Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  Oh, Bavaria, my Bavaria, most beautiful of lands now in the great pause between the fourth and fifth acts of the drama of the distant Gods: the village street stands empty, it is the time of milking, to the south rises a fata morgana in chalk, Karwendel. Still farther, a black-clad procession moves through the fields: an old farmer being carried from his house, finished with living. A long and deep completion it has been, and without hurry. Now they carry him from the house of his birth and his completion, the neighbours carry him across to the little church with the onion-towers. And still farther away are other neighbours, now bringing in the hay. Heavy stallions pull the green-painted wagons, the last Bavarian stallions before the advent of the tractors, the steel dragons.

  The light of the setting sun lies across these images—what is the secret, painful fear for your home that emerges here? The light of the setting sun lay across your youth as across mine when you gave me Friendship of Ladiz that ominous July of 1931.

  Emigrated to Shanghai two years later, struck down by a heart attack far from his Karwendel birthplace; cremated abroad, his ashes strewn to the winds from the afterdeck of a ship in the North Sea, near home, off Helgoland. . . .

  Cut from a different pattern than these businessman-novelists, with their unflinching war stories and their marvellous cadets whose unruly lives end in ‘the luck of a quick death, which all of us want, finally’.

  Now you, also. A light goes out, and then another. Finally, the theatre is dark, and the stage, where all was light and animation only a short time before, is empty. Every now and then, an icy wind sweeps out of the dark rooms behind, into the stage.

  Courage is required to go on living now. Courage, and a daily summoning-up of all one’s will. For years now, to go on living has been to go on hating. Courage is needed, and belief in that idea struggling so hard to become reality.

  August 1939

  I have been at Jannings’, on the Wolfgangsee. His impressive estate now lies deep under a shadow—its owner’s fears about a war. He is preoccupied with fear about what will happen to his art collection and his stocks and bonds, and about next year’s supply of coal for the central heating of his house, and about whether there will be a sufficient variety of sausage for his dinner the coming year. As a performer, he is neither more nor less than a character actor of the first magnitude; as a man, he is a fat bourgeois whose fears about the coming world storm centre about whether his siesta with fishing pole and cigar on the shores of the lake will be seriously disturbed.

  Jannings told me all kinds of things about the famous Berlin scandal involving Goebbels, who was supposed to have been found in tête-à-tête with the wife of the actor, Fröhlich, and soundly beaten by the latter. The truth is somewhat different—unfortunately. Since Jannings says he was an actual eyewitness, I will vouch for the truth of his version.

  It seems that Herr Fröhlich left a party in Jannings’ company, and went to get his car to drive home. Fröhlich found his wife in the car, together with the Herr Minister . . . in, let us say, tête-à-tête. He did not challenge Herr Goebbels, but later slapped his wife several times and thanked his valet for helping him expose his adulterous wife.

  This is the true story. The man could not find the courage, quite, for any public action. But the popular version insists on a more gratifying ending to the story, and holds fast to its vision of the beaten Cabinet Minister. Suddenly, a song entitled ‘I Want To Be Happy’ (‘Ich möchte einmal Fröhlich sein’) has become immensely popular.

  I have been spending the last few days of August on the Chiemsee with Herr von K., who was a cabinet member years ago, and who as a young man knew Bismarck. We talked about his experiences during the war, and about the first days of the war twenty-five years ago on the East Prussian border. Then, just before the declaration of war and on nights of a full moon, the patrols would trot back and forth at the edges of the fields, one man behind the other, carefully avoiding the heavy stalks of grain. Even after the war had begun, it was hard to get the peasant recruits to overcome their feelings and ride into the wheat fields ready for harvest. . . .

  Images from a world so near in time, yet already become like a legend from the past: A Prussian dragoon plunges his lance into the body of a Russian during the first cavalry battle, knocking him from his horse. He cannot pull the lance out of the body. Suddenly, looking down at the Russian, he begins to cry bitterly. The Russian strokes his hand, telling him not to take it to heart, for Christ’s sake.

  Another image: A little Jewish boy, condemned to death under martial law for aiding the enemy, is being led to execution and does not understand. He is handed an order on which the verdict is written, glances at it uncomprehendingly and asks: ‘Please . . . for what is the little paper?’

  Another: A little old Russian peasant who was wearing the uniform of the Russian Army when captured told us that he and his comrades were quite ready to shoot when the range was a thousand metres or more (‘You can’t hit a thing.’). And even when the range had narrowed to five hundred metres, they fired (‘At least, you can’t see whether you’ve hit or not.’). But when the Germans had got to within one hundred metres, all the Russians threw away their guns, and under no circumstances used them—‘Because who, sir, would take on himself to sin at such close range!’

  Then we talked about Bismarck, while Herr Hitler’s heavily loaded military convoys rolled eastward on the Salzburg highway below. As a young man in the foreign service, K. was to give a lecture before the Chancellor. On Bismarck’s desk was a plate containing a chunk of sausage, and from time to time, as the young men delivered their little speeches, the old glutton would cut himself a slice as thick as a thumb, cover it with a piece of butter again as thick, and bite into it, without troubling about bread. . . .

  There is no doubt in my mind that the physical durability of a chief of state has a profound effect on the policies it follows. The rise and fall of Napoleon’s empire is an example. And I would like to know what catastrophe would ensue if the Chief Eunuch now deciding the fate of Germany were ever to sit down to just one of these Bismarckian snacks.

  I would be a spiritual cripple if I attempted to deny Bismarck’s real stature and emotional depth. But we are now reaping the harvest of the industrially overdeveloped Greater Prussia whose seeds he sowed. I am more than ever convinced that his work contains the fatal flaw of a great man’s tragic misjudgement, and that it is this we have to thank for this government of industry-minded dolts, and for the fact that we are being overrun by the masses, who reproduce like rabbits, have no work to keep them occupied, and are therefore made all the more greedy for power.

  We are on the threshold of a second world war, in which again all of geography will be against the Germans, and which will derive from the Bismarckian state. And I am quite sure that such a war, declared by the eternal Prussian as it will be, is lost before the first shot is fired. We will not be able to talk about better days until we have before us the outlines of the coming catastrophe. This perspective we will have only when we are sitting atop the relatively small pile of rubble which will result from the relatively short war to come—a war which is inevitable, and which will break out soon.

  Already there is a touch of autumn about this crystal-clear day, the last day of peace. With the measured precision of stars, a span of oxen pulls the plough uphill and downhill over a field unchangeable, looking exactly as they did when they lowed over the cradle of Christ. The clean and entirely innocent landscape lies before me, open and peaceful, and solitary as the illustration in a book.

  And yet havoc is in the air. People here sense it and are deeply troubled. The farmers, and more especially the Bavarian farmers, are the only people left in Germany who still keep contact with their own inner being and basic sense of reality, despite the universal hysteria and the series of successful political robberies. The only enthusiasts in the village are the Hitler Youth rowdies who were trained in Radau and have an idea that the war is going to be like the Austrian an
d Czech promenades militaires.

  The next morning, as I was on my way home, the blacksmith came out to tell me the news: the pygmies to whom Germany’s fate is now linked have taken the leap, and at this very moment that power-drunk schizophrenic’s voice is crackling out of every loudspeaker.

  I pressed the man’s hand. For what will soon be seven years, he has suffered and hated as I have. I have no doubt that immeasurable suffering is coming, and that it could not be avoided. But I also have no doubt about the thing that has sustained me for six years, and maintained me in the darkest hours of my life . . . the certainty that today the great monster signed his own death warrant.

  I have hated you in every hour that has gone 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. When I let this hate free, I am almost overcome by it, but I cannot change this and do not really know how it could be otherwise. Let no one deprecate this, nor fool himself about the power of such hatred. Hate drives to reality. Hate is the father of action. The way out of our defiled and desecrated house is through the command to hate Satan. Only so will we earn the right to search in the darkness for the way of love.

  20 September 1939

  So the Nazis (I do not want to speak of the Germans in this connection) . . . the Nazis are conquering, and what else is one to expect? A hopelessly rainy summer has been followed by a clear, sunny autumn, full of the smoky perfumes of that season, with the ground solid and hard-packed and as though made to order for those tanks to roll over and flatten to earth whatever stands in their way . . . the Polish Cavalry, the whole Polish Army . . . and if Poland is ours today, tomorrow it must be the whole world.

  Yes, the Nazis are conquering and perhaps internally even more than on the battlefield. The editors exult in bloodthirsty fashion on the newsprint into which our forests are to be converted. They have invented a brand-new language to match the great times in which we live, and now proclaim the Realisation of 1899, and the Commitment of the Woman at War, and the Reinforcement by the German Woman, and talk about that ancient piece of German ground, Posen. And when they are reminded that Posen was Polish territory as far back as the time of Frederick the Great, and that even earlier soldiers from Danzig fought on the Polish side in the First Battle of Tannenberg, they turn nasty and threaten to tell the Gestapo. . . .

  The Nazis are, indeed, conquering, and their ‘war commentators’ bring new glory to the German language, as they ‘shower the enemy with sparks enough to make him burn for peace’ and ‘give him something to chew on that lays him flat on the ground’. And when they are told that their German is the German of the latrine wall and the pimp, they turn very nasty indeed, and roar that they are soldiers, and that this happens to be how soldiers talk, and if you don’t believe it, you can find out in a concentration camp.

  Oh, yes, the Nazis do nothing but conquer, they conquer just as uninterruptedly as Wilhelm’s armies did in 1914, and the beer-hall regulars again have the entire world annexed. And in the local café, recently, the old one-time Medical Corps general employed the current jargon in lumping Poles and Englishmen together as ‘pigs’—despite the fact that the old man never in his life saw an example of the latter in his ‘natural habitat’, so to speak.

  When I rose and objected to such entirely uncalled-for language, he looked at me with the eyes of a wounded stag, felt that the world had collapsed at his feet, and mumbled something about how he had always thought I was a patriotic man.

  22 September 1939

  Dear Reck,

  I am writing from home, back from the Polish War and before I leave for the Western Front of this Second World War. I am now a captain in the Air Force, and am just back from the Battle of Poland and eleven flying missions—some of them rather unusual missions like dive-bombing columns of troops and troop trains. Once, out of sheer love of the craft, I wangled an invitation as a ‘guest’ on a bombing run over Warsaw—one of many such, of course, but this was a vertical dive from 16,000 feet down to 2,200. And I came out of it untouched, even if there are a few scratches on the crate. And now for England. But more of that later.

  You heard right: I’m not lying, we are about to dare the impossible. We are the children of the gods, and they are most merciful. But we have our own way of tempting fate: we put our hands around its throat and say, ‘Bless me, or I won’t let go!’

  Dear Reck, I have not written to you for many years now. But we have time enough and to spare, we humans, we do not need to hurry. I have wanted to come clear about my preference for East Prussia and whether it was somehow too hasty. Now, I have flown over it all, from its northern extremity completely across the whole of it, to attack the enemy, and each time with a bomb-load of 1,600 kilos. And each time I have come back a couple of hours later from the Polish wastes safe and sound to the glory of Masuria. Sometimes, there were dead on board, planes were missing, or a crate was so shot up it could only be landed in a heap of twisted metal. Because, when you have caught a Polish infantry transport battalion on the southern edge of a swamp, and left it a quarter-hour later a burial ground, you do not ask yourself what price you paid, and you feel that your own death would be incommensurate. I do not know, Reck, how well you know the Polacks, or how enduring you consider that the Order we have created here will be. But this much I do know: this Order will remain, even if Europe, and England too, has to be turned into ruins and ashes.

  I was a member of the Hitler Youth, I was granted a post of some authority despite the fact that I was not a war veteran, and I am, naturally, a bone-deep believer in National Socialism. Yes, Reck, I know about the terrible mistakes that were made. There are places where the dry rot reaches right down into the ground. But I know also that these mistakes are not fatal—rather, that fate accompanies the spirit, precisely in the sense expressed by my great friend, Reck-Malleczewen, and that I can confidently believe in the spirit of my Third Reich. We two, you and I, move in directions that are completely opposed, of course. Austria, the Sudetenland, Bohemia, Memel were Christmas presents for me. Then, in midsummer, and even now, in the middle of the war, the mere thought that Vienna is no longer apart from the German Reich gives me a feeling of physical well-being. And the war against Poland was my war, long awaited, long desired, and fought with passion. I was glad to take part in it. Eleven times I took leave of this East Prussian glory and flew over fields dotted with ten thousand girls waving good-bye; and eleven times I came back, deeply happy, larger than life. Now the war must be carried against England, so that East Prussia can be released from its isolation and its cage of boundary lines, once and for all. A difficult task. I believe that England is either an article of faith, or a superstition. It may prove to be a tough piece of leather to work. But to win in 1918 at incredible cost, and then in 1933, or certainly by 1935, to allow one’s adversary to become powerful once again—surely, this is political dilettantism of the most ridiculous kind! And then, only then, war with Germany? No, Reck, that is simply nonsense, gross stupidity, parliamentary umbrella politics which lets every favourable chance go by, and then challenges the adversary when you feel personally insulted.

  I haven’t the slightest idea what is going to happen from now on. Mind at rest, I merely sit in my bombing-crate and shoot down anybody who gets in the way. But I am beginning to get the idea that the issue that has to be fought out here is simply the total existence of either England or Germany. Reck, I don’t care how many warnings there are about ‘darkening skies’ and England. We are not unaccustomed to fighting in the dark. Remember that we have gained priceless experience in Poland on how to deal with peoples and nations which insist on being our enemies. The Poles certainly fought with remarkable courage. Still, we quite pitilessly shot them to pieces. I believe that we did not even hate the Poles—certainly we don’t now, completely demoralised mass of primitives that they are today. Still, when there is a question of German farmers being shot in the back, we are
going to deal with the matter in a completely new spirit of Germanic coldness, no matter if we have to put any number of Polish intellectuals against the wall. And what is certain here is that the most important of these are already gone, and that in case of emergency there are always more German farmhands available than there are Polish intellectuals. I don’t know if methods like these are adaptable for England. But what I am certain about is that we are slowly coming around to acting in the spirit of: ‘If you will not be my brother, your head will be dropped off your shoulders.’ I have solemnly concluded that I will strike down any member of any nation who infringes on our newly created New Order in the East, or in any way tries to do damage to National Socialism. And I will do this with a pitilessness that should provide food for thought. I am not inclined to wish an attack of softheartedness on Germany, until this battle ends in either death or life as a people. Certainly the English, in their arrogant declaration of a war of hunger on women and children, have shown what they think of compassion and humanity.

  Does this horrify you, Reck? But I have never forced either the Czechs or the Poles to be our implacable enemies, and now that England has chosen this moment to declare war on us, I am merely being logical when I reject shuddering and hand-wringing as a means of waging war. This new World War undoubtedly goes sharply against the grain of many people, but I have no doubt that there are several tens of thousands of my type who will force the rest to perform the way they should.

  I expect that we will carry on the war against England with the same icy-cold mathematical reasoning . . . quite differently from the hazy, hit-or-miss quality of Wilhelm’s war. It is wonderful that despite the exhaustion following the First World War, this nation can now be brought by its leadership into a new and considerably more grim war situation. By comparison, I believe the English people have been more or less enervated by too much city living, that they are hardly capable of heroism, and that, with the exception of the old aristocracy, their culture is worthless. The German, of course, is hardly different, and little remains of the old aristocracy, but he has, instead, a new dream. Anyway, it will be a proper carnage, and if I next find myself turned into a rocket falling from the heavens, I will still, at the last moment, acknowledge this much: we have had our share of the fun.