Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  So much for the window. On the walls, the inevitable obscenities and calculations of time still to be served—in weeks, days, hours, and minutes, even. Then, a veritable flood of Soviet stars, which gave the idea that the entire Red Army had been imprisoned here. And lastly, scratched into the concrete with a key, perhaps, the words, so very applicable to me: ‘My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ I read this, and darkness envelops me. This was written by a man as close to death as I am.

  It is true that not one word has been said to confirm this idea. And yet, I cannot help registering the fact of this venomous animosity, which is intent on finding something against me, and would make of an ignored draft notice a matter for the hangman.

  It might well be believed of a sixty-year-old man who had lived his life honourably and had just received word that his son was a prisoner of the Russians that a heart attack did not necessarily signify an ‘undermining of the morale of the Armed Forces’. And this would hold true even if there were not extant a statement to this effect by the senior physician in the town of Prien.

  But what is happening to me now has nothing to do with a draft notice.

  A night spent in heavy, laboured breathing, while outside sounded the brutal Army noises. We who are buried alive here are not to be granted even the solace of a quiet night. When a door is closed it is slammed shut with full force. When a man asks to be led to the stinking hole called the toilet, there resounds down the corridor the filthy curses of the roused guard. At three in the morning, the relief stamps with elephant-tread on the parapet, and at five-thirty, despite the fact that our being up cannot possibly be of benefit to anyone, and that our being asleep cannot harm anyone, the doors are ripped open to the bellow of ‘Up!’—just when one might be able to doze off after the worried, sleepless night.

  I pondered the question of who was responsible for this, who it was whose amiable purpose it had been to deliver me up to the hangman. I thought about the District Leader whom I had taken to court for calling me a coward over my use of a watch-dog—and I reflected that he might have chosen this way of revenging himself on me for having lost the case. I thought about the senile old coffee-house orator whose mouthings of propaganda I had refused to applaud. And I thought about the housing commissar who found high treason in my customary greeting of ‘God be praised’, and whom I was twice obliged to throw out of my house despite the fact that he was ‘on official business of the Governor’. I thought of all these small, crawling things now finding their nourishment in denunciation and the decay of our country—murderers, large- and small-scale, now operating under cover of ‘full legality’, who have no idea that tomorrow they may be the ones for whom the hangman reaches.

  But I cannot enjoy the thought of what lies in store for them, and this fact makes me thoughtful. Strange: I have progressed. Ten years ago, I worked out plans for a terrible revenge upon them. And today? Today, I know that no such thing as ‘revenge’ exists, and that those passages in the Bible which emphasise this fact reflect an ancient, honourable wisdom. Revenge? Years ago, I took an old friend who had fallen into desperate straits into my house. He repaid my hospitality and my financial help by undermining my marriage. I beat him as hard as it is possible for one man to beat another. For three days afterwards, I experienced a feeling of relief.

  And then? And then came the realisation that all of this would not weigh greatly in the scales of eternity. If I had ventured deeper into the things that are God’s and had actually killed him, I would thereby have helped him to a heroic death, instead of the prolonging of a dishonourable life. I myself have been responsible for the tears of many; and has it ever failed that I have not paid for these tears, even if retribution was years in coming? Don’t I know that the things that are happening to me now, the approach of death, the separation from my loved ones, the filth, the attempt to degrade me—that all these things will be required, even if I am not there to see to it?

  A man need not be a Christian to know all this. But one must be a Christian to give form to this, and then heroically to live and die. In 1912, aboard an English coastal steamer, as untroubled a young man as only an innocent son of Wilhelmism could be, I theorised to the only other passenger, an old Chinese intellectual, in the course of an evening promenade on deck, that the whole of Christianity, everywhere in the world, now found itself in a single vast agony. The venerable old man, a follower of the precepts of Lao-tzu, professor of Asiatic religions at Tsingtao Academy, looked at me with amusement. Then he said quietly that Christianity still had before it its great and decisive task. I was deeply impressed by the way he spoke.

  Today, thirty years later, bowed as I am under the weight of responsibility for certain major sins, having attained to a certain height on some few occasions and fallen to certain depths on others, I know the thing is not so simple. Certainly, Christianity still has its great work before it. But in the face of the Satanism which now prevails, a second Catacombs will be necessary and a second Nero’s burning of Rome before the spirit may emerge victorious a second time.

  14 October 1944

  All that was entailed, supposedly, was a single night at a hotel, and so I had come with just a small valise. They searched it for weapons: It was not a good beginning. And when I asked for a lawyer, the response was harsh.

  Soon I was in a cell, and standing (against regulations) on the plank bed could see out into the perfect autumn day. The right to be out in that perfection had been taken from me, stolen as surely as they have stolen from us those years that were the First World War, and those of the years of inflation of the Twenties, and the Hitler-years—a quarter of a century, the best of a man’s life—robbed by these militarist maniacs.

  Across the caserne yard in the officers’ quarters, moving from room to room behind the cheap curtains considered elegant these days was a blond of the new officer breed, very likely yesterday a lavatory attendant into whose hand (the same hand which had just been clearing away various blockages and encumbrances) you slipped two marks. They have come up, these people, as far as we have gone down these last twelve years; obviously, since it is our money which has raised them up. The little schizophrenic who is their leader had nothing and was nothing, but from 1918 those like him in their rage began to puff him up into what he has become. What an Augean stable that will be, the one they leave for us to clean up!

  Now they’re marching on the parade-ground. I hear this from morning to night, the latest in military marches, snappy little melodies bellowed by a leader sheep, shouted back by his flock of 250. Shattering, these idiotic songs, these faces, this spiritual castration-by-propaganda. They march and rumble past—here, five men attached to one machine, there, a lumbering behemoth belching clouds of stinking gas with ten aboard, then another new mechanical monster with another five. What do these iron-plated apparitions have to do with soldiers? Better take the regimental insignia off their uniforms, and sew on instead gold-threaded representations of screwdrivers, or oil cans!

  I want to be clear: I come from a long line of soldiers. At seventeen, on a horse behind the silver kettle-drums, that is exactly what I felt myself to be—a soldier. But the coming of the machine gun and the four-cylinder engine has raised a question, and that is, does the profession of soldier still exist, any more than that of statesman, or king, or poet or intellectual—supplanted as these have been by surrogates—so that all that’s left among the traditional professions is that of licensed whore. (And even the public whore is close to being regulated out of existence, with the woman being required twice each session, at foreplay and at climax, to shout a politically knowledgeable ‘Heil Hitler!’) As for me, I can see myself ending as a pacifist . . . not because I set that much store by the inherently fragile artifacts of this world; no, because I want to officiate at the funeral of a damnable lie—the lie that the concept of ‘soldier’ can be infinitely further perverted!

  This afternoon, I was brought to a hearing. This was done before a captain wearing the insignia of a
former noncom,[69] and the look of a decent Bavarian petit bourgeois (he could have been a clerk behind a post-office counter, or in a busy law office). Still, when I declared that what had brought me here was foul denunciation, the machinations of a low intriguer, these attractive features contorted and he blared at me like a tuba. I waited until all this lung power was exhausted, and then, looking him earnestly in the eyes, ventured that at the moment a defenceless man stood there before him—with emphasis on at the moment.

  Then there flooded down on my head a veritable torrent of accusation:

  — I had falsely stated my rank (to which I responded that in the course of my life I had waded in too much blood to give undue importance to rank).

  — That in the course of my earlier admission of wrongdoing, I had made light of the People’s Militia. With my statement before me, I proceeded to show that the very opposite was the case.

  — That I had organised a demonstration of women protesting against the removal of crucifixes from public buildings, did not say ‘Heil Hitler’ when I should have, and downplayed the value of the German currency.

  I answered with a question: was I being questioned here under military or Party auspices? Also, in the matter of the currency charge, could I get further details?

  This was not a fruitful approach. What followed was a torrent of invective that burst over me like burning lava, covering all argument, all protest. I was silent. They took me away.

  But I was not to get off so lightly. They called in the major, and when I saw him I knew: only a Higher Power could save me now. He was an apparition, a man-doll, a frightful stumbling puppet smashed by shot and shell and put together with prostheses. Nothing worked naturally, nothing was normal—the man was a mechanical horror. And in the eyes, that sadism. . . .

  I know the type. I saw them in the time of the Free Corps.[70] These unholy apparitions, filled with sadistic rage, moved through that time as they do today, officers now under the Nazi regime, mutilated beings involved in inconceivable crime.

  Again now I am alone. Far away, over that house and land I call home, there would be the last red flash of sunset; inside here, the clumping of boots as the food detail goes by. Strange how quickly a man is brought down to the lowest levels of preoccupation in prison through trying any trick to make life here easier. You learn to clean the malodorous corners of the cell without disgust, and to lie down on the insect-infested straw mattress without a qualm. Your suit, measured by a London tailor whose greeting on the occasional shopping trip could have been directed to a reigning prince, is rubbed to threads on the splintery plank-bed, and you hardly care. . . .

  And what a thing it is that these little tricks, while they do indeed make your life easier, swiftly bring you down to jailhouse level. Some well-meaning bloke slides back the lock on your door, and freedom suddenly is the equivalent of being out of your cell, walking up and down alongside the door. You don’t actually do it; the thought has to suffice.

  The following day, now further enmeshed in this society of the imprisoned, I myself slide back the bolts and thus for the first time get to see, face to face, this brotherhood of the damned, my neighbours in the concrete cells. Until now they have been known only by their signals, the tapping on the walls in the code I quickly learned. Beyond the flat, blank sales-clerk visages, beyond the dead-white, stupid faces of the little underlings and clerks dropped into Army uniforms as guards is this polyglot Commune of prisoners. Among these, Poles, Czechs (even Danes and Norwegians) tumbled into this place like dice from a cup, are those who provide the balm of real people—as though, in a foreign country, one were to hear for the first time the sound of one’s own language:

  — A tearful little fellow, rather insufficiently attired in a shirt of the Moroccan Guards, but as hairy and lumbering as a bear, in deep depression. He had overstayed his leave by five days, seduced by a local maiden and the carp-fishing and -eating pleasures her family’s pond afforded.

  — L., an honest, dinaric[71] horseface, unfortunately a more serious case. Filled with hatred against these latter-day Communards, he wandered in civilian limbo for five months, and then was picked up at a military checkpoint, where he was also found, unfortunately, to be carrying a loaded revolver—yes, a very grave matter. The soldier who arrested him, tool of this proletarian militarism that he is, actually whispered to him in an access of humanity that he now regretted having done so. Indeed, the case is serious; it could even cost him his head.

  — T., Croat, is accused of having had dealings with the Russians somewhere on the periphery of the empire—a bonehead drafted and flung at random into an Army unit with which he has as much connection as I do with a man from Mars—actually, a young fellow of quality, friendly, likeable, even somewhat cultivated by the standards of this pesthole. In the dark corner of the cell, alongside an infested straw mattress, we talked for a time about his distant homeland. He described how the Serbs evacuated his peaceful winegrowers’ village by the Danube because they wanted to settle their own people there.

  ‘Believe me, the harvest was good; the barns were filled with wheat, the vats full of rye, the shed floors covered with sheaves of maize and tobacco. That spring, actually, there had been rumours that we were going to be forced off our land, and these rumours were believed by our gloomy old folks. But we who were the youth laughed at these fears, and were confirmed in our confidence by the Serbian officials, who vehemently denied any such plans. . . . Yes, just two days before it all became reality, they announced strict penalties for spreading rumours of the kind.

  ‘So you can imagine what a shock it was when it actually happened. We were given just twelve days to leave our village, our vineyards, the rich harvest in our sheds. We were told that in exchange for leaving behind all our goods, all our property, all our farm machinery, we would find the equivalent in Bosnia, with completely equipped farmsteads and rich crops . . . in short, that we would not regret the change.

  ‘The old people knew what the truth was. That same night many cut their throats, others hanged themselves, or drowned themselves in the Danube. As for the rest of us, we let them dump us into a miserable typhus-ridden collection point. Then we were shipped in sealed freight cars, and for fourteen days lived and died in the stench of our own faeces and the discharges of the dead.

  ‘Once arrived, part of us were locked into the freezing cold room of a large estate; others were thrown into the half-destroyed greenhouses of an abandoned nursery; while a third group was put into barracks filled with lice, formerly used for people ill with typhus. These, sir, were the “equally prosperous” farms we had been promised!’

  ‘The old regime,’ I answered, ‘the Austro-Hungarian Empire, would not have been less cruel. Do you imagine that all it required of you was to pledge allegiance to the double eagle, the symbol of the imperial throne in Vienna?’

  ‘Granted, sir, and still one wants to lead one’s own life.’

  He meant by this one’s own nationalist life, the insanity which has spread from 1789 on, in whose flames Europe will be consumed—and which could only burn so destructively because the milder flame of a generalised European intellectuality, the flame of those who seek God on this earth, has been extinguished.

  I lay down sadly. I have been born too early on this planet. I will not survive this insanity.

  . . . Sad days, of wind coming through the cracks in the walls, of the disappearance of the faint autumn sun, of the coming, so quickly, of the apocalyptic hour of dusk in this stone coffin.

  While the light lasts, until the day dies, I go on reading, despairingly, these utterly stupid memoirs, these diaries suffused with a special Parisian arrogance, these orgiastic survivals of the rotting-away of the Napoleonic concept, whose death-throes have for so long poisoned our lives. . . .

  ‘Formerly, there was a wide area of differentiation—now, there is total equality. Formerly also, there was something called fate—now, it is the daily wage. Renown—what is that? Weigh out a kilo of renown
for me—how much? We buy bridges for our mouths, cultivate intestinal flora in our stomachs. We parcel out pieces of life among each other, leave each other less and less of the air, from generation to generation leave behind an increasingly mishandled and chaotic world. The princess? She rides a bicycle the way the workers under her father, the king, did, and they barely move aside when she comes by, and may or may not greet her.’

  So, in 1915, wrote the man who, shortly afterward, driven of course by the women of his family with their need to bulk large in the world, joined the camp of these same mass-men.[72]

  On one of the first cold days of the year, I was called to a hearing, and was astounded at the changes which had occurred behind the scenes. Where just a couple of days earlier there had been icy northern winds, now a warm breeze caressed me; where only yesterday this crude, bellowing captain yelled at me like a top sergeant, now he dealt with me with the utmost consideration, and I was almost fearful that he would end this evening hearing by releasing me with a good-night kiss.

  The mystery was soon resolved. Out of the office of the major in charge, clad in a fantastic black leather overcoat bearing the emblem of the SS, came General Dtl., and it is to him that I owe the bringing-about of this miracle. A decade younger than me, he chided me gently, a discourse which of course I did not know whether I was to take seriously, or whether it was meant to ring well in his own ears. In any case, the effect on the corporal-turned-captain was noteworthy.

  ‘Does the Herr General require a car, or does he intend to go by foot?’ said in true Prussian barracks jargon, and with a passion that gave one to think that in the next moment this booted lackey would either fall on his face before him or simply jump up and disappear into thin air.