derided, the thoughtful branded, the rivers poisoned, and the forests destroyed? Why, if this is a high watermark of our national life, has our speech been vulgarized in this unprecedented way?”
"A storm is coming up over the heads of a people blindly drunk with victory, and the man who sees it is alone today in Germany. . . of all the things that have ever been asked of life, just one remains: that in the hour of martyrdom, which our epoch requires of any man not part of the mass, a man be able to bring forth out of himself the strength that comes from having kept faith with the truth. Surely, all human wishes, provided only that they are big enough, must come to fulfillment?"
This kind of speech is a refrain throughout:
“I hate you. I hate you waking and sleeping; I hate you for undoing men’s souls, and for spoiling their lives; I hate you as the sworn enemy of the laughter of men. . . Oh, it is God’s deadly enemy which I see, and hate, in you.”
“In every one of your speeches you make a mockery of the Spirit, which you have silenced, and you forget that the private thought, the thought born in sorrow and loneliness, can be more deadly than all your implements of torture. You threaten all who oppose you with death, but you forget: our hatred is a deadly poison. It will creep into your blood, and we will die shouting with joy when our hate pulls you down with us into the depths.”
He goes back and forth about how much he loves the Spirit and cultural history of Germany while decrying “the stupidity of an entire people in agreeing to this combination of corruption and inadequacy of leadership . . .”
Some random quotes:
“Hitlerism is a symptom, indicating a deep disturbance of cosmic proportions in the world.”
“A man must hate this Germany with his whole heart if he is to truly love it.”
“The frightening emptiness of their faces. . . and also the completely hysterical savagery.”
“The ocean of disgrace into which we have all sunk.”
Hitler to Reck is a pathological liar: “He certainly has lied and lied regularly and often to enhance his own personal reputation.”
“That power drunk schizophrenic. . .”
After Kristallnacht, Reck observes “[Hitler] signed his own death warrant.” A premature call, but apt in many ways, as this murderous reign escalated even as most of the world decried these acts (I say most because it is now clear not enough of the world spoke quickly or effectively enough).
Reck documents murder and suicide everywhere in his beloved country, as guillotines are brought to many cities to decapitate those who raise their voices in dissent. He speaks of the teenaged Sophie Scholl and her brother, killed for speaking against the state of criminality, the Antigone of Nazi Germany.
“ . . . faithful to the end, I have believed in the existence of Satan as I believe in the existence of God.”
“. . .the tyranny of an arrogant civilization at an end.”
“There is some eerie, impending thing in the air, the whole physical structure of our lives seems to have broken down under the weight of these never-ending lies.”
“The mystery of the German mass psychosis. . .”
“Courage is required to go on living now.”
His “diary” was published in 1947; I read the 2013 NYRB publication with an afterword defending Reck against a man who spent 25 years writing a dissertation pointing out errors in his text. Reck says yes, there are mistakes in the text that don’t take away from the hateful things identified in the text, and Reck’s passion. An historian checked all of Reck's assertions and allusions, finding nearly all of them to be supported by historical documents. Details, corrections and sources are provided in 10 small print pages at the back of the book.
“It throws up a troubling question that remains impossible to answer: If Reck could see so clearly that the Third Reich was plunging Germany into a maelstrom of crime and degradation, why did hardly any other Germans share his clarity of vision?”
But does any of this sound familiar to you regarding the world you live in? This is on the whole a remarkable document.
Reck saw himself as part of a shrinking minority faced with millions of adoring and increasingly manic fans deifying a criminal he finds stupid. He notes many criminal acts denied/ignored by Hitler's adoring populace. He relates with horror a story from the press that some women adoringly swallowed gravel Hitler had merely walked on.
As a person that pays attention to the news/state of the world, I was attracted to the title of this book and its possible wisdom about the present time. I discovered it was written by a German intellectual, and novelist, Frederick Reck, who never emigrated from Germany in spite of the rise of Nazism. He calls it a kind of “inner emigration,” which limited his ability to speak out publicly against the regime. Still, Reck decided to risk his life by keeping a record of his thoughts from roughly 1936 through 1944, when he was finally incarcerated for showing insufficient support for Hitler and his disastrously criminal war effort, and died in Dachau, close to three months before the end of the war he had decried from the first.
Reck was no radical leftist; in fact, he was a conservative, even possibly a reactionary--he was not in favor of democracy, saw himself as part of the elite cultured establishment, but he is nevertheless remarkable in many places in ways I have read from few first hand witnesses from the inside of the Third Reich. The book is a kind of diatribe against the rise of the “vulgar” and stupid criminal Hitler and his henchmen who oversaw the hysterical takeover of Germany and nearly, the world. It’s a series of snapshots of periods of that decade, rants against the regime, naming names in corruption, fraud, theft murder, and so on.
It would seem Reck was unaware of the camps, at least the extent of the horror, insofar as we know from his account, but he does name mass murder when he finds it. What’s not unexpected but still annoying at times is his whining about wartime hardships on the level of food access and quality, or the “vulgarity” of the Nazis and their supporters. Vulgarity was the least of their crimes. But he’s still appropriately outraged at the “thin sauce” of ideology and greed driving the Nazi takeover of multiple countries.
“But we must be completely clear. . . if nationalism is truly the hallmark of a people in the prime of its youth and energies, how does it happen that under its aegis morality decays, ancient customs die out---that men are uprooted, the steadfast derided, the thoughtful branded, the rivers poisoned, and the forests destroyed? Why, if this is a high watermark of our national life, has our speech been vulgarized in this unprecedented way?”
"A storm is coming up over the heads of a people blindly drunk with victory, and the man who sees it is alone today in Germany. . . of all the things that have ever been asked of life, just one remains: that in the hour of martyrdom, which our epoch requires of any man not part of the mass, a man be able to bring forth out of himself the strength that comes from having kept faith with the truth. Surely, all human wishes, provided only that they are big enough, must come to fulfillment?"
This kind of speech is a refrain throughout:
“I hate you. I hate you waking and sleeping; I hate you for undoing men’s souls, and for spoiling their lives; I hate you as the sworn enemy of the laughter of men. . . Oh, it is God’s deadly enemy which I see, and hate, in you.”
“In every one of your speeches you make a mockery of the Spirit, which you have silenced, and you forget that the private thought, the thought born in sorrow and loneliness, can be more deadly than all your implements of torture. You threaten all who oppose you with death, but you forget: our hatred is a deadly poison. It will creep into your blood, and we will die shouting with joy when our hate pulls you down with us into the depths.”
He goes back and forth about how much he loves the Spirit and cultural history of Germany while decrying “the stupidity of an entire people in agreeing to this combination of corruption and inadequacy of leadership . . .”
Some random quotes:
“Hitlerism is a symptom, indicating a deep disturbance of cosmic proportions in the world.”
“A man must hate this Germany with his whole heart if he is to truly love it.”
“The frightening emptiness of their faces. . . and also the completely hysterical savagery.”
“The ocean of disgrace into which we have all sunk.”
Hitler to Reck is a pathological liar: “He certainly has lied and lied regularly and often to enhance his own personal reputation.”
“That power drunk schizophrenic. . .”
After Kristallnacht, Reck observes “[Hitler] signed his own death warrant.” A premature call, but apt in many ways, as this murderous reign escalated even as most of the world decried these acts (I say most because it is now clear not enough of the world spoke quickly or effectively enough).
Reck documents murder and suicide everywhere in his beloved country, as guillotines are brought to many cities to decapitate those who raise their voices in dissent. He speaks of the teenaged Sophie Scholl and her brother, killed for speaking against the state of criminality, the Antigone of Nazi Germany.
“ . . . faithful to the end, I have believed in the existence of Satan as I believe in the existence of God.”
“. . .the tyranny of an arrogant civilization at an end.”
“There is some eerie, impending thing in the air, the whole physical structure of our lives seems to have broken down under the weight of these never-ending lies.”
“The mystery of the German mass psychosis. . .”
“Courage is required to go on living now.”
His “diary” was published in 1947; I read the 2013 NYRB publication with an afterword defending Reck against a man who spent 25 years writing a dissertation pointing out errors in his text. Reck says yes, there are mistakes in the text that don’t take away from the hateful things identified in the text, and Reck’s passion. An historian checked all of Reck's assertions and allusions, finding nearly all of them to be supported by historical documents. Details, corrections and sources are provided in 10 small print pages at the back of the book.
“It throws up a troubling question that remains impossible to answer: If Reck could see so clearly that the Third Reich was plunging Germany into a maelstrom of crime and degradation, why did hardly any other Germans share his clarity of vision?”
But does any of this sound familiar to you regarding the world you live in? This is on the whole a remarkable document.
May 13, 2014
Apparently, there is some disagreement about how 'authentic' Reck's diary is. For instance, he talks like a south-German gentleman, but was actually Prussian. Researchers who care about these things say that he lies a lot. This might dampen your reading experience, but not mine: I don't care if Reck's Diary is false, or a persona, or a character, because the speaker in these diaries is one of the most entertaining, enlightening characters I've ever come across in fiction. Whatever else Reck did or was, he certainly lived through Nazi Germany, very nearly to the end, only to end up in Dachau, where he died.
He acts like an old nobleman... but one who is generally kind to the proletariat and the peasantry, and reserves his scorn and hatred for the bourgeoisie and other nobles (at a time when these words still meant something). He's a reader of Spengler, and acts at times like a genuine pessimist... but a pessimist who has great hopes for the future, in which the vulgarity, cruelty, barbarity and injustice of the present may be overcome. Most of all, he depicts himself as an extraordinarily kind man, willing to use his (I assume) gravity and bearing in defense of the victims of petty arrogance, but at the same time harbors an incredible hatred.
DMD is one of the best books I've read recently thanks to these two things: the qualities of its probably half fictional narrator, and the openness with which he hates everything that deserves hatred--Nazis, of course, but everything they stand for. Vulgarity, pettiness, barbarity, stupidity, irrationality, self-interest, gullibility (whether conscious or not). Reck's narrator scorns everything that deserves scorn, and any book that reminds us of that is worth reading. That you get the scorn, and the narrator. And above all you get the incredible sensation--like seeing a Greek tragedy--of reading about Nazi Germany while knowing what's going to happen (i.e., Reck's hopes for the defeat of the Nazis will be fulfilled, but he won't live to see the future).
A clearer head could probably criticize this book heartily; Reck obviously lives in a fantasy world that is part medieval and part modern. But I forgot that while I was reading. Recommended for all.
"A storm is coming up over the heads of a people blindly drunk with victory, and the man who sees it is alone today in Germany... of all the things that have ever been asked of life, just on remains: that in the hour of martyrdom, which our epoch requires of any man not part of the mass, a man be able to bring forth out f himself the strength that comes from having kept faith with the truth.
Surely, all human wishes, provided only that they are big enough, must come to fulfillment?" [129].
He acts like an old nobleman... but one who is generally kind to the proletariat and the peasantry, and reserves his scorn and hatred for the bourgeoisie and other nobles (at a time when these words still meant something). He's a reader of Spengler, and acts at times like a genuine pessimist... but a pessimist who has great hopes for the future, in which the vulgarity, cruelty, barbarity and injustice of the present may be overcome. Most of all, he depicts himself as an extraordinarily kind man, willing to use his (I assume) gravity and bearing in defense of the victims of petty arrogance, but at the same time harbors an incredible hatred.
DMD is one of the best books I've read recently thanks to these two things: the qualities of its probably half fictional narrator, and the openness with which he hates everything that deserves hatred--Nazis, of course, but everything they stand for. Vulgarity, pettiness, barbarity, stupidity, irrationality, self-interest, gullibility (whether conscious or not). Reck's narrator scorns everything that deserves scorn, and any book that reminds us of that is worth reading. That you get the scorn, and the narrator. And above all you get the incredible sensation--like seeing a Greek tragedy--of reading about Nazi Germany while knowing what's going to happen (i.e., Reck's hopes for the defeat of the Nazis will be fulfilled, but he won't live to see the future).
A clearer head could probably criticize this book heartily; Reck obviously lives in a fantasy world that is part medieval and part modern. But I forgot that while I was reading. Recommended for all.
"A storm is coming up over the heads of a people blindly drunk with victory, and the man who sees it is alone today in Germany... of all the things that have ever been asked of life, just on remains: that in the hour of martyrdom, which our epoch requires of any man not part of the mass, a man be able to bring forth out f himself the strength that comes from having kept faith with the truth.
Surely, all human wishes, provided only that they are big enough, must come to fulfillment?" [129].
Read
November 21, 2017
[This book has been translated into English under the title Diary of a Man in Despair.]
Born into a noble Prussian family down on its luck, Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen (1884-1945) was a failed officer and a failed medical doctor and so wrote articles for newspapers and books for the mass market in order to keep his head above water. But beginning in May, 1936, he secretly wrote a diary in which he eloquently and dangerously vented his hate for the Nazis and those who helped them to power - the big German industrialists, his own Junker class, and the petite bourgeoisie - and expressed his despair at the sight of the German people acceding to the lawless, ruthless and shameless activities of the Nazis in power since January, 1933.
The few signs of active resistance from the Communists, from idealists like the Weisse Rose,(*) and from efforts in the military to assassinate Hitler alleviate for moments his despairing vituperation of the nearly unspeakable decay and collaboration he saw around him. But only for moments.
Many lovers of German culture have asked how could it happen, how could this "people of philosophers and poets" be taken in by this "böhmischen Gefreiten" and his laughing gallery of government ministers who soon changed the disdainful sneers into cries of fear? There have been many answers given to this question, and, after the fact, many books written by Germans to excuse or to whitewash their own collaboration. This book excuses no one, including the other European powers who stood by and watched until Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland.
One is simply mesmerized as Reck-Malleczewen makes his unwhitewashed reports from inside Nazi Germany about the increasingly thorough control of all aspects of German life by the Nazi party and its domestic security apparatus and the increasing unwillingness of Germans to utter any objections of any sort. He, and anyone else with eyes, clearly saw the huge ramping up of the military-industrial complex at the end of 1937. And there are many passages of perfect clairvoyance like this one, written directly after the violent Anschluss of Austria to the Drittes Reich in March, 1938:
All around, the other states shrug their shoulders while watching this miserable rape of a small state; no one grabs the criminal by the collar in time and all seem to want to wait until out of the yet vulnerable snake's egg the great cobra will crawl. But I see the day coming when one will remember this politics of cowardly passivity. ... I pose the question already now and see the day coming when I, after the unavoidable Second World War, will pose it a second time.
[my translation]
Reck-Malleczewen surprises with a bitter humor which caused me to laugh many times. The text is also full of unexpected stories of all kinds, not the least of which is the one about the former German officer, who, standing before a firing squad, turns around and drops his britches and a load right in front of the speechless executioners...
Reck-Malleczewen's critique of Nazi Germany is that of the stock conservative elite, not that of a progressive democrat. It is, therefore, more than anything an aesthetic critique. The Nazis are crude, vulgar, physically repulsive lower middle class persons who have no appreciation for culture and breeding. And though he has a paternalistic sympathy for the honest, hard working proletariat, there is no sign of any real social conscience in this book.
Because of this, the editor of the progressive weekly Der Spiegel wrote an editorial upon the re-publication in 1966(**) of Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten to remind his readers that there was an abyss separating Reck-Malleczewen's critique of Nazism from that of the modern German progressives (in the '60's the Social Democrat Party was still socialist).
The last entry is dated October, 1944, when the German armies are being thrown back on all fronts, and is full of reports of people being arrested or simply disappearing. Since he did not attend a call up of the Volkssturm(***) because he, a 60 year old man, was experiencing angina pectoris, he was arrested for Zersetzung der Wehrmacht, a crime which entailed the guillotine. He does not explain how he came home to write the entry...
Later in 1944, Reck-Malleczewen was denounced again to the Nazis; the second one took. He died in Dachau in February, 1945. Somehow, the Nazis did not find his diary; Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten was first published in 1947 in the midst of Europe's ruins.
(*) A group of students and one professor at the University of Munich who wrote and distributed leaflets in 1942 and 1943 calling the German people to oppose the tyranny of the Nazis. Nearly all were arrested and executed by the guillotine. In at least one case it has been documented that the Nazis sent the widow a bill for 600 Reichsmarks for "Abnutzung des Fallbeils" ("wear of the guillotine").
(**) This is the edition I read. For this edition a historian checked all of Reck-Malleczewen's assertions and allusions, finding nearly all of them to be supported by historical documents. Details, corrections and sources are provided in 10 small print pages at the back of the book.
(***) The people's militia of the very old and very young that was going to do what Germany's professionally trained armies were not capable of doing.
December 24, 2021
'With the malignant narrow-mindedness of the man marked by the Devil, he hates everything that has grown up straight and healthy, and the opposite of himself. With the hatred of the illegitimate, he hates everything that belongs among the precious elements of our tradition, and which does not flatter his vanity. Is it really too much to say, when we view this dangerous gorilla, that we are prisoners of a Neanderthal man who has got loose from his chain?
And so we continue to vegetate in our life of shame, our life of dishonour, our life of lies. And our protest, at least the protest of our cowardly bourgeoisie, is in the retelling of old jokes about the regime, while their remaining days are spent swallowing propaganda.'
January 25, 2013
Freiderich Reck is a major contemporary critic of the Nazis. His critique, unlike the major ones coming out of Europe after the war, is from the right. He is a conservative prophet of doom, and his prescience is impressive since he never doubts the absolute disaster that was the rise of Nazism. To him Hitler is not very impressive, he often refers to him as something like "that man from rented rooms," but Reck has his own explanation of why he rose to so much power. Firstly he is not a fan of democracy, and blames, not so much the German people, as modern man, or "mass-man" as he puts it. The book starts out with a small obituary of Spengler, and though I haven't read S. I'm sure a lot of this comes from him. The "mass-man" is a consumerist being who doesn't appreciate what life is really about—quality, reflection, art, etc.—but is happy to float in a world of "more," "production," and "progress." As a good conservative, Reck doesn't believe in progress, and living where and when he does one can see why. But he doesn't think of the Germans as any worse than anyone else. The British are culpable by not standing up to Hitler when they had a chance. And American culture is the origin of "mass-men" and all the evils of consumerism and technology etc., so aren't really defenders of morality in his eyes. On the other hand as a Prussian aristocrat, or perhaps not as Richard Evans's afterword points out the many lies in this book, Reck also faults the German nationalism coming out of Bismark and the Wilhem monarchists. Their drive for more and more power, centralized control, and the expansion so valued by a colony, really only end up driving the country into the hands of the industrialist, the Krupps and Thyssens et al., these men, interested in profit and markets to sell their goods, embrace Nazism as a way to get their goals, lots and lots of money. They don't care at all about the finer things in life, and Germany's history of idealism, art, and culture that Reck obviously loves has been destroyed in the blink of an eye.
Reck really hates the Nazis. He repeats it over and over again. This book, as well as being an interesting conservative critique of their rise, is a real testimony to what was happening in the country. And testimony from someone who was not falling for it. He doesn't believe any of the propaganda. Which lead me to a weird question: If this man, eloquent and relatively influential, knew what was happening (at some level, he's not at all anti-semitic and is furious after the Kristalnacht, but you don't get the sense he knows all that is happening) why doesn't everyone else? I realize that Reck was somewhat rare as a Nazi critic who stayed in the country, the internal refugee, but why weren't more people? It's hard to understand even now, and Reck's book doesn't explain it. To him, the fools who said "heil hitler" and wore uniforms were "termites in an ant-hill", "mass-men" who are brain washed to follow their leader blindly. But he does also note the cruelty in some of the young men he sees. The only hope that Reck sees is that this moment in history is a psychic cleansing of the evils of the modern world. A "boil" that needs to explode in horrible blood and pus before the skin can return to its clean and pure form of before. Let's hope he was right.
Reck really hates the Nazis. He repeats it over and over again. This book, as well as being an interesting conservative critique of their rise, is a real testimony to what was happening in the country. And testimony from someone who was not falling for it. He doesn't believe any of the propaganda. Which lead me to a weird question: If this man, eloquent and relatively influential, knew what was happening (at some level, he's not at all anti-semitic and is furious after the Kristalnacht, but you don't get the sense he knows all that is happening) why doesn't everyone else? I realize that Reck was somewhat rare as a Nazi critic who stayed in the country, the internal refugee, but why weren't more people? It's hard to understand even now, and Reck's book doesn't explain it. To him, the fools who said "heil hitler" and wore uniforms were "termites in an ant-hill", "mass-men" who are brain washed to follow their leader blindly. But he does also note the cruelty in some of the young men he sees. The only hope that Reck sees is that this moment in history is a psychic cleansing of the evils of the modern world. A "boil" that needs to explode in horrible blood and pus before the skin can return to its clean and pure form of before. Let's hope he was right.
November 30, 2016
I came upon this extraordinary book while browsing in the library, having never heard of it. Reck writes in horrified, apocalyptic tones of Nazi Germany from 1936 to 1944. In almost every other situation, his pronouncements would seem hyperbolic and melodramatic; in context, they seem terribly appropriate. From the beginning of the book, Reck utterly condemns everything about the Nazis and foretells a Second World War which will bring catastrophe to Germany. Indeed, he invites it as the only way to bring down the Nazis. What makes his account especially striking is that he is a self-proclaimed aristocrat and conservative, not necessarily the type to support the Nazis but not someone you would expect to hate them so completely and consistently either. Reck’s analysis of the social and political situation in Germany at the time is thus unusual and fascinating to read. He rails against nationalism, which he claims began with the French Revolution, and industrial technology, which he states has brought political disaster to Germany since 1848. His moving and powerful prognostications of apocalyptic doom are interspersed with anecdotes, apparently of varying reliability. The strict letter of what says is much less important, however, that the overall atmosphere of a country gone horribly wrong. As the excellent afterword puts it,
Reck’s conservative, upper class perspective is also more nuanced than might be expected. He doesn’t see Hitler as a demagogue who appeals to the worse off, rather he praises the workers and condemns ‘mass-man’ who appear to be composed of urban petty bourgeoisie. His writing style is vivid and memorable, sprinkled with such phrases as, ‘I only know people who would rather weep with God than laugh with Satan!’ (Reck frequently uses imagery of the devil and demons, but comments firmly that this is figurative and humanity has no-one to blame but ourselves). I found his dissections of nationalism chilling, as it reappears across Europe in the 21st century. He defines it like this: ‘Nationalism: a state of mine in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s’. I was also struck by his questioning of how nationalism appears as a contradiction to globalised capitalism:
Sadly, Brexit makes these questions all too relevant seventy-six years after Reck wrote them. That is perhaps what makes the book truly extraordinary: Reck writes as if with miraculous hindsight and his analyses still have relevance today. The man himself perished in Dachau concentration camp in 1945, less than three months before the end of the Second World War. His writing deservedly lives on.
Yet what strikes the reader about ‘Diary of a Man in Despair’ are neither the occasional and perhaps inevitably errors and exaggerations nor the pseudo-aristocratic, pseudo-military pretensions of its author, but the unflinching honesty and growing anger of the writer as he confronts a world seemingly gone mad, a world in which the standards and values of the civilisation in which he believes so deeply are being trampled on every level. It throws up a troubling question that remains impossible to answer: If Reck could see so clearly that the Third Reich was plunging Germany into a maelstrom of crime and degradation, why did hardly any other Germans share his clarity of vision?
Reck’s conservative, upper class perspective is also more nuanced than might be expected. He doesn’t see Hitler as a demagogue who appeals to the worse off, rather he praises the workers and condemns ‘mass-man’ who appear to be composed of urban petty bourgeoisie. His writing style is vivid and memorable, sprinkled with such phrases as, ‘I only know people who would rather weep with God than laugh with Satan!’ (Reck frequently uses imagery of the devil and demons, but comments firmly that this is figurative and humanity has no-one to blame but ourselves). I found his dissections of nationalism chilling, as it reappears across Europe in the 21st century. He defines it like this: ‘Nationalism: a state of mine in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s’. I was also struck by his questioning of how nationalism appears as a contradiction to globalised capitalism:
Is such a symbiosis of autarchy and technology even possible? Doesn’t technology itself mix different peoples, and standardise their tastes and requirements? What is the point of building an auto to go two hundred kilometres an hour when after an hour’s drive you come to a border post, where a full-bearded Teuton waggles a threatening finger as he forbids further travel as ‘contrary to the interests of the government’?
Sadly, Brexit makes these questions all too relevant seventy-six years after Reck wrote them. That is perhaps what makes the book truly extraordinary: Reck writes as if with miraculous hindsight and his analyses still have relevance today. The man himself perished in Dachau concentration camp in 1945, less than three months before the end of the Second World War. His writing deservedly lives on.
July 24, 2015
An interesting document, and worth spending some hours with, despite my 3-stars. The book consists largely of a rant, but a principled and entirely rational arch-conservative, confronted (at first-hand) with the utter madness of the Nazi regime. Reck lived in 'inner emigration', but ended up dying in Dachau.
An honest man, a writer of well-known childrens' books, in a work gone berserk....
An honest man, a writer of well-known childrens' books, in a work gone berserk....
January 26, 2016
Reck's diary is a moving and heartfelt howl against the Nazis consisting of what might seem to be an incongruous mix of dishy gossip, get-off-my-lawn fist shaking, and escalating tales of haunting atrocity. It's fascinating to view the rise of the Nazis and the parallel Nazification of German society through Reck's socially and politically conservative perspective - where criticism of the regime is just as much aesthetic as it is moral (because, to Reck, aesthetic and moral are pretty much the same thing - aesthetics and manners are a window and an outward manifestation of moral life). To Reck, the Nazis were not only guilty of horrible outrages against life; they were just as guilty of horrible outrages against taste - and to Reck these crimes were inextricably linked. Reck saw the Nazis as both horrifying butchers and pathetically boorish and uppity gangsters - in both ways tearing down the social fabric he was so invested in and all that gave life meaning and purpose. Reck is by no means perfect (he's frequently racist in a colonial sense, comparing uncivilized/ill-mannered Germans to "hottentots," and he's always super put out when women don't seem to know their place). But it's hard not to be moved by his heartfelt rage against the Nazis and what they were doing to the country, and at his increasingly dire predicament as the Nazis eventually close in on him. Some of the sick bureaucratic evil of the Nazi Regime comes through when Reck is arrested for "insulting the currency" after he complains to his publisher about what inflation is doing to his royalty checks. His diary is also interesting in its prescience, as he sees the war coming and the desolation Germany will experience at its conclusion. The diary is an invaluable resource, if a little flawed; according to the excellent afterword, the book contains quite a few exaggerations and rumors and Reck is a bit of a storyteller as well. Still, it's a fascinating conservative-tinged window into German life and culture before and during the war, as Reck documents his changing fortunes as well as those of his peers, his friends, and his town - while noting their reaction to their changes in circumstances through collaboration and, rarely, resistance.
April 13, 2015
Harendt considered this book as the best testimony on Nazi Germany. It has just appeared in French. The most striking chapter is the one where he lunches in a brewery with a few meters of Hitler. « I could have killed him ».With what the course of history is due. And we understand that german nazi resistance was done by young romantic people (Sophie Scholl) and old aristocrat who hated the plebs.
Other people prefered exile, even interior exile.
Reck-Malleczewen died in Dachau in 1945.
Other people prefered exile, even interior exile.
Reck-Malleczewen died in Dachau in 1945.
February 11, 2020
A first hand account of a nation's descent into ideological and spiritual barbarism...A tome of righteous invective delivered to those most abominable of historical boogie-men...A dire warning to future generations concerning the intellectual rot of populism...Or a conservative's attempt at assuaging his own guilt (and those of his colleagues) at failing to halt this phantasmal nightmare from snowballing into the historical reality Nazism ultimately became...
Diary of a Man in Despair encompasses all of these facets (and many, many more) within the brief span of its 200 some odd pages. It's author Friedrich Reck is not your typical critic of the Nazi regime...he's not a communist forced underground...he's not a jew or an other "undesirable"....hell he's not even a social democrat or a liberal. A self proclaimed conservative monarchist (and confidant of Oswald Spengler)... Reck notably though detested the capitalistic, militarist, and above all nationalistic pig sty Germany had become since it's unification under Otto Von Bismarck in 1871. His uniquely independent worldview crafts a rather intriguing look into the various failings of the German character that allowed Hitlerism to become the norm...And as the war comes about, and its dire consequences are played out one can sense the destruction of Reck's previously held political beliefs as his world comes to its apocalyptic end. Ultimately he was imprisoned in Dachau where he died of illness mere months before the end of the conflict in Europe....Thus one confronts in these pages a man staring into his own abyss. It's powerful stuff, and it makes for a unique counterpoint to Gravity's Rainbow (as I read them concurrently)....
The only minor downside is that some of the entries become swamped in boring sections concerning local rumors surrounding other figures in the German intelligentsia....
Recommended to ALL moral adults...this is a text that needs to be read as the ideological spectres of the early 20th century make their return here in the US and abroad...
5/5
Diary of a Man in Despair encompasses all of these facets (and many, many more) within the brief span of its 200 some odd pages. It's author Friedrich Reck is not your typical critic of the Nazi regime...he's not a communist forced underground...he's not a jew or an other "undesirable"....hell he's not even a social democrat or a liberal. A self proclaimed conservative monarchist (and confidant of Oswald Spengler)... Reck notably though detested the capitalistic, militarist, and above all nationalistic pig sty Germany had become since it's unification under Otto Von Bismarck in 1871. His uniquely independent worldview crafts a rather intriguing look into the various failings of the German character that allowed Hitlerism to become the norm...And as the war comes about, and its dire consequences are played out one can sense the destruction of Reck's previously held political beliefs as his world comes to its apocalyptic end. Ultimately he was imprisoned in Dachau where he died of illness mere months before the end of the conflict in Europe....Thus one confronts in these pages a man staring into his own abyss. It's powerful stuff, and it makes for a unique counterpoint to Gravity's Rainbow (as I read them concurrently)....
The only minor downside is that some of the entries become swamped in boring sections concerning local rumors surrounding other figures in the German intelligentsia....
Recommended to ALL moral adults...this is a text that needs to be read as the ideological spectres of the early 20th century make their return here in the US and abroad...
5/5
January 28, 2014
Holy Sheeeet, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen: This dude is my newest hero. What a book. 200+ pages of the most livid, caustic, perceptive, learned and cultivated dude throwing absolute haymaker roundhouses at Nazis. Glorious.
He was a landowning aristocrat, a veteran, and a writer of popular fiction (mostly for children). He moved in the most influential circles, was a connoisseur of art and lit, and he knew his history. If he had bought in to the ideology of the Third Reich, or even just played along publicly, he would've coasted from 1933-45. But he was a man of integrity who saw the regime, and its leader, for what they were: a bunch of vicious, hollow, kleptomaniac, sociopathic thugs who were polluting everything worthwhile in German spirit & culture. And boy did he write about it. Reck was a diarist of the highest order, able to take at individual moments & recollections (whether from 20 years previous or the day before) and polish them into perfect gems of invective, sorrow, and foreboding. He knew, from the moment they assumed power that the rise of the Nazis meant the destruction of his beloved German as he knew it, and he knew there was nothing he personally could do about it. So he kept this diary (hidden underground outside on his property) in order to record the degradation of his country, and privately rail against it.
He has nothing but contempt for the Reich, and the worst (best?) of it is reserved for Herr Hitler whom he refers to variously as "Machiavelli for chambermaids", "Chief Eunuch of the Reich", a "stereotype of the head waiter", a "forelocked gypsy", and a mere "resident of a furnished room". His rage is so vivid, so righteous, and so artfully expressed. I also find it remarkable because, as much as that rage resonates, on a cultural/political level Reck was about as distant from me as possible. A monarchist uber-consertive who loathed democracy, modernism, technology, mass-man, the middle class (who, much more than the German workers, embraced Nazism), and urban America, I doubt he'd have much good to say about me or my milieu, but damn if I don't find that irrelevant after reading this.
I can't recommend this book enough. I feel it's something I'll have to return to periodically, and it's definitely a work I'll cherish forever. Read it yourself. You won't forget it.
He was a landowning aristocrat, a veteran, and a writer of popular fiction (mostly for children). He moved in the most influential circles, was a connoisseur of art and lit, and he knew his history. If he had bought in to the ideology of the Third Reich, or even just played along publicly, he would've coasted from 1933-45. But he was a man of integrity who saw the regime, and its leader, for what they were: a bunch of vicious, hollow, kleptomaniac, sociopathic thugs who were polluting everything worthwhile in German spirit & culture. And boy did he write about it. Reck was a diarist of the highest order, able to take at individual moments & recollections (whether from 20 years previous or the day before) and polish them into perfect gems of invective, sorrow, and foreboding. He knew, from the moment they assumed power that the rise of the Nazis meant the destruction of his beloved German as he knew it, and he knew there was nothing he personally could do about it. So he kept this diary (hidden underground outside on his property) in order to record the degradation of his country, and privately rail against it.
He has nothing but contempt for the Reich, and the worst (best?) of it is reserved for Herr Hitler whom he refers to variously as "Machiavelli for chambermaids", "Chief Eunuch of the Reich", a "stereotype of the head waiter", a "forelocked gypsy", and a mere "resident of a furnished room". His rage is so vivid, so righteous, and so artfully expressed. I also find it remarkable because, as much as that rage resonates, on a cultural/political level Reck was about as distant from me as possible. A monarchist uber-consertive who loathed democracy, modernism, technology, mass-man, the middle class (who, much more than the German workers, embraced Nazism), and urban America, I doubt he'd have much good to say about me or my milieu, but damn if I don't find that irrelevant after reading this.
I can't recommend this book enough. I feel it's something I'll have to return to periodically, and it's definitely a work I'll cherish forever. Read it yourself. You won't forget it.
July 12, 2021
This ranks with the most important reads on WWII that you'll find. Why? Because Reck reads like a man who had to write it, didn't want to - but had to. Much like G.B. Edwards' Book of Ebanezer Le Page - this is a personal account of a man who stands outside the rubble, for now at least, while what he loves most is destroyed by people that should know better. Almost too close to the situation - Reck knew what he was writing would probably cost him his life. He makes it clear that he'll gladly exchange his existence 10 times over to see his enemies die. There's nothing flinching in his hate for the Nazi regime and this rage is tempered enough to make the reader much engaged in the storied of the downfall of a nation. Reck rails against technology and "progress" like all writers convinced that the end of humanity is near. But there's more to this than just another exposition of Nazi scum - there's a profound understanding of the machinations that made it all happen - but that alone isn't enough to set this apart. What I found most engaging is the fact that we, the reader, knows exactly what is going to happen - but Reck seems to know it as well. This clairvoyance places Reck in lock step with the reader as we move through the book. There's no introduction to this book and if you're reading this - this might be the introduction that NYRB wisely chose not to present - but rather an afterword that explains the reaction to the book primarily. Some of the stories seem hyperbolic but not to any major fault and considering the active campaign of disinformation it is very understandable that the complete and accurate reality of what occurred could only have happened after the dust and ash cleared. Although I wouldn't call it funny - there are bits of humor that draw contrast to the Nazis who were felled, in no small part, by their lack of ability to connect with humanity and the humor that is always present in reality. These jackbooted thugs are too busy with their whores to know love, too aloof to be genuinely pious and too married to an ideal to respect anything deemed superfluous like family or that which serves as an affront to nationalism.
There's something powerful here about a man writing out of his typical milieu. Reck wrote parody and plays otherwise and this move away from his tradition form seems forced by his circumstances. This provides an urgency and gravity that is powerful. It reminds me of Groucho writing about the death of his brothers; No cigar wiggling, no mugging - but instead a man urged to write by his need to expurgate and expound on a horrible situation and the factors that created it.
My only minor complaint is that while NYRB usually chooses the perfect painting for the cover of their books - this one is a miss. Earlier editions featured Simberg's Wounded Angel - that's the perfect painting for this. Simberg's child pall-bearer gazes out at the viewer asking why it all happened. No improvement on that is possible in this case - so it's a forgivable slight that they couldn't use the same work again under a different publisher's name.
Are you getting a sense that this might apply to current events in a similar manner?
There's something powerful here about a man writing out of his typical milieu. Reck wrote parody and plays otherwise and this move away from his tradition form seems forced by his circumstances. This provides an urgency and gravity that is powerful. It reminds me of Groucho writing about the death of his brothers; No cigar wiggling, no mugging - but instead a man urged to write by his need to expurgate and expound on a horrible situation and the factors that created it.
My only minor complaint is that while NYRB usually chooses the perfect painting for the cover of their books - this one is a miss. Earlier editions featured Simberg's Wounded Angel - that's the perfect painting for this. Simberg's child pall-bearer gazes out at the viewer asking why it all happened. No improvement on that is possible in this case - so it's a forgivable slight that they couldn't use the same work again under a different publisher's name.
Are you getting a sense that this might apply to current events in a similar manner?
November 14, 2023
It took me a while to get into this book, as I did not initially like the author, who was a complete snob. However, I stuck with it, and as the book went on, I understood him better. Yes, he was still a snob, but he had some very interesting things to say about the breakdown of his society (Germany under the Nazis) to say.
At first he objected to the Nazis, because he saw them as ignorant, uncultured oafs and himself as an intelligent, cultured and educated gentleman of letters. He bemoans the idiocy of the mass-men who follow like sheep:
Then, as Nazis gained more and more power, and increased their denunciation of Jews and others of his friends, and incarcerated or ‘disappeared’ them, Reck started to see the Nazis as dangerous rather than just stupid. He sees the language and violence of the Nazis as coarsening, then ultimately destroying German culture and society.
Reck sees the origins of Nazi thinking in the industrialisation of Germany and the Prussian military mindset, which during WWI and following defeat led to extreme nationalism. Major German industrialist did support the Nazis, thinking they could control them, and some companies – such as IG Farben – made a lot of money out of Nazi activities. As much as he hates the industrialists, Reck admires the workmen who continue to do their jobs in spite of the growing disorder, and above all the Bavarian farmers. He wants desperately to return to a pre-industrialised, and cultured, preferably monarchist (Wittelsbach not Hohenzollern) Germany – butt that boat has gone forever.
It is amazing that someone so opposed to the Nazis such as Reck (though he was never actively opposed), should have remained at liberty for so long, but eventually he was arrested, sent to Dachau, and died just before the end of the war. Most intellectuals and writers left Germany early on, but Reck stayed – through naivety, hopeful optimism, inertia, refusal to let the Nazis dictate his situation – who can tell?
This book was fascinating as a contemporary record of the insidious creep of nationalism, fascism and destruction of civilisation. Germany was not special. This could happen in many countries – and is today in Russia and Syria to name just two.
After a slow start, I really liked this book, and would recommend it to anyone who wishes to understand more about the feeling of Germans remaining in Germany during WWII.
At first he objected to the Nazis, because he saw them as ignorant, uncultured oafs and himself as an intelligent, cultured and educated gentleman of letters. He bemoans the idiocy of the mass-men who follow like sheep:
“Really, this people, only yesterday so intelligent and discriminating, seems to have been overcome by a disease of the mind. They now believe everything they are told, provided it is done with sufficient aplomb”
Then, as Nazis gained more and more power, and increased their denunciation of Jews and others of his friends, and incarcerated or ‘disappeared’ them, Reck started to see the Nazis as dangerous rather than just stupid. He sees the language and violence of the Nazis as coarsening, then ultimately destroying German culture and society.
Reck sees the origins of Nazi thinking in the industrialisation of Germany and the Prussian military mindset, which during WWI and following defeat led to extreme nationalism. Major German industrialist did support the Nazis, thinking they could control them, and some companies – such as IG Farben – made a lot of money out of Nazi activities. As much as he hates the industrialists, Reck admires the workmen who continue to do their jobs in spite of the growing disorder, and above all the Bavarian farmers. He wants desperately to return to a pre-industrialised, and cultured, preferably monarchist (Wittelsbach not Hohenzollern) Germany – butt that boat has gone forever.
It is amazing that someone so opposed to the Nazis such as Reck (though he was never actively opposed), should have remained at liberty for so long, but eventually he was arrested, sent to Dachau, and died just before the end of the war. Most intellectuals and writers left Germany early on, but Reck stayed – through naivety, hopeful optimism, inertia, refusal to let the Nazis dictate his situation – who can tell?
This book was fascinating as a contemporary record of the insidious creep of nationalism, fascism and destruction of civilisation. Germany was not special. This could happen in many countries – and is today in Russia and Syria to name just two.
After a slow start, I really liked this book, and would recommend it to anyone who wishes to understand more about the feeling of Germans remaining in Germany during WWII.
July 12, 2013
I read Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's diary in an English edition some years ago. It was a taut, absorbing read. Reck-Malleczewen was a political conservative, a monarchist, even a snob, a converted Catholic, a noted children's books' author and a ship's doctor. He hated Hitler and Nazism passionately, with a ferociousness that never ebbed. In his diary he recalls having had stopped for lunch at a small tavern after a morning's hunt and having noticed Hitler sitting at a nearby table, talking with someone. Reck writes that he remarked he was still carrying his pistol and thought for a moment of just shooting Hitler in the head. He regrets not having done so. This was before Hitler came to power. One wonders what might have happened then.
Reck was very attuned to the barbarism of Nazism, its deep opposition to everything decent. Initially he seems to have assumed that it would be just a ghastly, corrupt government, like others (he refers to rumors about Eva Braun, Hitler's concubine, wearing the state jewels of the Hohenzollerns and is disgusted by such amoral arrivism), but then he becomes conscious that Nazism is not like other regimes and will not stop until it has destroyed Europe. Reck never diguised his hatred for what Nazism was doing to Germany. He would not survive it. He was arrested near the end of the war and killed by a shot to the back of his head at Dachau.
Reck's home is located in Unterschleissheim, a small industrial town to the South of Munich. It's a small castle (his family estate of Malleczewen, where he was born, is in Poland). I saw it but did not visit, I think it's not open to the public. This book is a jewel. It shows that some people, though they could do little to oppose it, where always aware how bad Nazism was.
Reck was very attuned to the barbarism of Nazism, its deep opposition to everything decent. Initially he seems to have assumed that it would be just a ghastly, corrupt government, like others (he refers to rumors about Eva Braun, Hitler's concubine, wearing the state jewels of the Hohenzollerns and is disgusted by such amoral arrivism), but then he becomes conscious that Nazism is not like other regimes and will not stop until it has destroyed Europe. Reck never diguised his hatred for what Nazism was doing to Germany. He would not survive it. He was arrested near the end of the war and killed by a shot to the back of his head at Dachau.
Reck's home is located in Unterschleissheim, a small industrial town to the South of Munich. It's a small castle (his family estate of Malleczewen, where he was born, is in Poland). I saw it but did not visit, I think it's not open to the public. This book is a jewel. It shows that some people, though they could do little to oppose it, where always aware how bad Nazism was.
July 9, 2015
A fascinating document by a cultured gentleman of Munich, who comes upon Hitler and Company. For one, he is clearly not a fan of the Nazis, and reading his journal is like watching a car accident in the process - but in slow motion. He clearly had an understanding of these guys - who he saw as being uneducated bullies - in fact, there is almost a class resentment on his part against the Nazi world. He really doesn't like their aesthetic or the personality that makes a "Nazi." It pains him that Germany accepted Hitler, and from the very beginning he pretty much lets the reader know that this figure will destroy the country. Also noted is because he had to write this journal in secrecy, and in fact, hid it on his property - or in the forest. As things are made worse, he noted all the signs and observations from the beginning of hell to the horrors that come to be. Reck was a professional writer, and he had the ability to capture the Nazis as they were happening - and in power of course. His hatred for them is both funny in parts, but also terrifying - because reading back these diaries and knowing what happens - he really does capture the moments quite well. Essential World War 2 book, or anyone interested in the world of Hitler. Thanks for Stories Bookstore in Echo Park for the recommendation of this title.
April 6, 2018
"My life in this pit will soon enter its fifth year. For more than forty-two months, I have thought hate, have laid down with hate in my heart, have dreamt hate and awakened with hate. I suffocate in the knowledge that I am the prisoner of a horde of vicious apes, and I rack my brains over the perpetual riddle of how this same people which so jealously watched over its rights a few years ago can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself to be dominated by the street-corner idlers of yesterday, but actually, height of shame, is incapable any longer of perceiving its shame for the Shame that it is.
-- August 11, 1936 diary entry
Beginning, appropriately enough, by noting Spengler's recent death, Reck-Malleczewen's sporadic entries provides a chilling account of German life under the Nazi regime. His is an interesting voice -- arch-conservative, aristocratic, and completely disgusted with the Nazi regime. The risk Reck-Malleczewen takes in jotting his thoughts down is tremendous: in one entry he mentions that he keeps the diary buried in the ground, collecting it late at night, and frequently changing its burial location.
I’m humbled by the courage displayed and impressed by his lucidity and passion. This is an important document. Highly recommended.
-- August 11, 1936 diary entry
Beginning, appropriately enough, by noting Spengler's recent death, Reck-Malleczewen's sporadic entries provides a chilling account of German life under the Nazi regime. His is an interesting voice -- arch-conservative, aristocratic, and completely disgusted with the Nazi regime. The risk Reck-Malleczewen takes in jotting his thoughts down is tremendous: in one entry he mentions that he keeps the diary buried in the ground, collecting it late at night, and frequently changing its burial location.
I’m humbled by the courage displayed and impressed by his lucidity and passion. This is an important document. Highly recommended.
April 6, 2016
Along with Reck-Malleczewen's "Bockelson" (AKA "A History of the Münster Anabaptists..."), this is a vital record of the rise of a totalitarian dictatorship, written with unusual clarity and terror, by a man out of time. An ardent anti-Nazi, Reck was determined to document the criminality of Hitlerism. Although wealthy enough to emigrate, he chose to stay in Germany, where he wrote his diary in secret and buried it each night in the woods.
Reck is perhaps the most eloquent exponent of justified, righteous hatred. As Hitler prosecuted the Anschluss in 1938, Reck wrote:
"You, up there: I hate you waking and sleeping. I will hate and curse you in the hour of my death. I will hate and curse you from my grave, and it will be your children and your children’s children who will have to bear my curse. I have no other weapon against you but this curse, I know that it withers the heart of him who utters it, I do not know if I will survive your downfall...
But this I know, that a man must hate this Germany with all his heart if he really loves it. I would ten times rather die than see you triumph."
Reck died in Dachau in February 1945.
Reck is perhaps the most eloquent exponent of justified, righteous hatred. As Hitler prosecuted the Anschluss in 1938, Reck wrote:
"You, up there: I hate you waking and sleeping. I will hate and curse you in the hour of my death. I will hate and curse you from my grave, and it will be your children and your children’s children who will have to bear my curse. I have no other weapon against you but this curse, I know that it withers the heart of him who utters it, I do not know if I will survive your downfall...
But this I know, that a man must hate this Germany with all his heart if he really loves it. I would ten times rather die than see you triumph."
Reck died in Dachau in February 1945.
Read
January 3, 2025The wide-ranging journal of a principled conservative's existence beneath the Third Reich, Reck's bitter, brilliant lamentation for a nation and world gone mad remains as insightful as it was the last time Trump was elected. The sense of alienation and futility will resonate with any thoughtful reader, as will Reck's general critique of modernity, which only seems more prescient with the day. Everyone should pick this up.
May 27, 2021
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen hat in seinen Aufzeichnungen, die er von Mai 1936 bis Oktober 1944, kurz vor seiner endgültigen Festnahme und seinem Tod im KZ Dachau, führte, seine Eindrücke über das Dritte Reich festgehalten.
Was diese Tagebucheinträge so beeindruckend macht, ist ihre kompromisslose Ablehnung des Nazi-Regimes, die Verzweiflung des Autors an der Verführbarkeit (nicht nur) des deutschen Volkes und die klaren Vorausdeutungen der kommenden Katastrophen. Reck wollte einen „Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte des Nazismus“ (37) leisten, indem er Information und Anekdoten aus eigener Anschauung überlieferte. Für ihn nicht weiter schwierig, weil er als Intellektueller, Kunstliebhaber, Schriftsteller gut vernetzt war und anscheinend JEDEN in München, Berlin und zwischendrin persönlich gekannt hat, was ihn natürlich zu einem hervorragenden Zeitzeugen machte.
Während seine Beschreibungen und Vergleiche extrem anschaulich sind „Mit seiner öligen Locke, die ihm bei solchen Predigten ins Gesicht glitt, glich er in diesen Augenblicken einem Heiratsschwindler, der vor der Tat erzählt, auf welche Manier er liebeshungrige Köchinnen hineinzulegen gedenke.“ (21), war es nicht einfach, sich in seiner gesellschaftlichen Welt zu orientieren. Er setzt voraus, dass seine späteren Leser wissen, welche Personen des öffentlichen Lebens er gerade aufs Korn nimmt. Das Buch gibt hier Hilfestellungen in Form von Anmerkungen, im Hörbuch ist man sich selbst überlassen. Recks Wertungen sind eindeutig gegen den Nationalsozialismus gerichtet. Anfangs boshaft und hasserfüllt, am Ende des Krieges dann eher verzweifelt, wie es der Titel schon andeutet.
Was Reck jedoch zu einem für mich schwierigen Zeitzeugen macht, ist seine erzkonservative Haltung. Die Gründe für den Erfolg des Nationalsozialismus sieht er in der formlosen Massengesellschaft („Troglodyten“ ist hier sein Lieblingsbegriff), die durch Technik eingeebnet und moderne Medien verführbar gemacht worden sei. Der neuen Schicht der Angestellten und vor allem deren weiblichen Vertretern („Stenotypistinnen“ sind für ihn das Zeichen der nahen Apokalypse) bringt er nur Verachtung entgegen und hält sie neben den preußischen Industriellen für die eigentlichen Unterstützer des Nationalsozialismus. Dabei verwendet er eine Sprache, die sich in ihrer Menschenverachtung nicht so sehr von der der Nationalsozialisten unterscheidet.
Trotz seines Antifeminismus, seiner prinzipiellen Ablehnung von Aufklärung und Moderne empfinde ich Respekt vor seiner Geradlinigkeit, seiner Menschlichkeit und seinem Mut. Reck hat sich nie bei den Nationalsozialisten beliebt gemacht. Der Hitlergruß kam für ihn nicht in Frage, vor den NS-Dorfbonzen in seinem bayrischen Domizil zeigte er keinen übertriebenen Respekt und obwohl ihn seine Freunde davor warnten, dieses Tagebuch zu führen, kam für ihn nie etwas Anderes in Frage. Was ihn jedoch so menschlich macht, sind all jene Stellen, an denen mich er als monarchistischer Konservativer überrascht:
So ist Antisemitismus kein Bestandteil seines Denkens. Auch wenn ich mir mehr Interesse am Schicksal seiner jüdischen Mitbürger gewünscht hätte, verurteilt er aufs entschiedenste die Massaker, von denen er über Bekannte erfahren hat. Die unmenschliche Behandlung der sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen und die Hinrichtung der Mitglieder der „Weißen Rose“ brandmarkt er als verabscheuungswürdig, sie sind für ihn Merkmale des unmenschlichen Regimes. Bemerkenswert ist seine ambivalente Haltung gegenüber dem Stauffenberg-Attentat. Obwohl diese Offiziere ihren „Treueeid“ gebrochen haben, beklagt er das Scheitern des Anschlags „[D]as Glücken dieses Attentates hätte uns, hätte die restliche Substanz dieses unglücklichen Landes gerettet, ich trauere, wie dieses ganze Land, über das Mißglücken eures Handstreiches.“ (171) Gleichzeitig kritisiert er den Opportunismus des Militärs, „die Ihr ihm nachliefet, solange alles gut zu gehen schien (…)“. (171)
Als Konsequenz aus diesem Krieg wendet Reck sich 1940 gar dem europäischen Gedanken zu: „Der Nationalismus, so laut er heute sich noch gebärdet, liegt in Agonie (…). Ich bin früher vorübergegangen an dem Gedanken einer europäischen Unität und weiß doch, daß wir uns heute den Luxus, auch weiterhin an ihr vorüberzugehn, nicht mehr leisten können. Europa, die Wiege der großen Gedanken, steht vor der Wahl, entweder die Möglichkeit weiterer Bürgerkriege auszuschalten oder seine Dome zu pulverisieren, seine Landschaft zu versteppen (…).“ (100f.)
Reck wird sicher nie zu meinen demokratischen Vorbildern zählen, aber wegen seines unverstellten Blicks auf den Nationalsozialismus und seiner daraus resultierenden absoluten Verurteilung dieses Systems sollte er kein Geheimtipp bleiben.
Was diese Tagebucheinträge so beeindruckend macht, ist ihre kompromisslose Ablehnung des Nazi-Regimes, die Verzweiflung des Autors an der Verführbarkeit (nicht nur) des deutschen Volkes und die klaren Vorausdeutungen der kommenden Katastrophen. Reck wollte einen „Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte des Nazismus“ (37) leisten, indem er Information und Anekdoten aus eigener Anschauung überlieferte. Für ihn nicht weiter schwierig, weil er als Intellektueller, Kunstliebhaber, Schriftsteller gut vernetzt war und anscheinend JEDEN in München, Berlin und zwischendrin persönlich gekannt hat, was ihn natürlich zu einem hervorragenden Zeitzeugen machte.
Während seine Beschreibungen und Vergleiche extrem anschaulich sind „Mit seiner öligen Locke, die ihm bei solchen Predigten ins Gesicht glitt, glich er in diesen Augenblicken einem Heiratsschwindler, der vor der Tat erzählt, auf welche Manier er liebeshungrige Köchinnen hineinzulegen gedenke.“ (21), war es nicht einfach, sich in seiner gesellschaftlichen Welt zu orientieren. Er setzt voraus, dass seine späteren Leser wissen, welche Personen des öffentlichen Lebens er gerade aufs Korn nimmt. Das Buch gibt hier Hilfestellungen in Form von Anmerkungen, im Hörbuch ist man sich selbst überlassen. Recks Wertungen sind eindeutig gegen den Nationalsozialismus gerichtet. Anfangs boshaft und hasserfüllt, am Ende des Krieges dann eher verzweifelt, wie es der Titel schon andeutet.
Was Reck jedoch zu einem für mich schwierigen Zeitzeugen macht, ist seine erzkonservative Haltung. Die Gründe für den Erfolg des Nationalsozialismus sieht er in der formlosen Massengesellschaft („Troglodyten“ ist hier sein Lieblingsbegriff), die durch Technik eingeebnet und moderne Medien verführbar gemacht worden sei. Der neuen Schicht der Angestellten und vor allem deren weiblichen Vertretern („Stenotypistinnen“ sind für ihn das Zeichen der nahen Apokalypse) bringt er nur Verachtung entgegen und hält sie neben den preußischen Industriellen für die eigentlichen Unterstützer des Nationalsozialismus. Dabei verwendet er eine Sprache, die sich in ihrer Menschenverachtung nicht so sehr von der der Nationalsozialisten unterscheidet.
Trotz seines Antifeminismus, seiner prinzipiellen Ablehnung von Aufklärung und Moderne empfinde ich Respekt vor seiner Geradlinigkeit, seiner Menschlichkeit und seinem Mut. Reck hat sich nie bei den Nationalsozialisten beliebt gemacht. Der Hitlergruß kam für ihn nicht in Frage, vor den NS-Dorfbonzen in seinem bayrischen Domizil zeigte er keinen übertriebenen Respekt und obwohl ihn seine Freunde davor warnten, dieses Tagebuch zu führen, kam für ihn nie etwas Anderes in Frage. Was ihn jedoch so menschlich macht, sind all jene Stellen, an denen mich er als monarchistischer Konservativer überrascht:
So ist Antisemitismus kein Bestandteil seines Denkens. Auch wenn ich mir mehr Interesse am Schicksal seiner jüdischen Mitbürger gewünscht hätte, verurteilt er aufs entschiedenste die Massaker, von denen er über Bekannte erfahren hat. Die unmenschliche Behandlung der sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen und die Hinrichtung der Mitglieder der „Weißen Rose“ brandmarkt er als verabscheuungswürdig, sie sind für ihn Merkmale des unmenschlichen Regimes. Bemerkenswert ist seine ambivalente Haltung gegenüber dem Stauffenberg-Attentat. Obwohl diese Offiziere ihren „Treueeid“ gebrochen haben, beklagt er das Scheitern des Anschlags „[D]as Glücken dieses Attentates hätte uns, hätte die restliche Substanz dieses unglücklichen Landes gerettet, ich trauere, wie dieses ganze Land, über das Mißglücken eures Handstreiches.“ (171) Gleichzeitig kritisiert er den Opportunismus des Militärs, „die Ihr ihm nachliefet, solange alles gut zu gehen schien (…)“. (171)
Als Konsequenz aus diesem Krieg wendet Reck sich 1940 gar dem europäischen Gedanken zu: „Der Nationalismus, so laut er heute sich noch gebärdet, liegt in Agonie (…). Ich bin früher vorübergegangen an dem Gedanken einer europäischen Unität und weiß doch, daß wir uns heute den Luxus, auch weiterhin an ihr vorüberzugehn, nicht mehr leisten können. Europa, die Wiege der großen Gedanken, steht vor der Wahl, entweder die Möglichkeit weiterer Bürgerkriege auszuschalten oder seine Dome zu pulverisieren, seine Landschaft zu versteppen (…).“ (100f.)
Reck wird sicher nie zu meinen demokratischen Vorbildern zählen, aber wegen seines unverstellten Blicks auf den Nationalsozialismus und seiner daraus resultierenden absoluten Verurteilung dieses Systems sollte er kein Geheimtipp bleiben.
December 4, 2014
Friedrich Reck was a minor German novelist active in the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote simple stuff, somewhere between airport fiction and Morris West. Not the sort of author I would normally read, but this is not a normal book. Reck was an arch conservative, and an arch-enemy of Hitler. Those two phrases don't seem to sit right together, although he wasn't the only German conservative to hate the Nazis - but he was the only one to write something like this.
This is not a diary in the sense that Victor Klemperer wrote a diary, more a set of meditations on the state of Nazi Germany and the War that carry the date they were written. Reck apparently kept these writings very secret, and they weren't published in Germany until 1947. Reck himself died of typhus in Dachau in February 1945, having been imprisoned on a charge of "insulting the German currency".
What is fascinating about this book is how prescient Reck was about the fate of Germany. He was an aristocrat by nature, if not by title, and loathed "mass-man", which he noted was not a phrase interchangeable with "proletariat"; realising that it was the lower end of the Middle Class from which came the masses who followed the likes of Hitler, and who were debasing what Reck saw as true German culture.
He saw clearly that despite the Nazi claims to be true Germans, they were in fact in thrall to the technocracy - the likes of Krupp and Farben - and were busily destroying their much-loved German countryside to enable German industry to build the war machines required by Hitler for his madness.He sees Hitler himself as almost a cypher, describing him as a man "without the slightest self-awareness and pleasure in himself, that he basically hates himself, and this opportunism, his immeasurable need for recognition, and his now-apocalyptic vanity are all based on one thing - a consuming drive to drown out the pain in his psyche, the trauma of a monstrosity." and later "There he sat, a raw-vegetable Genghis Khan, a teetotalling Alexander, a womanless Napoleon, an effigy of Bismark..." what Reck did see in Hitler was the death of Germany as he knew it, through being eliminated by the Nazis or by Germany being crushed in war.
He had much to say on modern developments, believing the Prussians and technology were to blame for the state of the world, with Prussian bloodlust combining with the ability of technology to raise the common man leading to a destruction of higher feeling in Germans. His writing and turn of phrase are wonderful, forceful and inventive. "...and the masses sensing that they are doomed, they will, no doubt, strike out against everything that is not mass-like, but is, simply, 'different'. In Germany, whose Hitler regime is simply a massive attempt to prolong the existence of mass-man, the target will be that small elite which has done more harm to this regime with its principled 'No' than all the Chamberlain policy of impotence and endless appeasement. I believe that our martyrdom, the fate reserved for our little phalanx, is the price for a rebirth of the spirit, and that realising this, we can hope for no more good during what remains of our ruined and brutalised lives on earth than that there may be meaning to the manner of our deaths." This was written in September 1937, when Chamberlain, and not only him, did indeed still see Hitler as someone with whom they could work.
In 1942 Reck was already predicting the German regime's downfall - "This war based on the revolt of the masses may destroy the Gothic cathedrals and silence forever Bach's 'Chaconne': but a horde of degenerate football players will not survive the fire they started."
Reck also includes some great little pieces of gossip about the leaders of the Third Reich (mostly incorrect), and throughout his writing are descriptions of small acts of defiance by normal Germans against the Party. From his essay written in February 1943 - " The news of the Anglo-American landing in Africa spread with a speed that amazed me. Despite the ban on listening to the Allied radio, the news spread within an hour, And I was even more amazed, that gray November day, to see the reaction the news produced. Everyone seemed glad about this decisive change in the course of the war, which meant the defeat of his own country, and Bavarians [Reck owned property in Bavaria and this is where the diary was written] had the added consideration to ponder that the fighting must eventually reach the Alps.....Everyone sensed that a ghostly hand had nailed the death warrant of the Nazis to the wall, and this had as salutary an effect on the bad as it did on the good."
His entry concerned with the July Plot is a scathing attack on the Prussian military caste, who Reck blamed for nearly everything that was wrong with Germany: turning their back on the Kaiser in his hour of need (not that Reck has much good to write about Wilhelm in this tome); supporting Hitler for their own purposes; and now when the going got tough again, looking to get rid of their latest master.
As 1944 rolls on, Reck writes more and more of arbitrary arrests and executions, and the death throes of the regime, the Diary ends in October of that year with Reck's own arrest, and initial release, before his final incarceration. There is a useful Afterword in this edition by Richard J. Evans, which throws some useful light on Reck and the circumstances of the writing of this Diary.
At the time these were the railings of a prophet in the wilderness, but they are now a valuable insight into the development and denouement of the Hitler regime from an interesting viewpoint.
Recommended.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
This is not a diary in the sense that Victor Klemperer wrote a diary, more a set of meditations on the state of Nazi Germany and the War that carry the date they were written. Reck apparently kept these writings very secret, and they weren't published in Germany until 1947. Reck himself died of typhus in Dachau in February 1945, having been imprisoned on a charge of "insulting the German currency".
What is fascinating about this book is how prescient Reck was about the fate of Germany. He was an aristocrat by nature, if not by title, and loathed "mass-man", which he noted was not a phrase interchangeable with "proletariat"; realising that it was the lower end of the Middle Class from which came the masses who followed the likes of Hitler, and who were debasing what Reck saw as true German culture.
He saw clearly that despite the Nazi claims to be true Germans, they were in fact in thrall to the technocracy - the likes of Krupp and Farben - and were busily destroying their much-loved German countryside to enable German industry to build the war machines required by Hitler for his madness.He sees Hitler himself as almost a cypher, describing him as a man "without the slightest self-awareness and pleasure in himself, that he basically hates himself, and this opportunism, his immeasurable need for recognition, and his now-apocalyptic vanity are all based on one thing - a consuming drive to drown out the pain in his psyche, the trauma of a monstrosity." and later "There he sat, a raw-vegetable Genghis Khan, a teetotalling Alexander, a womanless Napoleon, an effigy of Bismark..." what Reck did see in Hitler was the death of Germany as he knew it, through being eliminated by the Nazis or by Germany being crushed in war.
He had much to say on modern developments, believing the Prussians and technology were to blame for the state of the world, with Prussian bloodlust combining with the ability of technology to raise the common man leading to a destruction of higher feeling in Germans. His writing and turn of phrase are wonderful, forceful and inventive. "...and the masses sensing that they are doomed, they will, no doubt, strike out against everything that is not mass-like, but is, simply, 'different'. In Germany, whose Hitler regime is simply a massive attempt to prolong the existence of mass-man, the target will be that small elite which has done more harm to this regime with its principled 'No' than all the Chamberlain policy of impotence and endless appeasement. I believe that our martyrdom, the fate reserved for our little phalanx, is the price for a rebirth of the spirit, and that realising this, we can hope for no more good during what remains of our ruined and brutalised lives on earth than that there may be meaning to the manner of our deaths." This was written in September 1937, when Chamberlain, and not only him, did indeed still see Hitler as someone with whom they could work.
In 1942 Reck was already predicting the German regime's downfall - "This war based on the revolt of the masses may destroy the Gothic cathedrals and silence forever Bach's 'Chaconne': but a horde of degenerate football players will not survive the fire they started."
Reck also includes some great little pieces of gossip about the leaders of the Third Reich (mostly incorrect), and throughout his writing are descriptions of small acts of defiance by normal Germans against the Party. From his essay written in February 1943 - " The news of the Anglo-American landing in Africa spread with a speed that amazed me. Despite the ban on listening to the Allied radio, the news spread within an hour, And I was even more amazed, that gray November day, to see the reaction the news produced. Everyone seemed glad about this decisive change in the course of the war, which meant the defeat of his own country, and Bavarians [Reck owned property in Bavaria and this is where the diary was written] had the added consideration to ponder that the fighting must eventually reach the Alps.....Everyone sensed that a ghostly hand had nailed the death warrant of the Nazis to the wall, and this had as salutary an effect on the bad as it did on the good."
His entry concerned with the July Plot is a scathing attack on the Prussian military caste, who Reck blamed for nearly everything that was wrong with Germany: turning their back on the Kaiser in his hour of need (not that Reck has much good to write about Wilhelm in this tome); supporting Hitler for their own purposes; and now when the going got tough again, looking to get rid of their latest master.
As 1944 rolls on, Reck writes more and more of arbitrary arrests and executions, and the death throes of the regime, the Diary ends in October of that year with Reck's own arrest, and initial release, before his final incarceration. There is a useful Afterword in this edition by Richard J. Evans, which throws some useful light on Reck and the circumstances of the writing of this Diary.
At the time these were the railings of a prophet in the wilderness, but they are now a valuable insight into the development and denouement of the Hitler regime from an interesting viewpoint.
Recommended.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
July 16, 2013
Freidrich Reck wrote this book between 1936 and 1944, chronicling his feelings as the Nazis tightened their grip on German society. Every night, he would hide his writings, burying them in the grounds of his home, regularly changing the hiding place to increase the chances of them not being found.
The result, this collection, is a pretty remarkable book, and one which merits the description 'unique'. It isn't a diary, as it wasn't written on a day to day basis, and its contents weren't intended to be private to the writer. So, it isn't like Victor Klemperer's diaries, in that it isn't a daily description of persecution under the Nazis. It isn't populist, in that Reck was a true old school conservative, of aristocratic stock (so he thought, at least) and an avowed monarchist.
What it is is a fascinating, brilliantly written selection of writing, from a man who loathed the Nazis and what he saw as their inevitable destruction of western civilisation.
Reck was extremely astute - not only did he suss out the Nazis out for what they were, he also recognised long before the start of the war that Germany was going to end up going to war, losing, and paying a very high price.
He was also highly contemptuous of the Prussianisation of Germany, and in particular the role of the Prussian generals in allowing Hitler to do as he pleased (there was little sympathy even for Stauffenberg and co-conspirators, on the basis that it was their cowardice and failure to stop Hitler that had allowed matters to become so bad in the first place).
He also showed huge contempt for the "Northern German" industrialists of the likes of Krupps and IG Farben for their greed-drive role in the ascent of Hitler, and talked of the retribution they too would face after the war.
His loathing of the regime caught up with him eventually, as he was sent to Dachau in early 1945, and died shortly after. We're lucky his writings went undetected, as they are a fascinating insight into opposition to Hitler.
The result, this collection, is a pretty remarkable book, and one which merits the description 'unique'. It isn't a diary, as it wasn't written on a day to day basis, and its contents weren't intended to be private to the writer. So, it isn't like Victor Klemperer's diaries, in that it isn't a daily description of persecution under the Nazis. It isn't populist, in that Reck was a true old school conservative, of aristocratic stock (so he thought, at least) and an avowed monarchist.
What it is is a fascinating, brilliantly written selection of writing, from a man who loathed the Nazis and what he saw as their inevitable destruction of western civilisation.
Reck was extremely astute - not only did he suss out the Nazis out for what they were, he also recognised long before the start of the war that Germany was going to end up going to war, losing, and paying a very high price.
He was also highly contemptuous of the Prussianisation of Germany, and in particular the role of the Prussian generals in allowing Hitler to do as he pleased (there was little sympathy even for Stauffenberg and co-conspirators, on the basis that it was their cowardice and failure to stop Hitler that had allowed matters to become so bad in the first place).
He also showed huge contempt for the "Northern German" industrialists of the likes of Krupps and IG Farben for their greed-drive role in the ascent of Hitler, and talked of the retribution they too would face after the war.
His loathing of the regime caught up with him eventually, as he was sent to Dachau in early 1945, and died shortly after. We're lucky his writings went undetected, as they are a fascinating insight into opposition to Hitler.
December 15, 2009
A great book by a true member of German aristocracy: his diary from 1936-1944. Here's a sample from the year 1937.
It's not all so jolly, I warn you.
On the way home I heard the latest scandal. The first year that they came to power, the Nazis proclaimed that duelling belonged to the natural rights of every man - a consistent extension of the philosophy of 1789 - and with much fanfare announced that all classes of society now had state approval for this method of solving differences. Any difference of opinion between master and servant over badly polished shoes could be resolved with pistols.
But the very first duesl held under the new dispensation has struck down one of their own - and by an ancient law, not the worst of the lot. Herr Roland Strunck, a journalist of a calibre that exceeded their usual level of a schoolmaster gone beserk....
Strunck, then, discovered one day that a fellow Party member, a young lout, was carrying out Nazi tenets on sexual unrestraint by sleeping with Strunck's daughter. Hew called the fellow out and was killed. The duelling regulation has now been rescinded. The danger that a man may have to received his chauffeur's seconds becuase he complained of his badly washed car has been set aside.
It's not all so jolly, I warn you.
March 27, 2013
Reck was a great hater. Apparently well-known during his life as a writer of potboilers, "Diary of a Man in Despair" is Reck's secretly written account of life in Nazi Germany. Really more a collection of set pieces or essays than a daily, diaristic account of life Reck mercilessly and hilariously skewers National Socialism, its adherents and bureaucracy, as well as "mass-man," capitalistic materialism, environmental degradation, and pretentiousness in all forms. Hardly a radical leftist, as his critic of capitalism might imply, Reck was a self-describe conservative--a monarchist, in fact--but the venal grasping after power, money, and sex left him nauseous and hateful. So powerful--and real--was his fear of having this "diary" found, that he buried its entries in secret locations around his property: had they been found, he would have been immediately executed. . . As it is, Reck, was imprisoned in a concentration camp shortly before the war finally ended, and that is where he died. . . Powerful, vitriolic, intelligent, intense, and funny.
October 28, 2014
This book is just cool in theory but it's not that great
June 25, 2018
Marvellous!!!
I'll be back to review this book, sooner.
I'll be back to review this book, sooner.
November 18, 2024
يوميات فردريك ريك الكاتب والروائي المشهور قبل واثناء النازية، الى ان تم اعتقاله على ايديهم للمرة الثانية في ديسمبر ١٩٤٤ حتى توفي في اوائل سنة ٤٥ نتيجة الاعتقال،
اليوميات تعتبر مهمة جدا جدا لاي شخص مهتم بالشأن الالماني في هذه الحقبة، لا يعيب عليها شئ وانما يصعب علي وامثالي معرفة شخصيات كثيرة في هذه الفترة الصعبة والمليئة بالاحداث العالمية،
عندما تقرأ اليوميات تتعرف على حال المانيا وقتها وتعرف انها كالجسد الذي تمكن منه سرطان قاتل يستحيل الشفاء منه، سواء في اواخر عصر الملكية مرورا بالرئيس الجمهوري الاول الضعيف ومن بعده النازية وصعود هتلر المدمر للدولة،
يصف لنا ريك حال هتلر قبل الوصول للحكم وكيف كان قبحه ومنظره الرث، كيف تتملكه الحمية ويخطب في الحاضرين ويبين جهله وتخلفه ومرضه،
كيف يمكن لشخص مثله ان يتحكم في مقاليد امور دولة كبيرة وعريقة مثل المانيا، هذا القزم الذي يعاني من الضعف الجنسي، كيف لهذا المسخ ان تحبه النساء وتقبل الارض وتاكل الزلط الذي يمشي عليه،
كيف اصبحت المانيا مترعاً لرجال الاعمال تصادر اراضي الناس من اجل مصلحتها هي والنظام، كيف وصلت المانيا لحد الجوع والفقر الذي يعرفك كارثة ان يحكمك شخص جاهل دموي يملك من الامراض النفسية ما يجعله يذبح اي احد،
اي تشابه بين ماضي المانيا وحاضرنا ليس بالصدفة .
اليوميات تعتبر مهمة جدا جدا لاي شخص مهتم بالشأن الالماني في هذه الحقبة، لا يعيب عليها شئ وانما يصعب علي وامثالي معرفة شخصيات كثيرة في هذه الفترة الصعبة والمليئة بالاحداث العالمية،
عندما تقرأ اليوميات تتعرف على حال المانيا وقتها وتعرف انها كالجسد الذي تمكن منه سرطان قاتل يستحيل الشفاء منه، سواء في اواخر عصر الملكية مرورا بالرئيس الجمهوري الاول الضعيف ومن بعده النازية وصعود هتلر المدمر للدولة،
يصف لنا ريك حال هتلر قبل الوصول للحكم وكيف كان قبحه ومنظره الرث، كيف تتملكه الحمية ويخطب في الحاضرين ويبين جهله وتخلفه ومرضه،
كيف يمكن لشخص مثله ان يتحكم في مقاليد امور دولة كبيرة وعريقة مثل المانيا، هذا القزم الذي يعاني من الضعف الجنسي، كيف لهذا المسخ ان تحبه النساء وتقبل الارض وتاكل الزلط الذي يمشي عليه،
كيف اصبحت المانيا مترعاً لرجال الاعمال تصادر اراضي الناس من اجل مصلحتها هي والنظام، كيف وصلت المانيا لحد الجوع والفقر الذي يعرفك كارثة ان يحكمك شخص جاهل دموي يملك من الامراض النفسية ما يجعله يذبح اي احد،
اي تشابه بين ماضي المانيا وحاضرنا ليس بالصدفة .
July 3, 2022
German writer Friedrich Reck records his mounting hatred toward “dung-face” Hitler. He excels at telling humiliating and often salacious stories about Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. Above all, his diary is a scorching indictment of a complicit populace. Arrested in 1944, Reck subsequently died in Dachau. The diary remained hidden and was published after the war. The NYRB edition is copiously annotated and fact-checked.
March 3, 2022
Angry prussian man yells at hitler
July 31, 2015
I have hated you in every hour that goes by, I hate you so that I would happily give my life for your death, and happily go to my own doom if only I could witness yours, take you with me into the depths.
Very interesting perspective on the National Socialist rule of Germany under Hitler - the author is a self-styled conservative aristocratic reactionary monarchist, a perspective you don't usually get in anti-Hitler writings. According to him, Germany suffers from the rise of the "mass-man", the cog in the wheel without "Selbstreflexion", without care for his past or culture:
Mass-man moves, robotlike, from digestion to sleeping with his peroxide-blonde females, and produces children to keep the termite heap in continued operation. He repeats word for word the incantations of the Great Manitou, denounces or is denounced, dies or is made to die, and so goes on vegetating. And there is not even a blush when he is confronted by the legacy of his fathers, by the monuments of a noble past, by the crowning achievements of his own culture.
He hates Hitler and the NSDAP for their "Prussianness" (Reck styles himself as a anti-Prussian Bavarian, which still has the wonderful "Saupreissn", pig Prussians), their loud, blind and empty core, he hates the all-encompassing belief technology, he thinks that parliaments are chaotic and useless, he loves the Scholls - both for knowing how to live and knowing how to die - but he dislikes the soldiers around the Stauffenberg plot for doing too little too late, after the military itself allowed Hitler to rise to power.
The annotation in the NYRB edition does a good job of picking up when Reck repeats unsubstantiated rumors as facts, and the afterword on Reck's "game of the self" is splendid. However it doesn't translate (or even note) some peculiar German turns of the phrase like "trained in Radau", which doesn't mean a city but more "trained in noisemaking".
Recommended for: People interested in the Third Reich; people who're sick of reading "the usual" about this time and would like a unique perspective
P.S.: How can it be that I can easily buy the English translation of this in Australia, but there's simply no ebook in German? As usual, German publishing lags behind the times.
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