Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  Prince Rupprecht told me how, years ago, as an Army commander in the First World War, he pleaded with Ludendorff to spare the castle of Coucy, a priceless architectural treasure which lay between the opposing armies. ‘It was really of no military value, either to us or to the enemy. Neither side had ever attempted to use it for military purposes. But the fact that I advocated sparing it, and that I feared that destruction of the castle would only mean a blow to our prestige, quite uselessly—this brought Coucy to Ludendorff’s attention. He prevailed, and the castle was destroyed, if for no better reason than to strike at me.

  ‘But he did not hate that castle just because I wanted to preserve it. He hated Coucy because he hated everything which lay outside his barracks view of life—spirit, taste, elegance, everything that gives distinction to life.’

  Ah, this unworthy nephew of great Moltke and all his caste could hardly be better described. For years, these men were the cover for every treasonable act, every orgy of rape and murder, because Hitler allowed them prominence once again in a debased, Prussianised Germany. They defended him, verbally and physically, every time he committed one of his criminal acts, they went blithely on past the suffering of all the bombing victims, the prisoners in the concentration camps, and the religious persecutors, and they hummed a little tune to words like ‘Germany’ or the ‘German spirit’, because a different regime would have meant the end of their power. . . .

  And now that the firm is going bankrupt, they are betraying it to provide themselves with a political alibi—just as they betrayed all the others who were no longer useful in their drive to get and hold power.

  The nation mourns the fact that this bomb did not explode where and when it should have, and I cannot possibly express how deeply I share everyone’s feeling. But as to the generals: as soon as Germany is liberated from the Prussian heresy, they should be killed, along with the industrialists who launched this war, and their journalist bards, and the Messrs Meissner and Hindenburg Jr and, let us not forget, the whole of that crew responsible for the immense misdeed of 30 January 1933, who ought to be hanged twenty feet higher than the rest. And let the ones who are spared be condemned to spend the rest of their lives selling matches and wastepaper, living caricatures to remind us of how and by whom power was once stolen to bring endless sorrow down on our heads.

  I can’t help it.

  16 August 1944

  The air reeks of death. I am not referring here, even, to what is broadcast from abroad—that 5,000 officers have been shot; that the Nazis are murdering everybody not to their liking regardless of whether there is a connection with the assassination attempt—yes, and shooting the family of the suspect at the same time they execute him to finish the job.

  No, what I have in mind is something that surrounds us like a frightful presage of things to come, that fills the summer air, and gives a ghostly cast to the light of the sun, so that it is as though we live day and night in the glare of a huge funeral torch. It is the certainty of approaching catastrophe that fills all our minds, horror and the horror of death that surround us. What is to become of a thoroughly coarsened people who instil in their youths the idea that political burglary and the murder of whole peoples are entirely legitimate life-aims, and whose military leaders did not for a single moment hesitate to back everything that was done, as long as things seemed to be going well.

  We breathe the air of death. We do not need to be told so, as the Woman’s Organisation leader in Obing, a harmless farm village, told us recently, when she extolled this ‘Führer’ of ours because ‘in his goodness, he has prepared a gentle and easy death by gas for the German people in case the war ends badly.’ Oh, I am not writing fiction. This lovely lady is no creature of my imagination. I saw her with my own eyes: a golden-tanned forty-year-old with the insane eyes of all this type—I remind you that next to the schoolteachers these female hyenas are among the most rabid of our Hitlerite whirling dervishes.

  And what reaction was there? Did these Bavarian farmers, offspring of independent-minded fathers prepared at any time to revolt—did they at least dip the lady, all on fire as she was with a burning readiness to die, into Lake Obing?

  The thought never entered their minds. They trailed off towards home, shaking their heads bewilderedly, muttering to each other that unfortunately there was nothing to be done.

  On the other hand, there are the workers in a Munich electrical plant who are said to have electric irons ready for the great day of reckoning when the swastika is branded into Nazi foreheads. A fine idea, which needs only the addition of a single detail to be quite perfect: how would it be if they were forced to wear brown shirts for the rest of their lives?

  9 October 1944

  Herr Giesler has dreamed up a new surveillance technique. ‘Housing Commissions’ have now made their appearance in every town and village, empowered to enter and search any house at any hour of the day or night, to commandeer living space. Since they also have been put in charge of ‘Labour Allocation’ they can, at their own sweet will, force any woman whom they decide is not ‘committed’ to perform ‘voluntary labour’.

  This is what happened at our house: Like a bolt from the blue, without prior announcement of any kind, without knocking or ringing the bell, there appeared in the living-room the little dictator who was assigned to our quiet village a week ago, and who has spent the time since in a fruitless attempt to root out ‘God be praised!’[63] as a greeting form among the farmers. Along with two other rooms, he took over my library, accompanying this with the amiable promise that a woman with at least three children would be quartered in each room, and to accommodate the horde, holes would be drilled in the Gothic walls and floors. I was ordered to move my library (including irreplaceable first editions, prints, and hand-copied manuscripts) down to the cellar where they could be quietly devoured by the mice. ‘Don’t get worked up, there are lots of book collections going down the drain. Why not yours?’

  His eyes as he said this glistened with meanness: the one-time tax clerk was swollen to the size of a Napoleon in the consciousness of his own power. I can remember that during the First World War, the occupants of a dug-out fed their stove with first editions and priceless manuscripts from the castle of Mesothen at Liévin. But this was a simple case of soldiers in need, a simple reaching out after the first thing available, there was no spiteful feeling in it. . . .

  But what was happening here was something else. To begin with, in the case of this subordinate bureaucrat, there was the resentment of the educated man, the resentment of everything that was more than he was—and the feeling that now, finally, his chance had come, the long-awaited chance to revenge himself on a higher-caste man.

  But there was something else involved: the canaille’s hatred for all that is of the spirit. It was this hatred which allowed the German bourgeoisie in the middle of the nineteenth century to throw away everything that was best from their own past, an act unprecedented in its cynicism. . . .

  There was much to be done in the days that followed. At Traunstein, an Army officer had warned me: Herr Buchner had me on his list for my ‘God-be-praised’ greeting. This, plus his statement, widely reported, that I had been involved in the attempted assassination on 20 July, made it imperative that I at once find ‘bombed-out’ people who shared my ideas, who would not try to spy out the radio stations we listened to, and who were not denouncers. We took in a couple, upholsterers from Munich, whom I knew to be dependable, and then a ‘bombed-out’ artist was recommended to me, an American who had thus far gone on living undisturbed in Munich, and who, incidentally, turned out to be a tremendously good fellow. All this took a vast amount of time, since a man is on no account supposed to be able to choose who is to stay in his house, and therefore there were endless trips to Munich, in filthy, overcrowded trains, and interminable waits in the ante-rooms of Nazi functionaries, having to listen to the giggles of the well-tended females in all the surrounding offices—repellent types, whose distinguishing featur
es are the permanent hair-do falling over the shoulder, the never-ending consumption of questionable ice-cream and still more questionable biscuits, and the tyrannising of the public.

  Thus, while immense convulsions shake Nazidom at every point, I am enmeshed in a life in which there are times when I do not know whether my house still belongs to me or not. And yet, paradoxically, I am also getting deep insights into this whole tottering structure as I go about it.

  My pilgrimage took me to the headquarters of the so-called Gauleiter, which is just exactly what one imagines a Nazi office to be like, complete with ‘executive officers’ who were office managers before they began impersonating Genghis Khan—and a smell in the air of secret fear, concealed behind a façade of coarseness and brutality, or else transformed into a reaching after sympathy.

  On the other hand, there is the Gestapo, which I entered with the help of an appropriate letter, and which looks very different from what one imagines: quiet, dignified offices, courteous subordinates, and a responsible officer, a Councillor Gade, a polite and tactful young man who asked leave to finish his cigar, and was, generally, the very model of a man of breeding and poise. The Gestapo’s greeting is ‘God be praised!’ while at the district office one is almost deafened with the bellowed ‘Heil Hitler’.

  When I described the perspective posed for me by the Gauleiter’s underling of having to live under the threat of having my house searched at any time, the Gestapo official actually indicated that the element of force standing behind such threat—which could only mean the Nazi Party—must certainly come to an end in fourteen days or three weeks.

  Strange atmosphere, compounded of fear, of resignation, and of a last, bellowing madness, which is to culminate now in Germany’s turning itself into a heap of rubble in honour of the great Manitou—strange atmosphere, diseased with the microbes of the end of the world!

  Imagine, however, that these termites, morning and evening clinging to the trams like grapes—imagine that they go on: headless as they have been made by the destruction of the intelligentsia, that they go on functioning! The air is so charged with tension that tomorrow, at any moment, lightning may flash. Except for those hardy souls who continue to down their daily portion of Nazi optimism, people know this, and are deeply resentful; their resentment emerges in the disputes which are constantly taking place, at post office windows, on trams, on these stupid queues waiting to procure what now goes under the name of newspapers.

  Nerves are rubbed raw, and at any moment an argument may break out, followed by hand-to-hand grappling. I saw a sixteen-year-old female waiting to get on a tram slap a rather helpless old man because he was getting out too slowly. The sweet young thing was extremely astonished when I returned the compliment to her two-fold—in the face, incidentally, to the protesting murmurs of the canaille.

  I never before saw such things here. The way people dealt with each other under the Munich Revolutionary Republic was a model of politeness compared to what there will be after Hitler. Munich, defiled and distorted as it is, devastated like all the other cities, by the Prussian locusts, has a strange look to me now, as though, walking in it, I were in Chicago.

  Oh, it is dreadful to wander among the ruins of a city which only yesterday was like a good-humoured mother. As I rode down one street, a house collapsed in an immense cloud of dust, covering the trolley tracks we had just passed with a pile of rubble five metres high. As I write, I can smell the stench of decaying bodies, because under the ruins are the corpses of seventeen bank employees who were buried by the rubble. In pious commemoration, and to mark the place where these poor devils were drowned when a river of human excreta suddenly flooded out at them from the broken sewers, the survivors have placed a cross on top of the rubble heap, and the rats, grown plump with much gorging on corpses, rustle undisturbed over ruins and cross.

  There are no telephone lines still in working order, and there is no service window without its lines of people waiting for hours alongside; nor is there a store with anything for sale, or a roof into which the rain does not come. And through it all, this herd of troglodytes goes on, brainless and animal, morning and evening charging into the restaurants after ration-free food like the apes at the zoo after they have been kept waiting for the noon feeding. They gulp down their chemical beer, believe every bit of propaganda larded out to them, and are basically responsible for the fact that twelve years could pass during which we have been ruled by a maniac. Is it not the absolute height of tragedy, simply inconceivable shame, that just those Germans who are left of the best of them, who have been prisoners of this herd of evil-tempered apes for twelve years, should wish and pray for the defeat of their own country, for the sake of that same country?

  October 1944

  Arrests, and more arrests. There is getting to be something akin to an arrest psychosis, which barely serves to conceal the terrible fear of the arresters.

  Toni Arco[64] has been arrested. I am sure he bitterly regrets his assassination twenty-five years ago of Eisner. Schacht[65] has been arrested, and old Hugenberg.[66] Mayor Scharnagl[67] has been arrested, and old ladies connected with royalty, and young religious novices.

  People disappear without trace. Nothing is heard of them for weeks and months. Whole families are separated in this way and sent off into the night. A. has been arrested; F.R. is also said to be in prison, his brother who holds the title of count disappeared without trace in the course of a trip to Vienna. All that is known of him is that he was seen in handcuffs between two guards on a station platform somewhere in Austria. Barely two years ago, both of his sons were swallowed up in this war.

  Strange and grim news has been received about His Majesty.[68] Herr v. M. has received the following word from northern Italy: ‘Do not worry about the Colonel, he is safe in the Dolomites.’ In the context, there is no question that by the ‘Colonel’ is meant the 75-year-old King of Bavaria—the monarch who dipped into the store of memories of his youth to tell me such absorbing stories about his meeting with old Emperor Franz Joseph, and with Bismarck, and who described so well the enviable appetite of ninety-year-old Wilhelm I at the breakfast table, and who now evidently is forced to wander from one mountain retreat to the other in a foreign land.

  Herr v. M. received this letter at the beginning of October. Now, at the end of the month, rumour has it that the King has been killed. The Nazis could hardly sink lower. I, however, can conceive of situations in which an enemy struck dead may be more dangerous than one left alive.

  And on the thirteenth, a beautiful, burning-hot day in October, I was myself arrested.

  At six in the morning—that hour so beloved of all secret police officials—I heard the bell ringing rather loudly, and saw below our Seebruck gendarme, a good soul, who explained apologetically that he had come in performance of what was for him the unpleasant assignment of conveying me to the Army jail at Traunstein.

  I confess that I was not greatly concerned. Four days before, I had ignored a so-called ‘call to arms’ for service with the Volkssturm, citing an attack of angina pectoris. Immediately thereafter, however, I had gone like any good citizen to regional headquarters to explain, and the opinion there had been that a man who had only just received word that his son was missing in Russia might well be believed regarding illness.

  I made a mistake. Deception, the burning-hot autumn day with its gay colours; deception, the tact, bordering almost on shame, of the gendarme. We crossed the river on our way to the train, and the melancholy with which my womenfolk waved to me from the house made me thoughtful. A couple of hours later I knew that this was, indeed, more than a little warning.

  The gate of the Army post closed heavily behind me. Between me and the bright autumn day there was a fence and a highly martial guard. I was standing in a guard post filled with the smell of leather, sweat, and lard, the chief personage of which was a young Swabian sergeant—a man with that peculiarly Germanic combination of choler, activity, and exactitude which never rings quite true
, and which has caused so much evil in the world.

  I telephoned the major who was officer-in-charge. A voice so frigidly vindictive that the quality of it emerged quite clearly out of the receiver told me that I was not there to ask questions, but to wait. Then I happened to see a young officer I knew bicycling across the compound. I called to him, but when he came refrained from taking his hand because, as I explained, I had been arrested and so, in the jargon of the old Kaiser’s Army on the Eastern Front, I was ‘lousy’. He laughed, gave me his hand, and himself telephoned. As the crackle sounded from the receiver, he grew pale. He hung up, and then informed me, several degrees more formally now, that I was charged with ‘undermining the morale of the Armed Forces’. He bowed and left.

  The penalty for ‘undermining the morale of the Armed Forces’ is the guillotine—the guillotine, on which the condemned man, as I heard recently, is granted the single act of grace of being blinded by a thousand-candlepower light just before the blade whistles downward, with the aftermath being one of the Lysol bottles of an anatomy class.

  In the meantime, however, evening had come on. The guard post was now a dark box. I was locked up.

  The cell is two paces wide and six feet long, a concrete coffin equipped with a wooden pallet, a dirty, evil-smelling spittoon, and a barred window high up on the wall. By climbing onto the pallet I can see a minuscule piece of the sky, the barracks compound, a section of the officer quarters, and behind, a pine forest: a pine forest of our lovely Bavarian plateau, which has nothing in common with this frenzy of Prussian militarism, this pestilence which has devastated Bavaria.