Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  I have had a long discussion with M., who for years has been prevented by the Nazis from teaching the social sciences, about the physiology and pathology of mass-man. I can clearly remember having talked about the same thing—the fact that in the last 140 years the population of Europe has increased two and a half times—with Spengler a number of times. Of course, Spengler, with his one-track mind, put everything down to the legalising of children born out of wedlock and the marriages of second and third sons of peasants who had previously become soldiers or priests. But I, then as now, was forced to come to different, more frightening conclusions.

  M.’s thinking on the subject turns to the cheek-by-jowl life of modern-day man which technology has brought with it. I cannot rest content with this, because mass-man is not at all to be found exclusively among the working class. In fact, he is perhaps less common among the workers than among certain sections of the bourgeoisie who do not at all live in crowded conditions. In addition, I observed that in the two precedents for the contemporary situation known to us—Imperial Rome and the Inca state prior to the landing of Columbus—this sudden, violent transformation into a mass-man horde was not at all indicative of robust health. It was symptomatic of decline and fall, connected, in the period of decline at the time of Caracalla, with worship of the magical placenta, with tangible social decay and threatening physical destruction.

  This is mass-man: arrogantly striding onto the stage of history, yet already sick; suddenly the centre of all attention, but incapable of maintaining himself for long; destined to disappear in the kind of ghostly emptying of the stage described around AD 400 by a Greek journalist in Rome—the city once crowded with millions of inhabitants had become a little country town of a few thousand people. Its Forum was now a cornfield, out of which the hermae rose here and there among the sheaves of corn.

  Is there anyone left these days who really believes that this proliferation of people is merely a modern fulfilment of the ancient injunction to ‘be fruitful and multiply’? There is a vast gulf between that injunction and its contemporary fulfilment; the crowded conditions of our large cities do not account for the increase in population we are now seeing. No, this population explosion has more the look of a worldwide plague. Even my peaceful village here, as I learn from church records, has quadrupled in population over the last hundred years. The result of the discoveries of science? I am more inclined to believe that present-day science, in its scope and power, in its tendency to replace the precious natural product by a synthetic, a chemical poison, is a product of mass-man, and not the other way around. I believe that the drive of present-day science to replace the tried and true products of yesterday by the cheap and standardised article, in radios, in Volkswagens, in rayon stockings, is further proof of this cause and effect.

  And what about today’s so-called ‘better health standards’—the elimination of contagious disease, and the raising of life expectancy; the disappearance of wasp-waists and whalebone-bellies, and the emergence of the ‘New German Look’? Oh, I wish we had them all back, those bad old times! At least, for God’s sake, now and then, you could find a human face, something of the old, unprettified German among those admittedly inferior types. If only by some lucky stroke of history we could just get rid of this visage of hysterical emptiness which is the typical physiognomy of Hitlerism!

  And to come back to the matter of increased life expectancy: this is largely due to the incubation of basically unfit children, and the elimination of the examination of the newborn that was once customary to determine if the infant was sound in mind and body. I have already mentioned the high incidence of sexual malfunction of male and female athletes noted by the doctors who treated them. This is nature’s own way of warning that it does not want the continuation of human types one-sidedly developed in terms of the somatic.

  At the same time these hollow men are produced in ever greater quantities, there is a stunting of the feeling for the metaphysical, a feeling nature placed in man at the beginning of time. There is no caste, either of priests or of kings any longer, nor does the lawgiver and judge any longer carry the priestly authority. There is no metaphysical focal point today, around which all the varieties of human experience can crystallise. The result is that no speculative philosophy worthy of the name exists, nor could it: The sages at the universities presently engaged in this discipline are akin to a group of highly respected night-watchmen who are limited to playing an endless old-man’s game of taroc with the same tired, used-up formulas.

  The treasure house of form that is art has been broken into, and its contents have been defiled by much fingering. The flight of German architects into the New Realism has ended in an architecture that is more unrealistic than the full-beard of yesteryear. The attempt to build a church becomes a blasphemy in stone, and the composer of a string quartet ends with something so pretentious and so boring despite all its agitatedness that it becomes mere noise at the sounding of a Mozart passage.

  Despite the fact that even coral strives for form, that nature abhors the amorphous as the original indecency, mankind goes steadily on sinking deeper and deeper into formlessness, hatred of all form. The ideal is now that thoroughly bovine condition in which any distinction given to rank or profession is considered ridiculous, and all is confusion: the professor looks like a sportsman, the waiter like an aristocrat, the aristocrat like a headwaiter. The businessman raises thoroughbreds, and the cavalry officer speculates in Rand mining stock. It has come to the point where streetwalkers and perhaps burglars are the only remaining groups who still have about them something like a professional distinctiveness.

  And what a sweaty fingering and pawing of things which were formerly spoken of only in awe and wonder, how they profane the titles and trappings of honour formerly accorded only to the immortals, the heroes, the great thinkers! In Germany now, you need only be a veteran of a beer-hall brawl, to get the same title of field marshal that was given Moltke for the victory at Sedan. If you combine the face of a horse trader with Nazi Party membership, you are eligible to be hailed as a ‘statesman’. Goethe would have burned his writings if he had imagined a time would come when people like Herybert Menzel and Joseph Magnus Wehner would be celebrated as writers; Frederick the Great would not merely have sought death at Kunersdorf, but would certainly have found it, if he had been able to foresee that the day would come when he would be placed side by side on a wooden plaque with the man from the furnished room on Barerstrasse—shameful juxtaposition, a disgrace to Germany! In their time of greatness, the Germans produced the unforgettable images of the Mother of God and the knightly dragon-killer. Now, we are blessed with Hitler Youth versions of St George, of BDM versions of the Madonna, who resemble the ideal about as much as Goebbels resembles Dorian Gray and Otto Gebühr is like Frederick the Great.

  I am, despite the impression I may have conveyed, not in the least contending that this dirtying and weakening of all higher concepts is connected solely with the Nazis or the German termite heap. I see this sea of mass-men lapping at the last islands of our culture in practically every country, and I see that, England perhaps excepted, the besieged are ready to surrender. As though this defeat was something ordained by fate, when really, by recognition of the reality and by acceptance of martyrdom, it can be avoided! This is no longer a matter of inevitable evolution, as it was in 1789. What we have here is a bid for power by the degenerates, and it can be fought with the weapons of one’s own ability to endure and to hold fast to belief in the truth. If necessary, even martyrdom can serve in this battle.

  I will never change my belief that mass-man is by no means identical with the proletariat. The mass type is now to be found much oftener in the boardrooms of the large corporations and among the sons and daughters of rich industrialists than among workers. The fact is that we are dealing here with pestilence, some unnameable kind of biological dissolution, that began in the higher reaches of our social structure.

  I believe that my call to resistance
and a naysaying to mass-man are justified in the face of this diagnosis and this prognosis, based on mass-man’s biological instability and the fact that his periods of existence on the earth have always been short. I have already talked about the mysterious connection that I have found to exist between the expansion of population and the increased emphasis on the somatic, between the modern termite heap and its increasing proneness to virulent tumours like some grim, God-inflicted plague. Cancer cell and mass-man: the same defective biological structure, the same tendency towards early death and decay, the same reproductive explosiveness, and the same anarchic emergence of previously fixed forms. This disease is sweeping down over us today with the tidal speed of the Black Plague. Surely, this fact alone reveals its deep-seated connection with the thing which is now threatening man’s entire culture?

  I am optimistic enough to believe that this black cloud which came up over our heads during the last century will some day disappear, even if only after years of apocalyptic horror. Economically, mass-man is an impossibility, as will be proved as soon as industry can blanket the world with its products. Then, this ridiculous overpopulation will be shown for what it is—excessive, and therefore untenable, as untenable and purposeless as feudalism was when it had fulfilled its historic function at the end of the eighteenth century. Mass-man is a non-viable organism threatened by all the non-rational developments now gathering momentum, like storm clouds on our horizon. It is entirely conceivable that before this happens, before the storm now in preparation actually comes, that Spengler’s grim vision, in which he saw the last violin lying broken on the ground, the last copy of Mozart quarters going up in flames, may be fulfilled. But what is quite impossible is that a creature derived from rationality and so overdeveloped under its sway will survive a new invasion of the non-rational or the anti-rational. And the endless spiritual vacuity of our time makes this invasion well-nigh automatic.

  Life does not allow mindlessness, it punishes a disturbance of the necessary harmony between body-functioning and mind-functioning by death—and death remains a constant, no matter what else is changed inside this bordello mass-man has constructed. This war based on the revolt of the masses may destroy the Gothic cathedrals and silence forever Bach’s ‘Chaconne’: but a horde of degenerate football players will not survive the fire they started.

  February 1942

  Nationalistic history-writing: In Germany, the lies have a blonde character. Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s.

  And now mass-man has forged for himself the perfect tool to provide explanations of the most difficult problems—a solution that is plausible, will never change, and can be immediately understood by everybody. A recent issue of the Schwarze Korps[56] magazine informs us that there is in the lives of men no such entity as ‘tragedy’, not for the SS anyway, and furthermore—the following is a quotation—‘Tragedy is a condition first discovered by the Pope for the subjection of mankind.’

  But that is the provoking thing about these people: they foist this barbarism on us, and then try to make us content with it by having us adopt their own mass-man inability to distinguish between things. We are to end by no longer knowing that the whole of their ‘technical comfort’ amounts to nothing more than one gigantic swindle, a shabby little ersatz-life, and that the mass-produced amenities they are providing us with are about as much like the genuine article as aniline colours are like a rainbow.

  Or do they really think they are going to stop us from making distinctions and reduce everything to dead level—equate a Brueghelian feast of the past with a modern meal out of cans; the rewards of an auto trip with that of a walking tour; the costly silk stockings of yesterday, and the rayon stockings of today’s office girls—all calculated to turn the beholder into a misogynist.

  Are we supposed to believe that Japanese woodcuts before and since the development of aniline colours are the same? Or that grandfather’s trip through Italy, planned to take two years and last him a lifetime, is to be equated with the four-week, express train ‘covering’ of Italy from Verona to Taranto, during which mass-man ‘sees’ it all, and then has to go to a sanatorium to recover? Is the sexual awakening which used to come brevi manu in the haystack to be paralleled by a lecture course given by the Reich’s Führer of Women, Scholtz-Klinck—with or without practical demonstrations?

  Earlier, when I talked about professional or class distinctions, I spoke of that honourable profession, the streetwalkers, as being the last to retain distinctive identifying characteristics. Now, I must hasten to retract even this bit of encouragement. It now appears that even sin must be sacrificed on the altar of progress. The latest word is that National Socialist Germany is about to establish a Reich’s Council of Prostitutes, complete with parliamentary debate, trial by a jury of one’s peers, and scientifically prepared career courses. This would be under the protection of the highest authority, a responsibility most conveniently assumed by the Reich’s Propaganda Minister.

  As a matter of fact, there is nothing lacking here for the formation of a modern German labour union—with one minor exception, perhaps: only you are missing, Mr Industrialist. Only you.

  11 March 1942

  From a reading of Schopenhauer: In order that I may better understand the intellectual quality of the Germans, and thus be better prepared for events to come, I have made note of several points to keep in mind in future.

  1. Fichte is still, forty years after his first book, being placed on a level with his master, Kant—as though they had something in common.

  2. Lichtenberg’s works not only did not go through a second edition—they are now, thirty-two years after their appearance, practically being given away, while the writings of Messrs Krug, Hegel, etc., have gone through a number of editions.

  For some reason the thought comes into my mind that when patriotism enters the realm of science it should be taken by the collar like a dirty little boy and thrown out.

  There is a contention now being made that the Germans invented gunpowder. I, however, find this difficult to believe.

  Thoughts after reading Heine on Germany (From Kant to Hegel): Christianity tempered somewhat the brutality of the Germanic delight in war, but was completely unable basically to change the feeling, and if the day comes when that moderating symbol, the Cross, loses its power, the senseless, berserk rage of which the Nordic poets write and sing so much will break loose again. Then, the old stone gods will rise up out of the ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years out of their eyes. And then Thor will spring forth, raising his mighty hammer, and smash into nothingness the Gothic cathedrals. . . .

  I warn you against Kantians, Fichteans, and Natural Philosophers—do not laugh. I expect the same revolution to occur in the world of material reality as has already taken place in the world of the spirit. The conception is father to the act, and precedes it as lightning precedes the thunder. Of course, this is German thunder, and therefore rather ponderous and slow-moving. But it will come. And when you hear the boom of it—such a sound as has never been heard before in the history of the world, then you will know: it has come, finally. And then, there will be a roar as will bring eagles plummeting out of the sky, and send lions in the most distant parts of Africa hurrying for their royal holes, tails between their legs. The things that will happen then in Germany will make the French Revolution look like a harmless idyll by comparison.

  May 1942

  Everybody is wailing about the destruction of Lübeck and Rostock, and nobody could possibly be more unhappy about the loss of these Gothic masterpieces than I am.

  But what happened here? Thirty years ago, Rostock was still the peaceful, self-contained market town of a prosperous farming area. Then, the idea was conceived of filling both Rostock and Lübeck with armament factories. These plants could just as well have been located in some uninteresting and architecturally worthless little towns. But the engineers did not want to be bored in provincia
l towns, and the burgomasters wanted to bring ‘progress’ to their communities. The result was the same as happened in Munich, which can thank Herr Krupp for the fact that it was blessed with its first great industrial complex during World War I, and that this was followed by others.

  So now people are crying over two cathedrals which we will never have again, and which were wrecked by the industrial monomania which is the source of all our unhappiness. They weep, but they do not beat their own breasts. What about the household tools, the screwdrivers and handsaws that are kept in costly baroque cabinets—and the irreplaceable crystal glassware used to impress one’s hunting guests? After the war, will these engineers, these War Production Board generals, these burgomasters and community leaders be called to account for the unspeakable frivolity with which they gambled away the treasures entrusted to them?

  It does not appear so. For years now, these pestilential north German corporations have been eating away at the quiet valley where I live, driving out the farmers, planting in their place social instability, poverty, discontent. And then these people have the truly monumental gall to claim credit for having brought ‘progress’ to the region, just like the Lübeck and Rostock burgomasters!

  Building has been going on for years here on a huge underground depot for munitions and poison gas, farmers have been expropriated without payment, and a vast stock of chemical filth of unthinkably terrible power is being buried here, endangering an entire region of what was peaceful countryside. Every night, I hear the shunting about of immense trains carrying gas bombs and similar weapons—a single air attack could turn the whole beautiful region into a hell of fire and gas.