Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  Deeply moving stories are told, of Austrian officers turning their guns against themselves, of units from Bregenz who placed themselves in position for a hopeless battle against the invader; of ordinary soldiers of the old Salzburg Rainer regiment, who threw themselves from the castle windows of the Salzburg fortress at the humiliation of their country. Why in the world did Schuschnigg not give the order to shoot, in one last attempt to awaken the rest of the world from its incomprehensible lethargy with these shots? The bordering countries watched this miserable rape of a little nation, and shrugged their shoulders. Nobody is moving to stop this before it is too late. It almost seems that they prefer to stand back and wait until the cobra breaks out.

  But I foresee a day when the nations will regret their cowardly passivity. The cost is beyond measuring; but they will have to pay, someday. In this first great breach of the peace, the criminal has been let go unpunished and is thus made to appear more powerful than he is. And as he is made more powerful, we, who are his last opponents inside Germany, are made weaker and more impotent.

  Are we, and all who think like us, to run into the machine guns of a Nazi army which, thanks to the lethargy of the governments, now has Austria’s guns as well? I put the question now, and see the day coming when I will ask it a second time: after the inevitable Second World War. If five years ago, at the time of the so-called Assumption of Power, the European nations had taken action—everything would have ended with a police raid, with the gang being hustled off to jail by the collars.

  But what did everyone do? They stood by and watched, and thus made impossible any resistance from inside Germany. What are they doing now? They are standing by and watching, preoccupied with figuring out a way to avoid irritating Herr Hitler—and so making any resistance even more impossible. In time to come, you will be able to do certain things: you will be able to punish those who with their wretched political deals made possible that infamous day in January 1933; and you will be able to punish the military and industrial men-behind-the-scenes. But one thing you will not be able to do: you will not be able to make the whole nation, in extenso, responsible for a regime which you—yes, you—have strengthened. You have broken our internal resistance through political lethargy, and you are nevertheless demanding of an unarmed people that they do what you, with your mighty armies and the most powerful navy in the world, do not dare.

  There will come a day when you will come face to face with this reproach, and this accusation.

  As I write, an immense flight of bombers is droning past overhead. For a whole hour the drone has gone on above, as though these planes were flying against a world power. I am a German, I encircle this land in which I live with all my love. Never again can I be torn from here without going to seed. I tremble for each tree and each wood that disappears, for each silent valley that is devastated, for each stream that these pirates of industry, the real masters of our land, threaten. . . .

  I know that this land is the living, beating heart of the world. I will go on believing in this heartbeat, despite all the covering layers of blood and dirt. But I know also that the thing up there that rumbles and thunders is the denial of right and justice, of truth and faith and everything that makes life worth living. I believe that this is a caricature of Germany, smeared by a malignant ape escaped from the leash.

  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.

  Writing this, I shrink inside myself. Soon it will be Easter, and as though in derision the final chorus of the St Matthew Passion rings out from the radio at just this moment—‘Wir setzen uns in Tränen nieder . . .’

  Germany, my Germany . . . yes, this chorus, once this spoke for us.

  And now?

  Now, still, overhead, these white savages steer their moronic automatons, flying toward brutality and crime, drowning out the peaceful stillness of this spring day. I am crying. But it is more out of fury and shame than out of sadness. . . .

  July 1938

  Herr Schmeling has been beaten in New York.

  By order of King Mob, I am supposed to believe in a defeat for all Germans because the highly paid German butcher boy who was knocked down in New York by another highly paid butcher boy happens to have the same nationality as I! Four of us sat until the dawn of this warm summer day to hear the outcome of this fight. When we heard that the entire drama over there had been played out in two minutes, we broke into laughter. My dear countrymen, I hope that you will live to see the day when you learn to believe in other gods than a few movie whores and a couple of prize-fighters.

  One summer morning, I noticed three men surveying my fields. They were strangers, and their whole appearance was dissonant in this peaceful atmosphere. They were going about my fields and property with all kinds of measuring instruments, did not bother to greet me when they saw me, and then, when I questioned them, identified themselves as employees of the Berlin Siemenswerke. It seemed that Siemens, one of the biggest of Göring’s enterprises, was planning to build a factory here. . . .

  Without querying me, without arrangement with me, without any notice, and without even an attempt to provide the shadow of legality. I asked how Siemens would like it if I appeared unheralded on their property and proceeded to drill holes. This led to a lively exchange, and since I wanted to acquaint the gentlemen from Berlin with basic concepts of propriety and good manners, I simply called my people and had the instruments removed from their possession and placed under lock and key.

  This led to loud outcries and many threats. The next day the assistant regional commissioner arrived. After mildly reproaching me for my resort to force, he informed me that I could expect to receive the visit of a commission in two days. This commission appeared as scheduled: five Bavarian administrative officials and an Austrian engineer sporting a swastika on his lapel. I learned the essentials of this project, which calls for the devastation of the whole of this marvellous river valley, the demolition of my ancient, early Gothic house, and putting four hundred hectares under water.

  All this to achieve 4,000 hp, the equivalent of the energy produced by one bomber. This by a regime which is constantly proclaiming its partiality to the farmers, and which has adopted as one of its many slogans, that ‘Germany will either be a country of farmers, or it will be nothing.’ From the first words spoken I understood that what was involved here had less to do with 4,000 horsepower than with a project that would allow north German industry to transfer its capital to the south. Smelling the approach of war and its accompanying inflation, these industrialists are converting their paper money into fixed assets—assets to be stolen from the farmers, no matter what the cost in natural resources, and loss of livelihood to the people involved. All this is given the name of the ‘general good’ to cover the brutal character of the actions of these industrial robber barons who are the successors of the German dynasties and the old nobility.

  I thought of the stillness of this incomparable river valley, and of the eighteen generations of men to whom this land has given shelter and sustenance. I saw no reason to hide my indignation. . . .

  The Bavarian officials were quietly on my side, and their grins showed it. But the Austrian engineer was enraptured with Hitlerism and a heated exchange followed. He spoke of ‘the good of society’, and I asked him what the current market quotation was for this ‘society’. When he began to talk about expropriation I declared that it was quite possible that I might have to leave this house, but that if I did he would certainly leave it beforehand—on a stretcher, and feet first.

  Evidently people in G
ermany have become unaccustomed in recent years to hearing plain talk of this kind, and he was speechless with fury. Nevertheless, the possibility that I might have my revolver ready in my pocket made him shift in doubt and fear in his chair. As the Bavarians stared at me as if at some miraculous animal, he quickly amended that it was possible the whole matter might take years to resolve. And with this, the commission departed.

  Some time later I learned in Munich something of the background of this. A source in the Hydroelectric Construction Section of the Ministry for the Interior told me that there had for a long time been extant another proposal, which would have obtained the same amount of power but would have spared the entire valley. But this proposal had been rejected, because Councillor Arno Fischer, chief of the section and inventor of the underwater turbine, wanted to use these turbines throughout the project. This, of course, would be of the greatest incidental benefit to this gentleman’s pocket, and it was for the sake of these underwater turbines and the inventor’s pocket that the entire valley was to be sacrificed. Lurking further in the background, a big Bavarian chemical company, which had long been producing explosives, and behind this again the all-powerful Herr Göring—Göring, who was making regular appearances in debtor’s court only a couple of years ago and now has become lord and master over the fate of families of ancient peasant stock.

  This was the reason, then. According to my confidant, there is no longer a property in Germany that is safe from this sort of thing. We will see, Messieurs, we will see. Ah, I would rather see my property and all of Germany blown to bits than leave it to such as these. . . .

  September 1938

  Homeward-bound from Berlin, which I found nervous and already a little more constrained as the Czech crisis continues, I saw from my sleeper window in the Upper Palatinate endless trains loaded with artillery and munitions rolling towards the border. Germany, by which I mean this latest generation, carefully nurtured in the precepts of highway robbery, is indeed in a most unusual state of mind today. It regards the will of this so-called Führer as a kind of cosmic law, and all opponents, even those outside the Reich’s borders, as criminals. Yes, of course, a foreign nation is involved, and there is the little matter of broken treaties but then the Führer has willed it so. . . .

  And what if the others were finally to take courage in hand and say ‘No’ to this Führer grown drunk on the success of his political burglaries? It could be that the shock of learning that he is not, as he has gradually come to believe, the centre of the world, would be enough. That moment when, for the first time, he does not get his way, he might well simply disappear from the stage.

  But everything indicates that Europe will look on and do nothing, this time as in the attack on Austria. And so Hitler’s position will be further strengthened. These are the lengths to which we have been driven: that we, who are not the worst of the Germans, must now put our hopes in a war to free us as of a plague of locusts.

  I had a long discussion on the subject with P., who cannot comprehend why I feel this way. Of course, he is a businessman, and it has long been a theory of mine that the basic substance of nationalism is of a commercial nature. Besides, it depends on whether or not one recognises this regime, born in chicanery, blackmail, and swindle, as a legitimate government. I have, since 30 January 1933, never ceased to view it as criminal in nature, and as a fraudulent counterfeit of a modern state. If, then, a gang of thieves breaks into my house, and attacks and beats me, shall I then complain about the police who come to my rescue and break down the barricaded door?

  I can now prove that the plebiscite to legitimise Hitler’s takeover of Austria was falsified in the crudest possible way. Together with the other four adults of my house, I naturally voted ‘No’. In addition, I know of at least twenty other reliable people in the town who did the same. Nevertheless, according to the official results, the town unanimously and without a single dissenting voice ‘approved the actions of the Führer’.

  The air is full of rumours about plots and assassinations centring, oddly enough, about the Praetorian Guard of the SS, and the so-called Knights of the Teutonic Order (mainly druggists’ assistants and mail clerks). And this is what happened to me in Munich recently. . . .

  As I was shaving in the little hotel near the main station where I ordinarily stay, something dropped past my third-storey window, and then there was the sound of a heavy thud. When I left the hotel a man was lying in the street, legs spread wide, skull cracked, and brains in a pool of blood on the pavement. He wore black riding pants and a gray and white striped pyjama jacket.

  Bystanders stood about, gawking, and an excited bicyclist was telling how he had been nearly hit by the body plummeting from the fourth floor. A noisy woman had actually seen the man climb onto the window ledge just before he jumped. A hotel porter covered the corpse with a heap of paper while two street cleaners swept up the blood and brains. Then came a sanitation truck, a hose was connected to the nearest hydrant, and the pavement was hosed clean as the corpse lay alongside, boots protruding beyond the covering paper.

  The corpse remained in the now closed-off side street, its outspread legs coming into view whenever the wind lifted the brown hill of paper. When I questioned the porter, he told me that the man had appeared at the hotel that morning at six o’clock, in SS uniform and slightly drunk, and had asked for a room on the uppermost floor available. He then ordered a litre of beer and a whole bottle of cognac—the remains of which we then found, the cognac three-quarters gone, in the bare little attic room alongside the disordered bed. On the floor also lay the man’s black jacket, and strewn on the bed, a crumpled collection of the kind of postcards which are sold to the tourist on the Praça do Commercio in Lisbon, and above all in Port Said.

  The results of the preliminary police investigation emerged several hours later. The dead man, who had registered, naturally, under a false name, had been trained in the school at Bad Tölz for SS officers. He had been involved in a conspiracy against Hitler and the Nazis, and was being hunted.

  The incident in all its unpleasantness and its still more unpleasant corpse reminded me of a story that my friend Hans von Bülow, nephew of the great general, told me years ago. In 1918, during the Finnish campaign, a former Prussian officer was captured who had become the chieftain of a band of Bolsheviks. This man had spent years in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, and this experience and his life during the Revolution had turned him entirely into a marauder. Before the war, the man had been promoted from the ranks, and from 1912 he had been given the privileges of an officer. Now this man, who had been completely brutalised by four years in a Siberian prison camp and had degenerated into a bearded, bloody killer, was condemned to death as the leader of a gang which had committed endless crimes. But this is what is so incredible: as he stood before the firing squad, looking into the black eyes of the muzzles directed on him, he asked for a cigarette. He lit the cigarette, took a puff or two, and then in the instant before the command was given to fire ripped down his pants, whirled about giving death his blank behind, dropped a pile on the ground, and received the sacrament and the bullets simultaneously—as he continued to defecate.

  I talked to Bülow again about that old story. At first glance, there was a passing resemblance to Chopin, who cried into the face of death as it came down upon him, ‘Merde!’ There was also a temptation to admire this present generation for its disdain of death. . . .

  But here a man would be wrong. What appears here to be courage in the face of death is merely mass-man apathy. What appears to be stoicism is merely the expression of the condition of mass-man: neither good nor bad, but basically and with a certain satisfaction at being so, nothing. I really do not know how to characterise the spiritual condition of my dreary contemporaries better than that.

  Today, rumours are circulating of an uprising which has flared in Vienna. I do not believe that there is any real basis to it. Most likely, the story derives from the gossip and trotting about of a few market wome
n, and that’s about all. 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.

  But even this, the overrunning of the world with Neanderthals, is not what is unbearable. What is unbearable is that this horde of Neanderthals demands of the few full human beings who are left that they also shall kindly turn into cavemen; and then threatens them with physical extinction if they refuse.

  We read in Heraclitus:

  They no longer know that the many are always the evil and the few, the good. The Ephesians go so far as to force all the aged to hang themselves and leave the city to the youth. They have hunted Hermodor, who was the foremost among them, from the city with the cry, ‘no one shall be called most virtuous amongst us—let him be so elsewhere and amongst others.’

  December 1938

  I rack my brains trying to discover the meaning of this persecution of the Jews which Goebbels has instigated.[33] At a time when this regime still urgently needs peace, surely this must call forth the deadly enmity of the whole world and make war inevitable. I cannot find the motivation, not even when I try to imagine myself a Nazi, and follow what I would imagine would be his train of thought.