Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  And so occurred the miracle which I, just an hour earlier, entombed in my cell, had not dared to conceive: I was to be released that very night.

  I was led out, had myself locked back in, and experienced what probably every prisoner about to be released goes through: hours of uncertainty in which the fear is that at the very last minute something will happen. You look, ridiculously, for a sign, anything to relieve the tension: the end-time, which is almost as bad as the first hours in the shock of jail.

  Luckily for me, an air-raid shortened the time: gawked at like animals from the zoo by assorted typists, laundresses and kitchen help, we were taken down to a narrow, low-ceilinged cellar where pipes connected with all the various water- and toilet-outlets. Presumably, we would be better off drowning in excrement-filled sewage than being split apart by shrapnel fragments in the open air. . . .

  Through the cellar window I could make out a small piece of sky and a somewhat larger section of the caserne courtyard. Ah, unrelieved monotony of these endless windows, bareness of sheds, apocalyptic ugliness in every direction—a hideousness which seems to be the very essence of militarism. . . . They hate everything which might carry a hint of spirituality and beauty. What they worship is a fetish, probably something like a grotesquely enlarged dice-cup. And out of this affinity for the ugly they have constructed a religion at whose shrine all the world is to worship.

  No, they will be rooted out, they will be pursued remorselessly, reduced to their true level by every conceivable and inconceivable means that can be found to humiliate them, because only then, when all memory of them has been blotted-out, will there be peace in the world.

  Two hours later, leaving the caserne, I had the feeling of a man buried in a mass grave—filthied, filled with unmanning memories.

  An ancient superstition forbids it that the person who has emerged into freedom look back, lest he be returned. Indeed I kept on going, never looking back, but then my friend the corporal came running up with a brush and cleaned off my dusty coat, saying: ‘Make this thing end soon!’

  For you, my young friend: in the name of our shared hatred: in the name of tormented mankind: in the name of the world. . . .

  Once at home, I learned what was thought to be happening to me, and what indeed would have happened had it not been for the intervention of Dtl.

  Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen (1925).

  Irmgard Reck-Malleczewen, Reck’s second wife, with his poodle Klaus (1936).

  Reck at Schleißheim, the large rambling estate near Munich that he was forced to sell (1928).

  A photograph taken in 1935 when Reck, a keen mountaineer, climbed the Alps.

  After selling off Schleißheim, Reck bought a disused monastery in Poing (also near Munich) 50 miles from the Austrian border. Seen here with Klaus, his poodle (1930).

  Back to back with his wife Irmgard at their new home in Poing.

  In front of the main house of the monastery (1935).

  In Poing on the bank of the river Alz (1936).

  Distracted, at the entrance of Poing under the woodcarving of St George slaying the dragon.

  The overgrown arbour at Poing (1938).

  Reck playing with the Märklin steam engine which powered his train set (1941).

  Reck seated in the library, which was terrorised by his pet parrot (1943).

  Afterword

  1.

  FRIEDRICH Reck’s Diary of a Man in Despair, one of the most powerful, moving, and unclassifiable documents of opposition to Nazism to emerge from the Third Reich, was first published in German in 1947 by an obscure publishing house in Stuttgart that went out of business shortly afterwards. It attracted little notice at the time. In 1964, however, it was brought to light in a newspaper article, part of a series on “forgotten books”; this time it attracted considerable public attention, and in 1966 it was reprinted in paperback form, to be followed by translations into several languages; it appeared in English in 1970, a translation that was reprinted in 2000 with previously expunged sections of the final chapter. It is not a diary in the conventional sense of the word; it does not chronicle daily events in the life of the writer, but rather brings together thoughts, reflections, stories, and reminiscences recorded at intervals over the years following the death in 1936 of the philosopher Oswald Spengler, who was a major influence on the writer, to Reck’s death in the final months of the war.

  Writing such a document under Hitler’s dictatorship was a risky business. On September 9, 1937, Reck reported that his friends had warned him about the danger he was courting after an acquaintance’s house had been raided by the Gestapo. “Driven as I am by my own inner necessity,” he wrote, “I must ignore the warning and continue these notes, which are intended as a contribution to the cultural history of the Nazi period. Night after night, I hide this record deep in the woods on my land . . . constantly on watch lest I am observed, constantly changing my hiding place.” Later on, he buried it in a tin box in a field, keeping the most recent pages hidden in a hay barn. It was only in the final weeks of the war that the diaries were retrieved from their hiding places and saved for posterity. By this time, the pages concealed in the hay barn had been partly eaten by mice. His wife gave the diaries to his friend Curt Thesing, a writer of popular works on biology who had translated Henry Ford’s autobiography and worked for some years as director of the publishing house Veit & Comp., and asked him to act as her late husband’s executor. Thesing transcribed them as best he could (most of the diary had been typewritten, but the damage to the pages meant parts of the final section were missing) and brought them out under the title that Reck himself had used to refer to them in conversation with him: Diary of a Man in Despair—despair not about himself, he explained, but about the German people.

  What makes the Diary so remarkable above all is the author’s openly expressed, deep, and vehement hatred for Hitler and the Nazis. Like other conservative opponents of Hitler, he saw the Nazi leader as a vulgar demagogue whose domination was the ultimate consequence of the disastrous course on which European history had been set by the French Revolution of 1789 (as he noted on September 9, 1937). Yet while other figures in the opposition, including those who eventually plotted to kill Hitler in 1944 and failed with such tragic consequences, had at one time or another fallen under the dictator’s influence, or gone along with his policies, or even shared to a degree his hatred of the Jews, Reck was totally uncompromising in every respect almost from the very beginning. Despite moving in politically conservative circles, he was never anti-Semitic, and indeed kept up with his Jewish friends such as the mathematician Leo Perutz right through the 1930s, in Perutz’s case until his emigration in 1938, despite the dangers that friendship with a Jew could carry for German citizens under the Nazi regime. Reck’s first secretary, Irma Glaser, was Jewish, and after her death (possibly from suicide) in April 1933, he wrote movingly of his dependence on her organizing abilities.

  Reck shared Spengler’s cultural pessimism and considered the Weimar Republic hopelessly materialistic, mechanistic, destructive of decent moral standards, corrosive of hierarchy and authority, and open to the subversive influence of vulgar American popular culture. In 1925 he satirized American business in the novel Die Siedlung Unitrusttown (The Unitrusttown Settlement), and he described his novel Des Tieres Fall: Das Schicksal einer Maschinerie (The Case of the Beast: The Fate of a Machinery), published in 1931, as “the first German declaration of war on Americanism.” But if he thought at all in 1933 that Hitler’s self-proclaimed “German revolution” would roll Americanism back and renew German culture in the sense foretold in Spengler’s cyclical theory of history, he was soon disabused. Within a few months of the Nazi seizure of power he realized this was not going to happen; indeed, the Third Reich was even worse in his eyes than the Weimar Republic. Reck saw Nazism as an outbreak of mass irrationality and knew it would bring Germany to catastrophe. Moreover, unlike most conservatives, who looked back nostalgically to what they thought of as the da
ys of peace and prosperity, order and stability under Bismarck and the Kaiser before 1914, Reck was clear-sighted enough to realize that the roots of Nazism lay in the arrogance, greed, and irresponsibility of the leaders of imperial Germany, as he noted in a characteristically scathing passage in February 1943. Few conventional German conservatives would have portrayed the former Kaiser, Wilhelm II, as a pretentious buffoon, as Reck did in September 1941. The Diary is full of sideswipes against the “Prussians” and their behavior in south Germany and Austria; indeed, in May 1937 Reck let fly a coruscating denunciation of the “drive for power of Prussianism,” at a time when many German conservative opponents of Hitler were longing for its return. And in his posthumously published tract Das Ende der Termiten (The End of the Termites), in which he compared the Germans under Nazism to termites, mindless masses who had lost all sense of individual responsibility, he was even more critical of “the Prussian virus [that] will go under together with the corpses of those worlds . . . which it has poisoned and consumed.”

  2.

  As this suggests, the Diary was not the only work in which Reck poured scorn on the Nazi regime. During the 1930s he published two major books that, in a manner characteristic of the writers who went into what was called “inner emigration,” distancing themselves from the regime without openly opposing it or leaving Germany for safer shores, criticized Hitler and the Nazis by means of historical parallels. Both of these books had emerged from conversations with his friend Baron Erwein von Aretin, a leading Bavarian monarchist, as the baron testified after the war. Reck had asked him “with what means he could fight against Hitler’s tyranny” and had come up with the idea of writing a novel about the uprising of the Anabaptists in Münster in 1534–35. Led by the tailor Jan Bockelson of Leiden, ultraradical Protestants had taken over the city and established a theocratic utopia that rapidly degenerated into mayhem; Bockelson became an absolute dictator, introduced polygamy, executed dissidents, and instituted a reign of terror that was ended only when the besieging force captured the city, arrested the Anabaptist leaders, and put them to death. Subtitled “History of a Mass Delusion,” Reck’s Bockelson, a historical work in literary form, was published early in 1937 and offered, for all those who could read between the lines, an obvious commentary on Hitler and the Nazis; indeed, in the Diary, on August 11, 1936, Reck drew out the parallels explicitly himself.

  He followed this with a similar study, also based on historical research but written in the style of a novel: Charlotte Corday: Geschichte eines Attentates (Charlotte Corday: The Story of an Assassination). Published towards the end of 1937, the book opened with a lengthy analysis of the ultra-Jacobin pamphleteer Jean-Paul Marat, whom many held responsible for the radicalization of the French Revolution, the September massacres of prisoners in Parisian jails, and the launching of the Reign of Terror. Reck portrayed him as a demonic and murderous psychopath, and left readers in no doubt about his admiration for the young aristocratic woman, Charlotte Corday, who obtained entry into Marat’s chambers on July 13, 1793, and stabbed him to death in his bath, believing that by doing so she was saving France from the horrors of terror and civil war. Subsequently, and inevitably, put to death by guillotine, Corday had become a romantic figure in retrospect. Reck had long admired her; he had published a novel about Marat in 1929 and returned to the subject frequently later on. Here again the parallels were obvious, and, as with Bockelson, readers were able to recognize them. Other authors also wrote similar books in which a subtextual criticism of Hitler could be read, but few if any were as bold as Reck: The writing and publication of Bockelson and Charlotte Corday were extraordinary acts of civil courage. Yet the Nazi censors never seem to have noticed that these books were really about the Nazi regime; the rule of the Münster Anabaptists evidently appeared to them simply as an episode of German history, the murder of Marat of French. Neither book was banned, nor did Reck get into any trouble with the authorities as a result of publishing them. He was careful to disguise Bockelson in particular as an arcane work of scholarship, complete with Latin tags, footnotes, and other learned devices, and this seems to have helped get it past the censors, at least until readers began to complain about its political implications for the present and it was removed from the bookshops by the Nazi authorities.

  Perhaps it also helped that he was already a well-known, entertaining, but apparently entirely unpolitical author of popular novels, or what the Germans call Trivialliteratur; he was not a major literary figure and has never been regarded as such either by the German public or by literary scholars. As he himself wrote in Das Ende der Termiten, speaking of himself in the third person: “He has written novels, he has written exotic novellas—how then can he be taken seriously when he discusses such a fateful topic?” However, he added, “these fictions and novellas are actually all just variations on the theme treated here, the theme of mass-man and his inevitable fate.” This was very much an ex post facto justification. Among his works were best-selling stories about aristocratic women, such as Frau Übersee (Lady Overseas), Die Dame aus New York (The Lady from New York), Diana Pontecorvo, and above all Bomben auf Monte Carlo (Bombs on Monte Carlo), a short comic novel published in 1929 which sold extremely well and netted Reck a considerable amount of money in royalties; it became a hit musical film, with major stars of the German movie business, including Peter Lorre and Hans Albers, and was remade in 1960 starring Eddie Constantine. The story, loosely based on historical fact, concerns a retired English captain commanding a gunboat belonging to a small Balkan state. The captain falls in love with a masked lady during the carnival at Monte Carlo but loses all the ship’s money at the casino, so he cannot fulfill his intention of buying a string of pearls to give the object of his affections. He threatens to bombard the city unless the casino returns the money, upon which the ruling princess of Monte Carlo, who of course turns out to be the masked lady at the carnival, sorts everything out and the story ends happily. How, the censors might have thought, could the author of such harmless fantasies be engaged in serious literary opposition to the regime?

  3.

  A prolific author of articles and short stories as well as more substantial works, Reck had also made a name for himself as a theater critic and travel writer before the First World War. He had worked for some months as the editor of the feuilleton or culture section of a Stuttgart-based newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung (not connected with the present-day Munich-based paper of the same name), and by the time of his thirtieth birthday he had become a full-time author. Born on August 11, 1884, in Masuria, East Prussia, Reck had grown up in comfortable circumstances. While his sister married a successful lawyer, neither he nor his two brothers fulfilled their father’s high expectations: his eldest brother abandoned a military career to become an artist, while his other brother fell heavily into debt and committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. Reck had initially followed his father’s plans for him to embark on a career in the army, but in 1904 he ended his military service prematurely by beginning his medical studies (which brought an automatic reduction in the time spent in the army) and thereafter devoted himself to literature; ten years later, he was ruled unfit to serve when the First World War began, and thereafter he continued to make a precarious living from writing. Often indebted, he lost a great deal of money in the hyperinflation of 1923. He survived not only by publishing successful novels and stories but also as a result of the death of his secretary, who had insured her life for a considerable sum and named him as the beneficiary.

  Meanwhile, he had married a fellow student four years older than himself, Anna Büttner, in 1907, and the couple lived on the outskirts of Munich with their four children. The marriage began to get into difficulties, however; they separated sometime in the 1920s, and in 1930 they divorced. By 1933 Reck had purchased the eleven-acre estate of Poing in the hills of Upper Bavaria, where he thenceforth lived permanently, after 1935 with his new wife, Irmgard von Borcke, with whom he had three daughters. His estate represen
ted for Reck the integrity of nature unspoilt by industry and modernity; reached only by a winding, unpaved lane from the picturesque Chiemsee lake, the property, with its cypress trees and stone buildings going back to the Middle Ages, was described in a walking guide to Upper Bavaria as built from “ancient masonry, situated in great isolation.” This was where he composed, and hid, the Diary in the following years, venturing forth every now and then to the nearby village, or farther, to Munich, to meet and socialize with his friends and acquaintances in one of the Cafés, literary societies, or clubs that he frequented.

  The pages Reck typed out in his self-imposed isolation contain many valuable details of everyday life in Nazi Germany. He commented on the falsification of votes during plebiscites and elections (September 1938); the vicious anti-Semitism exploited by some Germans for their own gain (December 1938); the shabbiness of Berlin under an austerity program in the run-up to the war (April 1939); the growing hardships and privations endured by ordinary Germans during the war itself (November 9, 1940; September 1941; January 1942); the terrible and murderous maltreatment of Russian prisoners of war after the first German victories on the eastern front during Operation Barbarossa (September 1941); the destruction of the telephone system as Germany’s infrastructure began to fall apart under the impact of Allied bombing raids (October 9, 1944); and much more besides.

  Even more compelling than details such as these are Reck’s perceptive notes on the changing public mood, and the views he records of various sections of German popular opinion. His account of the mass enthusiasm for the regime after the German victories over France in the spring and early summer of 1940 tallies with what we know from other sources. Already in October 1940, however, he senses it will in fact end with “a future occupation of Germany by English troops,” a prediction that most Germans, “drunk with victory” as he calls them, would have regarded as insane at the time, but which came true a mere four and a half years later. His somber mood and dark forebodings on hearing of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, by contrast, were shared by many Germans at the time. The Nazi regime was hostile to the Catholic Church and launched a short-lived campaign of discrimination in 1941, and Reck’s account of the jokes told by Catholics about the Nazi leaders in January 1942 is valuable anecdotal evidence of the negative reaction it provoked (such jokes, if reported, were punishable by death, so the conversationalists were risking a good deal in telling them). From May 1942 onwards, the Diary becomes increasingly concerned with the effects of Allied bombing raids, again reflecting a growing popular mood (although the figure of 200,000 dead in the raids on Hamburg, given in the entry for August 20, 1943, is a wild exaggeration; the generally agreed number is 40,000, terrible enough but nowhere near what rumor had evidently claimed). In October 1942, Reck notes the massacre of 30,000 Jews behind the eastern front, evidence of how knowledge of the Holocaust was percolating back to Germany, as in fact it had been doing for several months already.