Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  I will never forget the feeling I had when my hand touched the lumpy flesh for the first time, nor the first cut I made into this flesh. I looked around me. With me, around the same corpse, were three other young students. They faced the same problem as I, and their honest little-boy faces reflected the same attempt to fight down their horror and disgust. The whole room was filled with such boys, standing about their hideously bedecked tables, former students of Plato and the verses of the Iliad who had deserted the disciplines of humanism and now found themselves faced with the necessity to jump down into the foul air of decomposition where analysis takes place. . . .

  We would negotiate this leap successfully, and the proof that we would was reflected in the ironic expressions of the instructors and their assistants, and the still more ironical faces of the graduate students. I can remember only one of the beginners present who threw his knife away and never came back. Each of the rest of us set himself and began to work, began at the cost of a shameful metamorphosis of himself, and a subjection of himself to this metamorphosis, which I recall today as a shameful and troubling memory. I do not doubt that all of those present were the well-brought-up sons of a middle-class whose position was still unchallenged; I still correspond with several of them, and I know that in their leisure hours they read Baudelaire and find relaxation in an occasional string quartet. I know also that their feeling of horror when they view the orgy of brutality which is today filling the world is akin to mine.

  But what could we do but drown our disgust in cynicism? Immediately, from the time of that first incision, the entire room was filled with obscene joking, with the whistling of popular tunes, and with laughter that was intended to be casual, but that had a worried and cramped sound. This went on for weeks, and even today, almost a half century later, the memory fills me with shame. The jokes we made as we went about our macabre business became daily more obscene, and more and more grisly comedy was forced out of the positions taken by the corpses—poor puppers that they were—and the obscene postures that would have been implied if there had been life in them. That was the only period of my life when existence here on earth presented itself to me as a mean little game played by forces whose nature was raw and massive as a steamroller; a dreary comedy whose title was Inter faeces et urinas, and the depressing conclusion, in the style of the tragedy of Wozzeck.

  Of course, there came a time when I gained new understanding, and realised that all this had really been nothing but our defence against the horrible. But what defence is possible now, against the things now rising from the grave, the ghostly train now passing across the dark heavens of these late autumn days?

  For, from Paris comes word that the Père Lachaise cemetery has been dug up in a search for Heine’s bones, and since no bones were found, and something had to be done, the mold in the grave was excavated and strewn to the four winds. And an informant who was at the scene at the time has told me about the murder of Herr von Kahr, who was trampled to death by SS beasts in the courtyard of the Marienbad Hotel, in Munich: twenty-year-old louts and a seventy-year-old man.

  And H., with whom I philosophised today about man’s inhumanity to man? He has just come back from the Eastern Front, and witnessed the massacre at K., where 30,000 Jews were slaughtered.

  This was done in a single day, in the space of an hour, perhaps, and when machine-gun bullets gave out, flamethrowers were used. And spectators hurried to the event from all over the city, off-duty troops, young fellows with the milk-complexion of the young—the children of men, who also, nineteen or twenty years ago, were lying in cribs and gaily bubbling and reaching for the brightly coloured ring hanging just above! Oh, degradation, oh, life without honour, oh, thin shell that separates us from the lost souls in whom Satan burns!

  You judge us and find us wanting, and we, here, suffer in loneliness and dread. You point at us, and at our lack of resistance, and we know that the resistants have died unknown in filthy bunkers, and that the blood of martyrs has been spilled to no purpose, that deeds to match Charlotte Corday’s have been done, and never heard of. The Devil is loose, and it is God Himself who has unloosed him. ‘And the Lord will give him great power.’ And we can only guess at why He has done this, or why He has chosen this land as His stage, or what lies in store for us, behind His curtain.

  But still the night lies black over our heads, and we suffer, we suffer as you never shall suffer, no, not on your deathbed.

  Beware, the man who would make light of our suffering!

  February 1943

  The news of the Anglo-American landing in Africa spread with a speed that amazed me. Despite the ban on listening to the Allied radio, the news spread within an hour. And I was even more amazed, that gray November day, to see the reaction the news produced. Everyone seemed glad about this decisive change in the course of the war, which meant the defeat of his own country, and Bavarians had the added consideration to ponder that the fighting must eventually reach the Alps.

  And yet the whole town—the whole region, really—was as exhilarated as though everybody had drunk a bottle of champagne. Suddenly, people walked straighter, and their faces shone, and it was as though a long, hard winter had been endured and now the first warm wind was blowing over the ice. Everyone sensed that a ghostly hand had nailed the death warrant of the Nazis to the wall, and this had as salutary an effect on the bad as it did on the good. The local schoolteacher, like all his profession an eager preacher of the Nazi Word, suddenly and demonstratively began using the old greeting ‘Grüss Gott’ instead of ‘Heil Hitler’. The district’s chief Nazi called a meeting to plead that people for God’s sake stop threatening to burn down his house, since he had, after all, only been carrying out orders from the Party.

  That was the effect of the news on our villages. Hitler blustered, but behind the rhetoric was the shriek of fear. The days are past when people viewed him as a Saviour and were not ashamed; past, when, as actually happened in Prussian Protestant churches, his portrait, that perfect likeness of Dorian Gray, stood on the altar next to his book, that Machiavelli for chambermaids. The nimbus of the god is gone. Slowly, the canaille is beginning to come forward with the bill for the vast deception which has been foisted on it.

  There is a kind of nasty satisfaction on everyone’s face these days, the look of pious virtue has vanished overnight. The Nazi emblem has disappeared from coat lapels, and in government offices it is now common practice for officials who years ago were punished for hostility towards the Party to have the fact put on official record. Near here, an arbitration board ordered a farmer whose land had been partially expropriated for the ‘war effort’—without compensation, naturally—to testify before it. The man, seized by an onrush of fury, called the arbitrators a pack of scoundrels, the regime a band of thieves, and the Highest of all, a ‘crazy pain-in-the-ass’. Then he left, banging the door behind him. The authorities were so perplexed by this strong language, coming after years of silence, that the man is still free.

  Meanwhile, things are getting better from one day to the next. There is a shortage of chloroform and morphine in the Army hospitals. Doctors are protesting the fact that hospital trains are arriving in which the wounded lie on stinking straw in ice-cold freight cars. In Berlin, an entire unit of diabetics has perished for lack of insulin.

  I have been reading the memoirs of the German Crown Prince, about the period 1870–1, and once again I find the circumstances connected with the founding of the Reich wholly shattering.

  There are the casual conversations, marked by the most disdainful kind of language, which determined what the symbol of the Reich was to be—as though this were a trade-mark for a product to prevent falling hair. There is Bismarck’s statement regarding the colours, that as far as he was concerned, the new colours of the Reich could be ‘green and gold, like a dance-hall’s, with “dancing tonight” printed above’.

  Is this really the way a Reich is founded? Does the rebirth of a nation happen this way? This is how a new
coffee export firm is founded, this is the debate of future partners on the by-laws of a new stock company—this is how you nail together an economically feasible unit which will then try to earn the name of Reich!

  And everywhere in the Crown Prince’s journals, the lack of consideration, the arrogance of its royal author—a foretaste of what is to come with the son, Wilhelm II. Between the lines, one senses the disappearance of solidity in German life, the growing rapacity of the robber-barons, the cynical denial of a great spiritual heritage. There is nothing here of that mysterious seed which lies at the heart of every healthy state, that deeply hidden chamber where every healthily developed nation has enshrined the things which arc ‘not of this world’.

  No, this Reich was compounded of a dash of duelling-club romanticism and the gymnastics originated by that ‘Father of Gymnastics’, Ludwig Jahn, a touch of Hegel and a healthy slice of Friedrich List—all this in a rich broth of greed, greed of an entire generation, for riches to be had as fast and as painlessly as possible. Wasn’t it basically sound instinct which led Ludwig of Bavaria to refuse the title of Kaiser, and were those men of my grandfather’s generation who shrugged and turned away from the new firm nothing but reactionary cranks? This Prussian Reich derived from the will-to-power and arrogance of a colony which had seized control of the mother country, and the thing could have come to no good end for this reason alone.

  This Reich was dogged by trouble from the first days of its existence: the business failures of 1873; defeat by the Church over control of education; the attempted assassination of Wilhelm I; the badly miscarried attempt to repress the Socialists by law; the deaths, in immediate succession, of Wilhelm I and Friedrich III. And eighteen years after the time described, nearly at the end of this unlucky author’s unfortunate life, a series of episodes like something out of Hamlet: a German Kaiser nearly dying in the streets, saved only by a passing droshky driver, who tears the blocked cannula that is suffocating him out of his throat; the new Kaiser beginning his reign with the arrest of his own mother; and, finally, the funeral of Wilhelm I, at which the adjutant carrying the flag in front of the casket is completely drunk, and has to be supported as he walks, while Bismarck, in the procession that follows, wears a blonde wig to protect his bald head in his fear of catching cold, that Arctic day in June. This is how it is when the gods, insulted, retaliate.

  As Hamlet says: ‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good.’

  While at Prien, I visited an old, old man who lived there, and who as a very young man served as a footman at the court of Ludwig II just before catastrophe struck that monarch. Strangely, and like all those I have ever met who were in immediate contact with the King, the man cannot be dissuaded from the notion that Ludwig II was not at all mentally ill, but was rather the innocent victim of a plot originating in Berlin. He claims that he was present during a heated argument between two doctors at Schloss Berg, when each of the two medical men in attendance accused the other of having falsified the psychiatric diagnosis. I do not want to take a position on this one way or the other, but I have for years wondered about the inexplicable animosity evinced by the physician Gudden in his handling of the case at the time—the same Gudden who months before the catastrophe had allowed his colleagues’ malicious comments about the King to stand unchallenged, and who, after Ludwig II had been confined, could not conceal a certain satisfaction about the outcome: as though it gave him a feeling of power to be the psychiatrist who had put away a king.

  Furthermore, the genes which were causative factors in the development of the psychoses of King Ludwig and King Otto were not at all, as the north Germans delight in believing, the result of intermarriage between and among Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs, with the resulting defects of inbreeding. On the contrary, the defective characteristics were derived from the disease which the grandfather of both kings, Prince Wilhelm the Elder of Prussia, brought back from the Wars of Liberation, and which he then passed on to both his grandsons through his daughter, Queen Marie of Bavaria, in the form of defective germ-cell structure.

  This is, therefore, most definitely not a Bavarian product, but something which was imported from Berlin. Furthermore, mentally ill or not, there is not another monarch in modern European history who lives on from beyond the grave as does Ludwig II. Just as in 1918, in the midst of the Revolution, people believed he had returned, so today, legend has it—and not only that of peasants—that he can be seen on winter nights, rushing through the snows of the Wettersteingebirge in a ghostly sleigh.

  Along these lines, I, who have seen death enter the circle of my friends much too often in recent years, have an experience of my own to relate. It concerns my house, a very isolated place more than six hundred years old, which has long been regarded as haunted, and has its ghostly monk, who is supposed to fly over the river and appear at the windows of the dining-room.

  I, of course, have never seen him. I have observed that there are strange sounds in my house, on occasion the heavy rolling of something like a bowling ball; that the light suddenly goes on in the middle of the night; and that for no earthly reason the door to my bedroom will suddenly open. I have put all this down, as one customarily does, to the nightly prowling of cats, to a loose electrical contact, to a worn-out door lock, and have never been too greatly concerned about these manifestations.

  Lately, however, my household has been upset by something new, and of a far less common nature. Since last autumn, since the time death struck so deep into my life, we have all, independently of one another, noticed that in the attic room which has always been considered the starting point for these ghostly episodes, there is a hideous smell of decomposition. And the smell is not restricted to this room either, but drifts about the whole house, disappears above, suddenly reappears on the ground floor, and then is perceptible on the second floor. This cannot possibly be a matter of suggestion, since we have had guests from Munich who had no idea of all this, and yet a minute after they had entered their rooms reappeared to tell us that there was a penetrating odour of something rotting in their bedrooms.

  Naturally, our first thought was of dead mice in the mattresses, or even under the floorboards. Naturally, we made the most thorough examination without finding a thing. And here is the most incredible part: at this point, the odour began positively to mock us, moving from place to place in a single room in some inexplicable way. It now no longer filled the whole room, but seemed to spring from one article or piece of furniture to the next, now on a chair, then to some easily overlooked point like a light bulb, after which it might disappear from there and turn up again abruptly on the bow of my cello. We could find nothing and had to put up with the thing. Then, as the yearly mass for my dead friends was being said, the phenomenon observed and confirmed by a total of ten persons completely disappeared. I tell all this knowing I run the risk of being laughed at by all kinds of intellectuals with horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

  Further, there is the matter of my friend Gwosdinski, whose house was destroyed, roof to basement, in an air-raid. He writes me that several days before the catastrophe his cat was transformed from a young and kittenish creature beloved by all to a completely different kind of animal which hung its head and whined constantly for no apparent reason. The night of the bombing, the cat was rescued, but it tore itself away and as though hypnotised by something it saw in the flames ran back into the building. Its body was not found in the ruins. Again, I merely cite the fact, without either affirming or denying. But I myself recently had an experience which seems to me to deny explanation without making use of the transcendental.

  When I was a young man, the great conservative, von Heydebrandt, a colleague of my father’s in the Reichstag, had taken some notice of me. In the autumn of 1918, he retired from the political arena, and I lost sight of him, and did not think of him again until a night in October 1924, when I dreamed that he had died. Several days later, I learned that he had passed away.

  As to Herr Hitler again, there is suddenly in my mind
his laying the corner-stone for the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. He was handed a hammer with which to strike the three traditional blows. But as he raised his arm the head of the hammer flew off the end of the handle, and spun so far away that it could no longer be found in the confusion of the crowd. I could see how deeply that superstitious hysteric was affected by the omen.

  His opponents took this as a good sign, and we hoped at the time that the regime might soon collapse. We have now been waiting for more than ten years. Our hair has been made gray by grief and sorrow, we have poisoned ourselves with a deadly and irreconcilable hatred which makes us prefer death to giving up the hope of seeing our enemy destroyed. We have held to the right, and have not surrendered, at the sacrifice of the best years of our lives. And now, in our hatred, we are like bees who must pay with their lives for the use of their stingers.

  And yet, is there one of us who would have chosen peace and prosperity under Hitler, knowing as we do that such a life can only be founded on tears, and robbery, and murder? I know of none! I only know people among my friends and fellow fighters who will never be reconciled—I only know people who would ten times rather die than bear the triumph of this monster. I only know people who would rather weep with God than laugh with Satan!

  But it is over now, the laughing, and he knows it. The end is at hand—not a heroic but a dirty end, in shame and degradation and the mocking laughter of the rest of the world! It does sometimes happen that a would-be great man is allowed to toy with the levers of the gigantic machinery of history. This goes on for some time, and the fool is not destroyed. But suddenly the wheels begin to move, faster and faster, and he is thrown into the machinery and crushed. Stalingrad: ever since, He has been going about in a condition the French call ‘cul nu’, and a new expression is spreading among the people, more damaging than any propaganda from the regime has ever been: ‘Gröfaz’. That is now his nickname, Gröfaz, an abbreviation of ‘Greatest Field Marshal of All Time’: Gröfaz. A miserable hysteric may play Alexander the Great before the world for a while. But sooner or later, history comes along and tears the mask off his face.