Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  Is it possible to ignore any longer the fact that all of this is part of a terminal stage of a great culture, and that, its vigorous days long since over, technology itself is threatened by the intellectual impotence of mass-man?

  Mass-man, who buys the products of technology in complete mindlessness, without involving himself, or even taking an interest in the intellectual work that made these things possible—mass-man is blood brother in this to the Roman of Caracalla’s time, who was aware of the Limes romanus as a comforting guarantee for his comfortable way of life—but unable to rouse himself from his indolence to keep it from falling to pieces.

  I do not believe that this ‘New Adam’ has the faintest idea of how completely dependent his existence is on the products of technology. I have an idea that at the beginning of the end of the world he will want to know how the government proposes to hold next Sunday’s Germany-Sweden football match on schedule. His fate appears to me certain and unavoidable. The coming Second World War will be the beginning of the end: the end of an epoch in which rationalism was dominant, and the legacy of which—assuming that the planet is still capable of regeneration—will be ‘X’, a new mode of life based on the nonrational.

  This being so, 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.

  I, who set this down, know myself to be in no way above the general fear of dying, and I know, too, that all large statements sooner or later come back to the man who makes them, and require redemption. . . .

  But we cannot go back to the life we shared with you yesterday, a life which you will spread before us so temptingly when you return. We have suffered too much to believe any more that the way to what we see as the Absolute can go in any other direction than through the deep valley of sorrow. Hell has not opened before our eyes to no purpose, and he who has once seen it cannot find his way back to earthly symposiums. Earlier, I recounted how a Hitler Youth threw the image of the Saviour into the street yelling, ‘Lie there, you dirty Jew!’ I have told about Hitler himself, and how he showed himself before the mob assembled at Berchtesgaden, and how afterward bewitched females swallowed the gravel his feet had trodden . . . oh, it is the most shameful thing of all that this was not even the physically beautiful and spiritually glittering antichrist of the legends, but only a poor dung-face, in every aspect something akin to a middle-class antichrist. . . .

  Oh, truly, men can sink no lower. This mob, to which I am connected by a common nationality, is not only unaware of its own degradation but is ready at any moment to demand of every one of its fellow human beings the same mob roar, the same gravel-swallowing, the same degree of degradation.

  When I got home, I turned to Dostoyevsky, to him who is proscribed in Germany as no one else. I read once more in The Possessed the words spoken by Peter Stepanovich, the son of the General’s wife:

  All are slaves and equal in their slavery. Everyone belongs to all, and all to everyone, and the great thing about it is equality. To begin with, the level of education, and science, and talents is lowered. A high level of education and science is only possible for great intellects, and they are not wanted. The great intellects have always seized power and been the despots. Great intellects cannot help being despots, and they’ve always done more harm than good. They will be banished or put to death. Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned. Down with culture. We’ve had enough of scholarship. Discipline comes first. The one thing wanting in the world is discipline. The drive for knowledge is an aristocratic drive we will destroy; we’ll employ drunkenness, slander, spying; we’ll stifle every genius in its infancy. We’ll reduce all to a common denominator! Complete equality, absolute submission, absolute loss of individuality, the Pope at the head, with us ‘round him, and below us—Shigalovism! . . . But one or two generations of vice are essential now; monstrous, abject vice by which a man is transformed into a loathsome, cruel, egoistic reptile. There’s going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before. Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness, the earth will weep for its old gods. . . .

  Truly, Dostoyevsky is right, the end of the world is at hand. It is the end, even if it is the end of one world, the tear-drenched and curse-ridden world of yesterday.

  9 September 1937

  I have spent several days at Hohenschwangau Castle as a guest of our Royal Master.[28] Released by my host following long talks lasting far into the night, I tried to get to my room in a distant guest wing, and, wandering through a maze of corridors up and down stairways unable to find the light switches in the unfamiliar surroundings, ended by crouching on a step and so waited, chattering with cold, for dawn.

  My host related all kinds of stories to me, tales which in these times seemed to come to me from across an immense distance: about the triple-pronged cigar holder intended to hold three Havanas which he had seen Bismarck using—only by smoking three cigars at one time could that outsized glutton get the clouds of smoke he wanted; and about the marvellous appetite of the old Kaiser, with whom, shortly before the fateful year of 1888, he had breakfasted. Finally, he told me also of the gloomy and difficult days he had known as an army commander in the World War shortly before the collapse . . . at that time, September 1918, the whole Army reserve had shrunk to half a company, and the airmen with the Army group had a gasoline stockpile of not quite 1,200 litres at their disposal.

  At the end, my host showed me a photo in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung of Herr Göring, that happy family man, pictured in his study with his lady, the former Miss Sonnemann. They stood before an immense Gobelin tapestry which had been part of the Wittelsbach private collection, and which had brevi manu been stolen just as, probably, were the other items in this representative photograph: the enormous rings on the fingers of the master of the house and the bracelets and earrings on his wife. We spoke of the origins of this dainty fellow, the son of a Rosenheim waitress, who had not succeeded in gaining admission to a Bavarian cadet corps—the application had gone through the hands of the Crown Prince—and had thereupon been sent off to Prussia. Now, of course, along with a fantastic coat of arms, Herr Göring has had a pedigree drawn up which traces his descent to some Westphalian general of the early Middle Ages. Obviously mentally deranged, he now takes himself to be the King of Prussia in person. An acquaintance of mine, who had occasion to go to Karinhall recently, saw porcelain nameplates on the doors of the rooms occupied by the divers companions of the former Miss Sonnemann which read ‘First Lady-in-waiting’, ‘Second Lady-in-waiting’, etc.

  But this is how they all are with one another, just this way. All of them act the classa dirigente, have fantastic coats of arms drawn up, compose even more fantastic pedigrees for themselves, and choose their ‘adjutants’ from among these north German nobility come down in the world who crowd after them just as the type that once followed Bockelson.

  Herr Göring officially decrees that his wife is to be addressed as ‘Your Ladyship’, Herr Goebbels has some mangy princeling from a Middle German royal family, to pay him homage, and even Herr Himmler, who generally has taken pains to maintain a simple standard of living, is supposed to have a royal vassal in his entourage. But worst of all are the females, these former barmaids, most of whom have passed through any number of hands, who are loaded down with the stolen jewels of noble families, and still can never dispel the aura of their native kitchen milieu. Made
up to resemble something midway between a movie star and a cocotte, they play at court intrigue: ‘How, Frau Goebbels, does it happen that I observe three official cars constantly at the disposal of your husband, when he is actually entitled only to two?’

  But this is the way they all are. The pose of revolutionaries, de facto dirty little bourgeoisie who cannot rid themselves of the feel of the dog collars they wore only yesterday, and who—the candles burned low and the food partly eaten—have seated themselves at the table of their evicted lords.

  On the way home, I heard the latest scandal. The first year after 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 duel 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 the schoolmaster gone berserk—as far as I know, a decent chap, a man of some quality.

  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. He called the fellow out and was killed. The duelling regulation has now been rescinded.[29] Now, a mere challenge has been made punishable by a heavy prison sentence, and the danger that a man may have to receive his chauffeur’s seconds because he complained of his badly washed car has been set aside.

  I had a disagreement about this policy with Clemens von Franckenstein, whom much travelling about has made into a sceptic. I have just finished Action for Slander, a novel in which two English cavalry officers seek satisfaction over an argument at baccarat first by boxing, and then by taking the matter to court—without the officers being suspended, and without the writer, Mary Borden, being able to give her bemused non-English readers so much as an inkling of what her two main characters might be like.

  Now, I am far from being an advocate of the well-known idiotic student bloodletting, but I cannot possibly ignore the fact that since 1918, and the official ban on duelling, there has come about a complete bolshevisation of all standards of honour, and that a man’s good name has become free game. Any libeller does not now have to fear the serious consequences that would have followed in the past—and this did not begin with the Nazis. Let no one, please, answer me with the ancient objection that generally the lie emerges for what it is. To take a libeller to court is really giving a small devil more than his due—besides which, when a defamation case involves family honour and the most private matters, a duel becomes an infinitely more human expedient than exposing the entire inner workings of one’s home and life to newspaper stories, and oneself to running the gauntlet of the clacking tongues in the streets. We have witnessed an appalling decline in European mores these last thirty years. We shall have to take care not to sink even lower.

  On the way home, I went through Munich, a city which I avoid as much as possible since its occupation by the Prussians—it was so gay and so brilliant, once! Not long ago the periphery of the city was untouched meadowland, stretches of bucolic peacefulness unlike anything else in Germany. This has been ruined by the depositing of hills of gravel, by the cutting down of the forests, by railroad spurs, and by monstrous industrial plants which the General Staff, with characteristic barbarian inability to understand that some things are irreplaceable, had finally brought here too. No, I no longer recognise Munich as the gay, high-spirited city of youth and happiness that it once was; never actually a big city, it was really only the main town of a land of peasants and farmers. Now, wide-hipped females, wives of the Prussian bureaucrats who are overrunning Bavaria, push their baby carriages past the façade of the Florentine Palace on Ludwigstrasse, and everywhere in the hotel corridors one sees in front of doors the repulsive jackboots of the newly promoted officers with their sergeant’s faces. The Hoftheater, which in the last three years, since Franckenstein’s departure, has sunk, really, to the level of a fourth-rate touring company, is packed with herds of BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädchen—League of German Maidens) bleach-blondes, and the hotels are crowded with the wives of north German factory managers, the bane of every porter’s existence, keeping their rendezvous with Nazi gangsters. No, I want to see nothing more of this city ruined by Prussian barbarism until the day of release.

  While in the once secluded Hofgarten, where, incidentally, Herr Hitler wants to build ‘the greatest opera house in the world’ by having the arcades and Rottmann frescoes removed, the painter Ziegler was pointed out to me.[30] He has been assigned by Hitler to ‘cleanse German art of all decadence’ and is, therefore, something like the chief among all German painters: a man with no back to his head. He holds the title of ‘Master of Female Pubic Hair’, conferred on him by his associates in view of his predilection for this kind of representation.

  And so it goes in Munich. The general feeling about the systematically pursued Prussianisation of the city has, moreover, been shown in an occurrence which in the days of the old Regents thirty years ago would have been dismissed as incredible. The outlying districts of Haidhausen and Giesing, Munich’s lively and alley-filled versions of Whitechapel, have for some time been made unsafe by a group of adolescents banded together under the sign of the ‘Red Anchor’,[31] who have launched a campaign of terror against all wearing Nazi uniforms. Provided one does not break the taboo against speaking north German dialect here, he can with a quiet heart traverse Giesing wearing a fur coat and top hat, and he will not be troubled—the ‘Red Anchor’ lays hands only on uniformed Nazis, and especially members of the SS. All this is in no wise to be dismissed as harmless rowdyism, since the ‘Red Anchor’ is said to be responsible for a number of killings. The police have recovered the corpses of several SS members, and connected the murders with the honourable brotherhood. The comedy here is that the entire band has been recruited from young fellows, de facto anti-Nazis, who were forced into the Hitler Youth and are now playing double roles. But what verges on the incomprehensible is that in circumstances that approach those of the Chicago underworld, the leader of the organisation is supposed to be a Munich lawyer—this in our lighthearted basically good-humoured city, over which just two and a half decades ago a dignified old patriarch held sway! Truly, a devil has broken loose from his leash in Germany—ah, and we none of us know how we are to get him back on the chain again.

  20 March 1938

  And now, Austria.

  We have seen it coming for weeks. Naturally, we sensed what it all meant, these threats and staged riots . . . the whole shabby performance designed to provide an excuse for intervention. And now tank and artillery columns are rolling down every street, under the command of agitated young SS men, and in my village, exactly as though this were a battle of life and death, the half-grown louts in the Hitler Youth are playing at being heroes, and volunteering for the Army as though the enemy was a European Great Power, and not a tiny nation of seven million inhabitants.

  I cannot help but see in this generalised brutality, this nasty satisfaction over the fate of the Austrian leaders, this general delight in ridicule and rape—something ignoble, which makes me deeply ashamed. . . .

  Austria, poor, eternally derided Austria, whose only sin was, that until the end, and in the face of the attack on it by Greater Prussia, it held to a last recollection of the noble old Holy Roman Empire of the Germans.

  Now in Salzburg, where I have been staying these past few days, these Berlin potato-faces fill the streets, together with their full-bosomed females. Thanks to the rate of exchange they are able to make off with everything for a song, including goods which are no longer available in Germany, and the store shelves are empty. They are behaving like a horde of servants whose masters are away, who have found the keys to the wine cellars and
now are having an orgy with their women. . . .

  The gang are out of the house,

  Let us drink down all they’ve left,

  A kiss from you

  And a kiss from you,

  Life at last, life at last

  is what it should be.

  Something of the sort. Swarms of Berlin League of German Maidens girls have been directed here for the moment, and they wave ecstatically at the tank columns rattling through the old streets. In the next issue of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung they will be pictured as ‘Local Inhabitants, Who Greeted Their German Liberators with Wild Ovations’. . . . We know all about the talent for stagecraft of Goebbels, the limping haberdashery salesman.

  I hear that Schuschnigg[32] is being held in the foulest kind of prison, and mishandled. They are all enjoying themselves over the misfortunes of people who had the temerity to stick to their posts to the end.

  Since it would be quite inconceivable for the writers—their writers—to absent themselves from the universal bacchanalia, Herr Bruno Brehm has come forward with a secretly printed brochure to mark the event. This contains a hymn to Hitler, who is lauded by this traitor to his people as the consummator of the dream of a German Reich.

  But the low point is reached when the north German press dares to speak of ‘Austria’s return to the Reich’—as though these Prussians had any rightful claim to be considered the successors of the great empire of the Hohenstaufens and Habsburgs. . . . As much right as a swineherd who rises in the world, marries the daughter of an ancient family fallen on evil days, and then claims he is in direct line of descent and entitled to bear the family shield.

  I spoke to my cousin, L., who is participating as a major general in this political burglary and cannot conceive why my eyes are not bright with pure joy at the event. I asked him if he imagined that a man of breeding like the elder Moltke would not have reacted with an immediate resignation if he had been given orders to make an attack of this kind. The frightening and incredible thing is that these Prussian officers, bearers of great and famous names, have no conception of the degraded roles they have been led to play here. It is this erasure of a feeling of honour, this ethical defect, this godless denial that boundaries exist between right and wrong that forces me to believe in a final and ignominious depth of the German spirit.