Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  I know that dictators must stage a new fireworks show every five months in order to hold the allegiance of the canaille. . . . This is what drove Napoleon III from Sevastopol to the Chinese Expedition, to Magenta, Solferino, Mexico, and finally, Sedan.

  All this is incontrovertible, and might well explain the events of 9 November, if it were not for the fact that Hitler is also thereby bringing war down on himself—a war which he must certainly avoid if he is not to dig his own grave.

  I discussed this with L., hard-working official at the Foreign Ministry, who simply laughed at me and my complicated analyses. His explanation of everything was Hitler’s sudden fits of rage; now playing Artaxerxes, Hitler at once begins to roar when he does not immediately get his way, throws himself to the floor, and bites the carpet.

  This is the reason, then, if L. is right, for all this misery and this immeasurable shame. But I wish to cite two cases, which took place before my eyes, so to speak. The first concerns a niece of Sonnenthal, the actor, who was driven from one refuge to the next, until finally, deathly tired, and beyond wanting to live any more, she simply walked up into the mountains on one of the first freezing nights of this autumn. After days of searching, we finally found her: she was dead.

  The second story is even more shattering. I will not name its unfortunate subject for reasons that are highly personal. It was told me by the widow of our immortal Leo von Zumbusch:

  Aged Fräulein X lived in great seclusion in her two-room apartment on Munich’s Maximilianstrasse. A well-known actor who had managed to win great popularity with the Nazis decided that he wanted these two rooms. He found it unheard of for an old Jewish woman to be inhabiting them and denounced the old lady to get the apartment. This is tantamount to deportation to a concentration camp and slow death by starvation in these glorious times. Old Fräulein X knew this very well, and felt herself to be too old and too weak for this bitter path. She turned with an urgent plea for a quick-acting poison to the mother of one of her pupils.

  The friend was a woman of character and determination. First, she offered every conceivable aid and protection to the old, weary lady. When this did not work, she had the courage to go to a Munich pharmacologist, a colleague of her husband’s, to ask for the poison. . . .

  This gentleman, who to make matters worse was himself a follower of Hitler, was furious at the very idea, and at first refused. Then, however, as the utter hopelessness of the case was driven home to him, he overcame his sense of outrage sufficiently to slip a mixture of curarine and potassium cyanide into her hand. The lady returned to Fräulein X, really already a dying woman, with the poison.

  And now it turned out that with her tearful thanks for the poison, Fräulein X had still one more request: would the friend sing Brahms’ Ernste Gesänge before they parted? The friend, who is a singer, complied. She left, and today at lunch we got word that old Fräulein X had been found dead in her apartment. The man who had denounced her, the actor P., had grown impatient and was at her door at the time.

  These were things I witnessed, so to speak. I give the names of the denouncers in neither case. In the Sonnenthal case, the individual is a 79-year-old one-time dancer, a Hitlerite now living in Vienna . . . an old slattern who soon, on her deathbed, will see before her the Seat of Judgement. . . .

  And the other one?

  I have now lived more than fifty years, have been forced to descend into certain dark places, and I have emerged with one piece of wisdom: no harm that I have ever done has not caused me pain later on, if it took decades. One way or another, sooner or later, often when it is almost forgotten, I wonder: is there now and then in the cocktails which Herr P. enjoys in his apartment acquired in this way the taste of a mixture of curarine and potassium cyanide . . . and through the march music resounding out of his radio, does he not perhaps, at times, hear something like the Ernste Gesänge?

  April 1939

  With the passing of this endless winter, which really seemed to have adapted itself to what is generally meant by ‘Nordic’, I went again to Berlin. There was a great deal of bustle in connection with Hitler’s birthday, and the approach of this national holiday was indicated by the fact that the hotels were flooded with the various storm, overstorm, tornado, and hurricane troopers which Germany has at its disposal. Their hideous boots were visible in front of all the doors.

  First, I met Hans Albers,[34] and had tea with him in his no doubt incredibly expensive apartment overlooking the Tiergarten. He has filled the apartment with questionable antiques which he unquestionably thinks are genuine.

  But he is a good fellow, if petrified with fear at the thought of getting old. Albers qualifies as one of the major celebrities of this part of the world, and in private is a simple and charming Hamburg type, but he has the same trouble as Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Kaiser was also easy and pleasant in tête-à-tête, but when he had to appear in public, he was unbearable. With me, however, Albers even exhibited a certain sentimentality, and he had tears in his eyes when he told me about his mother’s attempt on her deathbed to sing the famous Schleswig-Holstein, Sea Surrounded of her native Holstein.

  Berlin smells of war, and strikes me as looking the way a parvenu never should: shabby, wan, ridiculous. The menus offer little, the wine is even more questionable than usual, the linen is of doubtful cleanliness. The coffee is miserable, there is no petrol for the taxis, and since repairmen have been drafted for work on fortifications, the hotels are in a sorry state. All kinds of things are now visible under the plushy, stuccoed, bronzed junk which formerly concealed the down-at-the-heels artifice which is Prussia’s natural style.

  One evening, led on by a whispering, winking promoter, I landed in an old Westside nightclub located in a basement. Through Herr Göring, it stayed open until morning at which time, in the best tradition of old Berlin, the waiters sat slumped and exhausted at empty tables. During my visit, the place was filled to capacity with young men of the rural nobility, all of them in SS uniforms. They were evidently in Berlin to attend the approaching Emperor’s Birthday. The club was filled with the odour of their bad cigarettes and their noisy manner, which was even worse.

  They were having a fine time dropping pieces of ice from the champagne coolers down the décolletages of their ladies and retrieving the pieces of ice from the horrible depths amidst general jubilation. They derided a doddering old man with a long white beard who had wandered into this den for some unfathomable reason, and generally communicated with each other in loud voices that must certainly have been understandable on Mars, their speech the pimps’ jargon of the First World War and the Free Corps period—the jargon which is what the language has become during the last twenty years.

  From my table, I examined their faces. They were the bearers of old, blood-spattered names, they were the sons of beer-happy fathers who were once, to the astonishment of their contemporaries, embassy councillors and attachés, bestowing upon the world the Teutonic belly and dash of soccer stars—looking ludicrous and almost touching in their stern inflexibility and rigid helplessness.

  To observe these men meant looking at the unbridgeable abyss that separates all of us from the life of yesterday. True, the beer-bellies and the bags under the eyes are gone, the faces are lean and narrow now. At first sight they look like a group of dragon-killers or like archangels who have left their wings in the cloakroom. . . . Until a second, harder look . . . until the sound of this whorehouse jargon and the coarseness of their expressions bring quite a different analogy to mind.

  The first thing is the frightening emptiness of their faces. Then one observes, in the eyes, a kind of flicker from time to time, a sudden lighting up. This has nothing to do with youth. It is the typical look of this generation, the immediate reflection of a basic and completely hysterical savagery.

  I knew the old Kaiser’s army. After a year or two of World War, it was gone. And I know that the Belgian atrocities charged against that army were based either on a tragic misunderstanding or on the propag
anda needs of the adversary. Had that old army been ordered to carry out just one of the acts of conscious cruelty charged against it, the shooting down of a defenceless enemy, it would have mutinied! But woe to Europe if ever this hysteria that confronts us now gets free rein. These young men would turn the paintings of Leonardo into an ash heap if their Führer stamped them degenerate. They would not hesitate to send cathedrals tumbling into the air, using the hellish arts of I.G. Farben, if this were part of a given situation. Oh, they will perpetrate still worse things, and worst, most dreadful of all, they will be totally incapable of even sensing the deep degradation of their existence.

  The next day in front of the Reich Chancellery, packed into the mob, deafened by the crash of drums, cymbals, and tubas of the marching troops, I witnessed the festivities. I heard the clamour, saw the enraptured faces of the women, saw, also, the object of this rapture.

  There he stood, the most glorious of all, in his usual pose with hands clasped over his belly, looking, with his silver-decorated uniform and cap drawn far down over his forehead, like a tram conductor. I examined his face through my binoculars. The whole of it waggled with unhealthy cushions of fat; it all hung, it was all slack and without structure—slaggy, gelatinous, sick. There was no light in it, none of the shimmer and shining of a man sent by God. Instead, the face bore the stigma of sexual inadequacy, of the rancour of a half-man who had turned his fury at his impotence into brutalising others.

  And through it all this bovine and finally moronic roar of ‘Heil!’ . . . hysterical females, adolescents in a trance, an entire people in the spiritual state of howling dervishes.

  I went back to the hotel with Clemens von Franckenstein, whom I met accidentally today. We talked about my observations yesterday, and he reminded me that the German peerage register is full of listings of families like the von Arnims, Riedesels, von Kattes, von Kleists, and Bülows, with members holding positions such as ‘Group Leader’ and similar offices under this criminal. . . . These honours are accepted without a thought of the disgrace they thereby bring to the famed old names they bear, and to their forefathers. And I reflected again on this thick-witted mob and its bovine roar; on this failure of a Moloch to whom this crowd was roaring homage; and on the ocean of disgrace into which we have all sunk.

  No, the much-maligned generation of the Wilhelms never quite reached this point of adoration of a Chosen One. In this case, it is really true that yesterday’s sins were not as bad as today’s. No, these are filth! These ceremonials are not anything to be seen and grasped. Satan has loosened his bonds, a herd of demons is upon us. . . .

  This people is insane. It will pay dearly for its insanity. The air of this summer is full of foreboding, and fire and iron must heal what no physician can any longer cure.

  On the train back to Munich, D.[35] told me about the time in the First World War when he was Hitler’s company commander. He described Hitler as a man constantly in a kind of daze. As company runner, he regularly and bravely marched ‘into the jaws of death’, but once out of danger he was generally considered the company fool by his comrades.

  There is also an odd rumour, never quite dispelled, about the Iron Cross he wears.[36] I merely report it, since I lack the facts to verify it. An officer familiar with the procedure under which decorations were awarded at the time brought to my attention recently the fact that an award of the Iron Cross, First Class, was automatically accompanied by promotion to non-commissioned officer. This being so, the officer had come to the conclusion that this particular decoration was ‘self-awarded’.

  I do not like the ugly custom which has sprung up these past few years of nasty, uncritical backbiting. I will not do the same, and so I merely record what I have heard, without taking a position on the matter. The man has certainly lied, and not only in politics. He has lied regularly and often to enhance his own personal reputation. For example: on 9 November 1923, that legendary day, after Hitler had managed to get away from the Feldherrnhalle intact,[37] he concocted a fantastic story about a crying child he had tried to rescue from the whizzing bullets. No eyewitness saw the child. Undoubtedly, the purpose of the story was to cover his ignominious flight with a sentimental tear-jerker.

  D. told me something else which characterises the man. Prior to the famous Assumption of Power, Hitler always addressed his former company commander with the formal ‘you’, and as ‘Captain, sir’, and D., whenever they met, used the familiar ‘you’ to his one-time runner. . . .

  Thus the usages of the First World War, which held until 1932. Now D. was a Munich attorney, and the other was the all-powerful man in the silver-threaded tram conductor’s cap. . . . Now, this was the Moloch of the Germans, master over life and death—this former inhabitant of a Barerstrasse[38] furnished room, who had the boundless temerity recently to offer one of his gangland decorations (refused, with thanks) to the sovereign of a foreign state.[39]

  But this is how it is with the dear Prussians, and even with this poor imitation Prussian: try as they may, they cannot hide their basic recruit mentality; not even when a caprice of fate wafts them into the places of power. Even as D. goes on talking, a troop of youngsters comes marching out into the muggy spring day in the street below. They are not carrying comfortable rucksacks, but duffelbags, on their backs. The bags carry less and pull bestially, but they have the advantage of being reminiscent of the barracks and parade ground. This is how they are. Well-packed and ready for use at any time in each blanket roll is their master sergeant’s dream of how to order life, with which they have ruined Germany and which they now propose to present to the world. Very soon now, Germany will be faced with the ultimate question: whether to free itself from Prussian hegemony, or cease to exist. There is no third way.

  The occasion of the Emperor’s Birthday celebration in Berlin was also used to raise Herr Bruno Brehm[40] to the eminence of poet laureate: Herr Brehm, who first introduced himself to me as a monarchist of purest black-and-gold hue, and who two years later wrote that low book about the Kaiser during the war. . . . Herr Bruno Brehm who as late as 1930 was seeking favours in the antechambers of the literary Jews of Vienna; who dedicated his books ‘in faithful recollection’ to their equally Jewish wives; and who now, a few years later, writes one inflammatory anti-Semitic article after the other.

  Oh, I am sure that he has some atrophied archduke safely tucked away somewhere ready for use as his political alibi the moment the wind changes. In any case, I know he will be more agile about changing course than Benno von Mechow, who became a Catholic in 1933, when it seemed as if the Catholics were going to win. This did not happen, however, and so he veered around to the Nazis. Unfortunately, this did not produce as powerful an effect on the Hitlerites as he might have wished.

  But isn’t this the way they all are? Are they not typified by the World War cadet who was never promoted, emerged from the war to write one powerful book based on powerful and unique experience, and then, faced with the fact that he lacked all ability to tell a story, was unable to complete a second book founded on fantasy and imagination? So they have served up the same old brew a third, a fourth, a fifth time, in book after book, merely by the addition of hot water, and without the brew getting any stronger, obviously. For years now they have done nothing but rewrite the same book under the guise of filling in the gaps in previous versions by their immense writer’s craft.

  Eternal cadets, old enough now to command a division; imitators of Hamsun, and of Adalbert Stifter; specialists in blood and soil, earth-smell and pipe-stink; pre-Raphaelite youths with Tyrtaeus eyes; archangels and dragon-killers of intact virginity and negative Wassermanns.

  Not a whole-bodied man in the lot. Not one who has not had his ‘little misdeed’ as old Fontane called it in his Stine stories. Not one whom a man might call ‘friend’.

  I have said it before: for us who have remained, hardest of all to bear is our ever increasing loneliness. One after another, our comrades are disappearing, opponents as well as those who thou
ght as we did.

  Today, when I got off the train, I learned that Max Mohr is dead.

  Emigrated in 1934, died while working as a doctor in Shanghai—a year ago; and I learn of his death only now. Officer of selfless bravery in World War I, skier and mountain-climber, farmer and physician.

  Friend of David Herbert Lawrence. Author of the unforgettable Improvisations in June which told of the revolt by the romantics. Author, also, of two novels even more powerful, if that is possible, than that. No one so unsure and retiring on a pavement. No one so stoutly a man on a mountain top, and in the snow.

  Lawrence and Mohr: were they not two soldiers in the newly formed troop of those who had seen through the stock-market world and were roused into action by their disgust? Were they not both of this little band as yet without a flag, as yet everywhere scattered—but which will never, so long as the sun continues to shine on this earth, so lose hold as to despair and sell itself?

  From Friendship of Ladiz:

  This was at a time when men did not yet have navels. There was such a time, of course, when there was no such thing. Navels were invented by the Prussians. . . . Probably out of their innate sense of order, so that a man would have a portable commemorative medal of the day of his birth!

  No one ever so irresistibly ridiculed his own country, and no one so enfolded it in a tempestuous love. No one ever so charmingly administered a kick to the seat of the pants of everything and everybody we both hate: the Kurfurstendamm and I.G. Farben; the industrial knighthood of the Ruhr, the lads in knickerbockers of the Silberspiegel Club (the Silberspiegel was known as a homosexual club); and the old bridge-playing and philanthropic whores of the Berlin faubourgs.