Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  No, we are pondering these things because the future cannot be jerrybuilt. If we again botch things as we did in 1919, our grandchildren will shed their blood in still another Prussian-sponsored slaughter. Paradoxical as it may sound, we will have won the war if we can release Germany from Prussian hegemony, lift off its mercantilist superstructure, and free it of the senseless over-industrialisation possible only because the government subsidises it. This is the only way we will ever remove the purposeless and, in the highest sense, unproductive human ballast we now must carry, even if the job of removal takes decades. And this is also the only way we will be sure that if we have not won, at least, I.G. Farben has lost the war.

  20 August 1943

  An English leaflet reproaches the Schwarze Korps for locating the basis of all wars not in the actions of men but in the subterranean machinations of demons, and the English attack the magazine for ascribing these catastrophes to irrational causes. Now I am not to be listed among the apologists for Schwarze Korps, or for Gunter d’Alquen—whose real name is probably Gunter Schulze. I would be the first to grant that the very real, flesh-and-blood individuals responsible for this war—the company directors greedy for bigger profits, the Army generals greedy for more medals, the street-corner bums greedy for more balm for their egos, who have now been promoted to politician status—have been exposed this time as perhaps never before in a war.

  But having said this, have we resolved the problem? Have we explained the lethargy, the almost frenzied lack of consistency of the masses in accepting Hitler just five years after having declared themselves generally pacifist, in the elections of May 1928? Have we explained the behaviour of the females who, as I described earlier, were so overcome by the sight of Hitler they swallowed the gravel he had walked on? Does the behaviour of that Hitler Youth boy who threw a crucifix out of the window, yelling, ‘Lie there, you Jew pig!’ thereby become more explicable—or the ethical demoralisation, the brutalising, the appetite for murder of the younger generation? And do people in England really think that all of this was possible without the emergence from out of the night of a form of delirium that could very well tomorrow seize hold of any other people?

  I must admit that the whole argument depresses me. It shows the gulf that exists between continental European and Atlantic—or insular—thinking on the subject. They are still trying to come to terms with this historical ghost story by using the old, worn-out formulas of the nineteenth century.

  Certainly, we are going to sit in judgement on the visible individuals who pulled the strings here, certainly the wood for the gallows on which I hope to see Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Papen, et al., hung has already been thoughtfully put aside. And certainly, too, all of us Germans will have to take our Cross upon our backs and carry it through the dark Valley of Sorrow before the Absolute is attained.

  But is there a nation today so lacking in perspective as to deny the possibility that such a mass psychosis could at some time in its history occur within its own boundaries? Do people really go so far as to accuse unarmed German intellectuals of lethargy when, during the first two years of the Hitler regime, at least, the British Cabinet, with every possible weapon at its disposal, was itself too indolent to smoke the brown rats out of their holes?

  I am not even complaining that the old game of who-is-really-guilty is being played here. What disturbs me is the methodology of this kind of thinking, which overlooks the real problem and in mindless and so-comfortable shutting of the eyes refuses to face the great crisis of our time. Woe to the nation which does not hear the thunder of the apocalyptic hoofs! Woe to any people under the sun of Satan, who do not learn now, as this sun makes its terrible ascent, to believe in God! Woe to the folk who are incapable of absorbing this single fact:

  Rationalism has had its day. That heresy ruled the world for 400 years, and now its time is past. The Great Mystery, the irrational itself, is again knocking at the door. Today, I witnessed the first air-attack by American planes, a bombing in broad daylight of Regensburg. It was my first personal and really close contact with the war. There they flew, over my quiet valley, these snow-white birds. . . . I saw one, hit by anti-aircraft, glow dark red a moment, and then fall in a shroud of flames. I saw tiny figures in their parachutes detach themselves from the flames, and then I saw the cords of one of the chutes catch fire and the human load depending on it plunge to the ground. I drove to Seebruck to look at the wreckage. Burning oil bubbled in a crater fourteen feet deep at the wreckage. The engines had bored so deeply into the ground that no attempt was being made to dig them out. Around the crater, pieces of the human body were scattered—a foot, a finger, an arm. The remains were carried off in a small potato sack.

  Near W., a couple of Americans were luckier and landed safely. But then, as they were being led off, two refugees tried to spit at them, and only the fact that the soldier escorting the Americans declared that he would not allow it and waved his gun as a warning saved these defenceless men from this indignity. You really have only to scratch your average non-bourgeois to find underneath that good old substance of human decency and that inborn aversion to the actions of canaille.

  The news from Hamburg is simply beyond the grasp of the imagination—streets of boiling asphalt into which the victims sank and were boiled alive, veritable cities of ruins, which cover the dead and surround those still alive like some jagged stone martyr’s crown. The talk is of 200,000 dead.

  I am not one who believes everything he is told. I much prefer seeing the thing for myself. And I think that in this case what I have seen with my own eyes suffices.

  I have heard a great deal about the completely wild and disoriented behaviour of people in Hamburg as the city burned, stories of amnesia, stories of people wandering through the streets in the pyjamas they had on when they fled from their houses, crazy-eyed, carrying an empty bird cage, with no memory of a yesterday, and no idea of a tomorrow.

  And now this is what I saw on a burning-hot day in early August at a little railroad station in Upper Bavaria, where forty or fifty of these miserable people were milling about, scrambling, despite the angry roars of the station-master, into a car through a window they had broken, pushing, kicking, yelling, accustomed by now to fighting for space.

  What happened then was inevitable. A suitcase, a miserable lump of cardboard with edges broken off, missed the target, fell back to the platform and broke open, revealing its contents. There was a pile of clothes, a manicure kit, a toy. And there was the baked corpse of a child, shrunk to the proportions of a mummy, which the half-crazed woman had dragged along with her, the macabre remains of what only a few days before had been a family. Cries of dismay, disgust, roars, hysterical outbursts, the snarls of a small dog, until finally an official took pity on all of them and had the thing disposed of.

  Another report I heard was that the fire-storm created by the immense conflagration sucked up into it all the oxygen, suffocating people who were far away from the actual flames, and that the rain of phosphorus broiled the corpses of grown men and women into tiny, child-sized mummies, so that countless women are now wandering about the country, their homes in ruins, carrying with them these ghastly relics.

  In the face of this, can it still be denied that with this war an epoch is reaching its end? Can the fact still be blinked away that technology is playing out its last grim moments, and that it is leaving behind a dreadful vacuum of soul-emptiness—a vacuum which can probably only be filled by something antirational, antimechanical, an ‘x reaction’ compounded of newly risen demons? Is there any doubt that there is no possible way anymore back to the world of yesterday, and that this time those riders now saddling their black steeds are none other than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse themselves?

  2 July 1944

  Today, bicycling home from Stein, I came upon a mob of youthful female factory workers. All from northern Germany, evacuated here and ‘allocated’—to use one of the lovely terms of the new business-German—to the Alz Valley
’s chemical plants. They were close packed as a heap of mussels, like all this nation, and marching in military formation. The effect was as ugly, as irritating, as devoid of everything feminine as the BDM itself. They trotted by like a herd of cows with blonde tail-braids, and I shall have to explain why I found them even important enough to go on about. . . .

  It is because of the song they were singing. The song was one of those things with a choppy rhythm borrowed from the Bolsheviks by our musical purveyors-to-the-court: insignificant trash, in short. But the refrain is worth noting:

  Where the flames leap

  From the opera house

  Is my hometown,

  Is my native house.

  Now, you will admit that for people who are being bombed that is a remarkable song! A query brought the information that these bovine figures with their lymphatic faces were from Hannover, where the opera house really did go up in flames. I would not dare to say whether what is involved here is opposition, self-derision, protest, or merely more of the general cow-likeness into which the Nazis have turned German women. Probably it is just one more example of the general state of idiocy here.

  I must add something from a conversation at the Traunstein rail-road station with two members of the Berlin Philharmonic I know. These two, who have retained, naturally, their mental agility and their angry protest, told me about an amusing variation to the customary form of the daily Army communiqué, as this is whispered about in Munich:

  Bulletin from the perplexed Army post: from the upholsterer’s headquarters:

  The latest Army communiqué does not yet lie around.[61]

  Very good, certainly, very good. Of course, I would prefer seeing resistance to the regime take the form of partisan-group organisation rather than these more or less funny jokes. At best, these things mirror the isolation, the cowardice, and the lethargy which the Nazis have set in motion here with their complete castration of the German people.

  I should note, to be quite fair, that I have heard of a Bavarian band of partisans operating around Murnau and an Austrian group around St Johann, in the Pinzgau. These groups are composed, naturally, of Army deserters and of workers who have left their jobs—but how much sorrow we could have spared the world if we had started this kind of thing earlier!

  And thus I come back to the puzzle which has been troubling me for eleven years, the old puzzle of the German mass psychosis, of the generals who allow themselves to be physically manhandled by Herr Hitler (and what does a man of sixty-five years of age have left to lose that is so very important except his dignity?)—without striking down this ‘gentleman’ out of a furnished room on Munich’s Barerstrasse; of the hysterical females who are his fanatical supporters; I come back to the problem represented by children like the eleven-year-old Gregor Strasser, who watched his father being murdered by order of Herr Hitler in the summer of 1934, and then, just four weeks after the murder, explained: ‘The Führer did it, and what the Führer does is right.’

  Ah, gigantic psychosis, drunkenness on a mass scale beyond measuring, which will be followed by the most horrible morning-after the world has ever known! Here, here is the product of your radio manipulation—stupefied mass-man, and the conversion of human societies into heaps of termites! And with this have gone the discouragement and final silencing of the real intelligentsia, a factor not to be overlooked, and, following, the creation of a mob which I, who have seen the United States and know something about Soviet Russia also—although the latter is hardly to be mentioned in this connection—declare to be the most infernal human dregs in the world today.

  It should be noted that the people I am talking about are not of proletarian origins. These are derived from the middle-class—lower-rank officials, elementary schoolteachers, postal officials part way up the scale. They come from that infernal class Sombart described as the ‘shackle on all true progress’, a citation I read in Revolt of the Masses by Ortega y Gasset, which is rather frowned upon in today’s Germany because of the cosmopolitan, Girondist spirit it breathes.

  I think that those of us who are now gathering the materials for a written history of the Third Reich will be obliged, when we have combined it all into a single work, to call it The Revolt of the Mailmen and the Schoolteachers.

  18 July 1944

  From my Chiemgau house, I saw the worst bombing ever of Munich. For three solid hours, the drone never stopped, and a never-ceasing thunder of exploding bombs shook the earth. And even here, ninety kilometres away, the air pressure shattered windows. Then the powerful drone of the propellers roared overhead. Quite near, I heard two detonations, presumably the firing of anti-aircraft. I saw one of these silver metal birds—I don’t know whether it was German or English—spiral down in a long glide to the earth, like a leaf made tired by the coming of autumn. It fell about five or ten kilometres from here.

  Who is going to vouch that some other bomber will not fall through my roof, so that this little property of mine, so bitterly fought for, rescued with difficulty from the time of inflation, is not destroyed? A recent English broadcast named Hörpolding as the site of the munition depot. Hörpolding is just eight kilometres from here, in line of flight. Also, the whole lower valley of my clear and guiltless river has been contaminated by the industrial plague brought here by the generals who are mainly responsible for the destruction of Germany.

  I look at the things I have brought together here, and cherish, the library, the medieval statuettes, the candelabra from the Middle Ages, the drawings, and it seems to me often now that these things have a strangeness about them, and I want to cry. Ah, have you ever looked about you at the possessions of a man on his deathbed, knowing that all of it would soon be scattered to the four winds?

  An endless stream of refugees is now moving down the nearby autobahn, heading away from Munich, where tens of thousands of bombed-out people have spent rainy nights camped in the streets off the Maximiliansplatz—broken old women with long sticks on their shoulders to which are attached bundles containing all they own in the world, miserable, homeless people, with burned clothes, in whose eyes there is still the horror of the fire-storm, the pulverising explosions, the burial under debris, the frightful death in the cellars where people suffocated amidst the river of sewage and excreta from the burst mains.

  But why should Herr Hitler worry, as, we are told, in his shelter being dug constantly deeper into the earth, he reads a novel a day, and at night—restless, painful nights of the mass murderer and sentimental gangster—spends his time watching movies? Why should that lout named Speer worry, either, with that clean-cut expression of his, which is the epitome of this whole sickening, mechanical, little-boy-at-heart generation? I must admit something about Speer: after Papen, who combines the conscience and sense of honour of a butcher’s hound with stupidity so devastating it is not an excuse but a crime, and just after these new-German pseudo-Girondists and ersatz aristocrats of the type of Krupp et al., his is the most sickening face I know among Nazidom’s second string—and he imagines himself to be the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci.

  20 July 1944

  Maria Olezewska[62] has come for a visit. We talked about Furtwängler—a subject I hardly want to touch on. There is, evidently, a way of conducting in a ‘blonde’ manner. And the favouring of this shade, whether in fact or as a concept, is something which in itself compromises the man who does it.

  I can’t help it.

  21 July 1944

  And now the attempt to assassinate Hitler. Carried out by the Count von Stauffenberg whose irreproachable father I have always considered to be one of the last remaining examples of the true German nobleman. Behind it—a revolt of the generals, long awaited.

  Ah, now, really, gentlemen, this is a little late. You made this monster, and as long as things were going well you gave him whatever he wanted. You turned Germany over to this arch-criminal, you swore allegiance to him by every incredible oath he chose to put before you—you, officers of the Crown, all of you. And
so you made yourselves into the Mamelukes of a man who carries on his head responsibility for a hundred thousand murders and who is the cause of the sorrow and the object of the curses of the whole of the world.

  And now you are betraying him, as yesterday you betrayed the Republic, and as the day before yesterday you betrayed the Monarchy. Oh, I don’t doubt that if this coup had succeeded, we, and what remains of the material substance of this country, would have been saved. I am sorry, the whole of this nation is sorry, that you failed.

  But then to think that you, who are the embodiment of the Prussian heresy, that sower of evil, that stench in the nostrils of humanity—that you may be Germany’s future leaders? No.

  I am a conservative. In Germany, naturally, this is an almost extinct political species. I derive from monarchical patterns of thinking, I was brought up as a monarchist, and the continued existence of the monarchy is one of the foundation stones of my physical well-being. And yet—not despite this fact, but because of it—I hate you. Coquettes who flirt with every passing political adventurer! Renegades, betrayers of your past! Miserable bedfellows of that same industrial oligarchy with whose coming to power commenced the destruction of our societal and governmental structure! Obedient planners of the attempt, now gone awry, at burglarising Russia, under the aegis of Krupp & Co., the very planning of which only reveals your political dilettantism and geopolitical ignorance! Men who have left the realm of all propriety and order! Unconscionable advocates of every conceivable form of godlessness and soullessness—haters of the beautiful and everything which excludes your flat Prussian utilitarianism!