Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  Nevertheless, my first reaction was wild jubilation. I have never ceased to believe in the core of this people, deep as this has been hidden away, by now scarcely discernible. This nation is about to take a great and salutary reducing course which will free it of its ugliness, and teach it, at a cost of what may well be immense suffering, to believe in other gods than the unholy Trinity of Krupp, Röchling, and the cheap radio.

  In their immense vanity, Satan’s own have overreached themselves, and now they are in the net, and they will never free themselves again. That is the fact, and this it is that rejoices my heart. 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.

  Let my life be fulfilled in this way, and let my death come when this task is completed! This promise has come out of the heart of the people you are now striking, and I set it down, at this moment, since it applies to you as well as to us:

  If you banish God from the earth, we will meet him under the earth. And then we, the underground men, will sing a song to God, who is Joy. . . .

  September 1941

  Recently, at the little station of Garching, in Upper Bavaria, I saw the first trainload of Russian prisoners of war.

  I should say: I did not see them. I smelled them. A line of sealed freight cars was standing on a spur, and the summer breeze carried over to me a foul stench of urine and human excrement. When I went closer I saw the urine and excrement seeping through the floorboards and cracks in the cars and down onto the tracks. ‘They are packed in there like cattle.’ The militiaman who said this to me did not seem to agree at all with this treatment of defenceless men—he seemed, in fact, truly disturbed. ‘They are so starved in the prison camps that they tear the grass out of the ground and swallow it.’

  Here is something that happened locally. The son of a poverty-stricken peasant family returned home recently from America following an adventure-filled odyssey. His mother and father, poor as beggars but of excellent repute, welcomed their son home with open arms and a great dinner, and the prodigal ate and drank and went to bed. But during the evening, he had exhibited several hundred-dollar bills. The parents debated the matter for a long time while the son slept. Then, unity having been established, the mother got a long kitchen knife and slit open her son’s throat for the sake of the money: honest people, otherwise, upright people. . . .

  Yet when I voice a long-held theory of mine, that behind all this horror and this unprecedented denial by a basically well-meaning people of all decency—that behind it, there lies concealed a cosmic process, a gigantic psychosis and the unleashing of a horde of demons, I am laughed at. I am called a fabricator of nightmares, and am told that a certain amount of physiological coarsening is always observable in people during wartime. It will turn out that I was right in the end, even if it takes decades.

  And now it begins to appear that the theory must be widened. The death of the few good people who remain must also be included among the symptoms of the disease, as though these deaths were part of the plan, according to some frightful logic. Clemens von Franckenstein became ill last winter, just before he was planning to visit me for a few days. The sickness appeared to be a severe grippe, and was treated as such. But he did not improve and had to be removed to a hospital.

  Recently, I visited him there, and was terrified at the way his face had shrunk. And today, a friend of mine who is a doctor sent me a copy of a Munich medical weekly, in which lung-cancer case histories are given. The very first case, with the use of initials, an indiscretion which pained me very much, was that of Clé: that good and clean man. Clé, who in bearing and character has always appeared to me to be among the last true German noblemen!

  The very same day, as though fate had really decided to take away all my friends, as though loneliness has become part of our martyrdom, I got word of the severe illness of Clé’s cousin, Count Erwein Schönborn. Master of the great Wiesentheid estate, nephew of former Reich Chancellor Hohenlohe, a man of truly humanistic temper, he chose medicine over the usual career as diplomat or jurist. He became a doctor after the most comprehensive training in surgery. At home, after breakfast in a salon among tapestries woven by Raphael, it was the custom for this extremely wealthy aristocrat to leave his guests and get on his motorcycle for the morning calls on his patients—he accepted no fees. Now, this tremendous man of letters and friend of everything human appears to have fallen ill after years of doing too much.

  We were, Franckenstein, he, and I, a little band of friends joined by certain sports and personal experiences, but above all by a common attitude towards life and by the hope that a better time might come. When I think that this man, too, on whom I counted so heavily to help shape the future of this nation, will soon be lost to me, I shudder.

  In the theatre, the lights flicker and go out. The stage empties, and from somewhere behind it an icy wind sweeps down. Only the larvae are left in the orchestra seats. In deathly loneliness, before an audience of degenerates, the last scene must be played out.

  Berlin, of course, is far from such melancholy thoughts! Berlin has the loud voice of the confident, it is riding the crest of a torrent of victories, it has the look of the fattest days of the Wilhelms. The deserving are parcelling out the goods of the earth, as thrown to them by Herr Hitler. . . . People transact ‘business’ breakfast extremely well in restaurants reserved for the demigods of this regime, and all in all have the pleased air of a man who has a birthday every day. On my last visit, I dined at the same place where the carryings-on of the scions of Prussian nobility so absorbed me several years ago. With me this time was Frau v. K., my dancing partner as a girl, who now at first sight somehow reminded me of an oaken dining-room buffet. The lady had a huge bosom, and that prosperous-looking physiognomy so often found among ladies of her class who have passed the forty mark.

  This sylph of yesteryear produced out of her handbag and dangled before my nose a pair of handsome bronze candlesticks—the hors d’oeuvres. According to the testimony, also produced, these candlesticks had once served to light the desk of Napoleon at Saint-Cloud, long since destroyed by fire. . . .

  Robbed, naturally—but this is war, isn’t it? When I tried to say that I did not want what was to me stolen goods, and refused them on the basis of my insufficient means, I was given a lecture on economics by the lady. I learned all about how happy the banks were to lend money, how paper money automatically depreciated in value, and why I, as a father of two, should certainly be able to seize opportunity by the forelock when it arose. After the candle-sticks came an offer of French cognac, of Parisian lingerie, and finally of a breeding pair of Sealyham terriers that a friend of Frau v. K.’s with an estate near Rennes had ‘secured’—these last, obviously, could not be carried in one’s handbag like candlesticks for on-the-spot appraisal.

  However, when I refused all these offers, the temperature fell sharply, and Madame took her leave, having decided she had become involved with an idiot. The movement of her yardwide backside conveyed her deep contempt.

  Paul Wiegler, the last man remaining at the former Ullstein publishing house on Kochstrasse who also worked for the Ullsteins, told me about the old doorkeeper there. This man still, somehow, is in touch with his former employers in New York, and according to information he has received, one of the brothers, a former multi-millionaire, is close to going hungry in his old age. I knew none of these unapproachable Ullstein brothers, but now and then I saw something of their an
t-like industry and their puritanical rules of conduct. Now they are poverty-stricken. They might be interested to know that an official government agency has been set up, complete with telephone, card files, and secretary, which calls itself the Reich Office for Ethics in Business Operations.[54]

  I used this opportunity to call upon Princess Friedrich Leopold, a close friend of my wife’s parents. The Princess is the sister of the deceased Empress, sister-in-law of that Kaiser who, with his wife, left the country ‘by public request’, so to speak, and daughter-in-law of Prince Friedrich Karl, who was in command at Mars-la-Tour. She is alert and quite agile despite her eighty years, and in no respect reminds one of her royal sister. Possessed of a mind free of prejudices and in excellent health, she bicycles from Glienicke when she visits my in-laws at Strausberg, a trip across the whole mammoth city, and is not at all inclined to be gentle when she talks about her imperial brother-in-law and his demeanour as Emperor.

  Of course, she has hardly anything left of the brilliance that was Glienicke in her father-in-law’s time. Most of the castle has been sold, and her capital has shrunk to almost nothing in truly tragic fashion. Of her three sons, one fell in the first days of the last war, the second died in an accident during a riding competition, and the last of her sons, now doubly dear as a result, has given her great sorrow because of certain unfortunate inclinations. With their marvellous nose for such things, the Nazis got wind of these aberrant inclinations shortly after they got into power, and have been blackmailing the mother ever since. Periodically, they jail the prince, and demand an appropriate ransom. He is freed for a few weeks, and then rearrested. And the game begins again. When the Princess sought help from Herr Göring, he kept her waiting for two hours in an ante-room full of typists and SS louts. After the two-hour wait, the Royal Prussian Infantry Captain (retired) and model of a modern field marshal finally appeared, his hands in his pockets, chomping the inevitable cigar, and greeted the daughter-in-law of the victorious general at Metz as follows:

  ‘What is it you wanted?’

  This is Herr Göring, champion of the modern version of enrichez-vous, and as such, the ideal and white hope of the German bourgeoisie.

  We talked a great deal about the dead Kaiser, whose reaction on learning of the death in action of her eldest son the Princess cannot forget. Wilhelm II was obligated to take some note of the death. To console the grieving parents he therefore sent a telegram, as follows: ‘Noblesse oblige.’ This was the entire text.

  I admit that I have come with the passage of time to think in more kindly fashion about the forgotten and deserted Kaiser. It seems to me that with his exile in Doorn he paid for his sins. I only saw him once, when he was ‘on duty’, had been angered by some military detail or other, and began to shout more loudly and shake his rather fat and short-fingered hand more violently than befits a king. The Hohenzollern decorations which later were contemplated as overtures in view of my monarchical leanings turned, amusingly enough, into a wooden souvenir from Doorn, carved by His Majesty’s own two hands, when it was found out that my duty lay not to the House of Prussia, but to the House of Wittelsbach.

  If, nevertheless, I have more to say about the dead monarch than the average German, this is because there was always a connection between my social class and the Court. The links were those old men, Deputies and holders of offices at Court, who were completely informed about all internal matters and gladly passed on full details during the course of hunt dinners in Masuria. People in our circle thus knew about the Krupp and Eulenberg Circle scandals five years before the press did, and I can remember one truly Hamlet-like episode which took place behind the scenes in Wilhelm’s Germany during 1896 or 1897. . . .

  My Uncle Marcell, who was attached to the German Embassy in St Petersburg, was constantly travelling back and forth between that city and Berlin, and so he was glad to make use of my parents’ estate as a place to rest between trips. The result was that we knew everything that happened in Berlin, as reflected in the gossip of the Czar’s court, in the shortest possible time. I can remember a July morning after breakfast when I had gone to read the newspaper in my father’s study, while the two old gentlemen, my uncle and my father, remained sitting at the table in the dining-room adjoining.

  I should explain that at that time the newspapers had reported that the Emperor had narrowly escaped serious injury aboard the Hohenzollern when a smoke sail fell off the mast and hit him in the eye as he was promenading on deck. The wound was light, but rather painful, the newspapers reported, and there was a further notice that the officer of the watch responsible for the accident, a Lieutenant von Hahncke, died in the course of an outing several days after this Lilliputian catastrophe, and that his corpse and bicycle were pulled from the bottom of a waterfall in Norway.

  Now, listening to my uncle, I learned what no newspaper had reported, what had taken place backstage. Lieutenant von Hahncke was a passionate bicyclist—this was the heyday of the sport. He had ridden his bicycle around the deck of the Hohenzollern a number of times when the Kaiser, who hated the new sport, was also there. Wilhelm had him confined to quarters and thenceforth felt a certain animosity towards him. It was the purest bad luck that Hahncke had the watch when the smoke sail fell and hit the Kaiser as he was on deck.

  But now something inconceivable occurred, something that made the blood of a twelve-year-old boy hearing about it turn cold. The Kaiser ordered the entire watch assembled on deck, and then, wild with rage, struck Hahncke in the face—and Hahncke, struck thus before all these fellow officers, also forgot himself and remembering only what is basic to all of us, hit him back.

  Dead silence. All present merely stared. Then, Hahncke turned and went below. A day later, following the ship’s arrival in Norway, the Lieutenant asked for and was quickly granted shore leave. That evening the officer and his bicycle were taken from the waterfall. He had, of course, committed suicide—there was no question of murder. He had killed himself in payment for his insult to his king. This was confirmed to me by relatives of the dead man twenty-two years later.

  Still, it would be unfair to judge the Kaiser on the basis of a single incident arising out of his lack of self-control. In private, he was a well-meaning though basically deeply insecure man. But as soon as he was called upon to appear in public, a kind of frenzy took hold of him, and to overcome this insecurity and appear in his own eyes a personage who ‘knew how to take care of himself’ he adopted a manner which was meant to show what a grim and unyielding military man he really was.

  A friend of mine had the grim experience of watching this transformation take place before his eyes. He was host to the Kaiser during Army manoeuvres, and the Emperor had walked about the estate, talked pleasantly, and been altogether natural and charming. But then the manoeuvres began again, his adjutants appeared, and the Emperor was suddenly converted into the cranky, loud-voiced ‘Imperator’ the world knew; irritable, with an effect that was painful in every way.

  At the same time, the tragicomedy was that this master of military nicety and the theatrical effect in uniforms was himself never quite able to appear correctly dressed. There was always something about his waist belt, his sword knot, or some other detail of uniform that was ‘not quite’. An English naval officer told me that the Kaiser, who was among other things an admiral in the British Navy, once suddenly had the idea of ‘inspecting’ a British Mediterranean squadron at that moment involved in firing practice and totally unprepared for the visits of royalty. The officer described how Wilhelm II climbed the gangway of the flagship wearing a glittering admiral’s uniform and—to the amusement of all—highly inappropriate white summer shoes.

  At the very beginning of his exile, when the Emperor was still living at Amerongen, an English lady saw him at the wedding of some high-ranking couple of the Dutch nobility. The Kaiser was standing at the altar wearing his impressive general’s uniform, complete with the Cord of the Black Eagle—and on his feet were those hideous leather leggings popul
arly called ‘tootsic rolls’ in my Army days. Recently, I saw one of the last photographs of the Kaiser, taken by my wife’s uncle, who for ten years was Marshal of Nobility at Doorn. The photo shows the Kaiser peaceably sitting on a park bench, attired in a handsome soft suit, his hands clasped over the handle of a cane, feet comfortably crossed—every inch the dignified old gentleman. The only trouble was that on his feet the warm boots he was wearing were not buttoned correctly—so much so, that there was really no overlooking the fact.

  I do not at all say that such things were offensive—rather, that they were comical and made one feel that a kind of irony was involved; as though an invisible hand were setting the balance right in this way for his compulsive exactitude in just such matters, and with a certain bonhomie reminding him of the tragicomedy in all human endeavour—‘See here, Kaiser, you are supposed to be the expert in precisely these matters; even you are far from perfect’—or something to that effect. I don’t believe that accident is involved in such things. I believe that here we see the benevolent hand of God—when, in the midst of the most passionate lyrical or political effusion, crucial words become their ridiculous opposites by the printer’s changing of a letter.

  I do not believe in that famous ‘extravagance’ with which nature supposedly equipped him for his imperial role, as people used to say so often. I believe that only by the cruelest of ironies could this shy, insufficient, and basically deeply insecure man have been called to rule a Reich which has been drowned in trouble practically since the day it was founded: robber-barons’ defeat in the Church-State battle, the von Arnim scandal, social crises, the deaths of two Kaisers.

  I do not even hold him responsible for the dismissal of Bismarck, either alone or as the moving force. No serious student of history will blame Wilhelm for this. Was there actually room anymore for a conservative autocrat in a Germany which had industrialised itself overnight? Can one seriously imagine a symbiosis of Bismarck and I.G. Farben?