Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  The dramatic change of the popular mood after the German defeat at Stalingrad at the beginning of February 1943 is graphically recorded in the Diary, perhaps with a little exaggeration and wishful thinking; but Reck also notes the increasing intensity of terror from March 1943 as the regime introduced more and more draconian punishments for expressions or acts of dissidence. Among those executed were the Scholls, two students, brother and sister, who had plastered leaflets around Munich denouncing the regime’s crimes; Reck clearly took some pains to find out as much as he could about them, and his description of their demeanor in the face of death provides some of the Diary’s most moving pages. By contrast, his attitude concerning the attempt to kill Hitler and stage a military coup d’état, written on July 21, 1944, the day after the event, differed from almost everyone else’s in Germany. Most people condemned it as a betrayal (Reck was wildly over-optimistic when he claimed that “The nation mourns the fact that this bomb did not explode where and when it should have”). Reck condemns the plotters as acting too late, and writes them off as renegades because they had betrayed every regime they had ever worked for, including the Weimar Republic, when they had all flocked to the Nazi banner in 1933. They would not, he prophesied, be “Germany’s future leaders,” and he was right: They represented backward-looking forces (“the Prussian heresy, that sower of evil, that stench in the nostrils of humanity,” as he put it), and whatever happened, they were doomed to failure.

  On August 16, 1944, Reck captured in a graphic anecdote the increasingly suicidal mood of the regime as defeat approached; it was to end in the mass self-immolation of Nazi leaders and officials in the final days of the war. But already at this time the net was beginning to close in on him. Only a few weeks later, on October 9, 1944, he noted that the Nazi authorities in his district were beginning to treat him with suspicion. On October 13 he was arrested for having disobeyed a summons to join the Volkssturm, the “People’s Storm,” a makeshift militia consisting of men above the age of conscription, many in their fifties and sixties, being raised to mount a last-ditch, entirely futile defense against the invading Allied forces. He was confronted with a long list of accusations, of which the most serious was “undermining the morale of the Armed Forces,” and put into a military prison. As he recounts in his final Diary entry, he was eventually released from his military incarceration (most probably after a week), and returned to his estate at Poing, but his troubles were far from over. Like many others in Nazi Germany, Reck became the subject of a denunciation, probably by someone who worked at his publisher’s. The Gestapo were sent a letter written by Reck to his publisher on July 10, 1944, in which he complained at length about the monetary inflation that was robbing the advance on royalties on his next book of any value. Arrested on Sunday, December 31, 1944, New Year’s Eve, for “insulting the German currency,” he was imprisoned in the Gestapo jail in Munich and fingerprinted on January 3, 1945. The prison was badly damaged in a bombing raid on January 7-8, so on January 9 he was transported to the concentration camp at Dachau along with most of the other prisoners. He was admitted with the number 137838. Conditions in the camp were appalling. Thousands of new prisoners were continually being brought in from other camps that were about to be overrun by the Red Army to the east, overwhelming the already very basic facilities. Disease and malnutrition spread, the prisoners were sick, starving, and covered in lice, and a typhus epidemic had already broken out towards the end of 1944: 2,903 prisoners died of the disease in January; 3,991 in February; 3,534 in March; and 2,168 in April. Reck fell ill and was taken to the sick bay, where conditions were no better. The death rate among the over-50s, the category into which Reck fell, was 80 per cent. The official death certificate recorded that he died of typhus on February 16, 1945, less than three months before the end of the war. The following day his name and prisoner number were added to the Abgangsliste, the list of “departures” from the camp population, and early in March the Gestapo wrote to the local administrator of the district of Traunstein, where Poing was located, asking him to inform Reck’s wife that he had died on February 16.

  4.

  Following its publication shortly after the war, Diary of a Man in Despair eventually became Reck’s best-known work. Most of his books are now forgotten, though Bockelson, for which he carried out a good deal of original research, is still in print and has recently been reissued in an English translation with a critical apparatus. But the Diary has given Reck widespread posthumous fame. How accurate is the picture it portrays? Clearly, not everything he writes can be accepted without reservation. Moving, as he did, in literary and journalistic circles, Reck was able to hear many rumors and anecdotes about the Third Reich and its leading figures, and these add color and incident to the Diary’s broader cultural-critical reflections. Understandably, however, since he was in no position to check them for inaccuracies, some of them are in need of correction. Gossip retold in the July 1936 entry about Paul von Hindenburg, who as Reich president had appointed Hitler chancellor in January 1933, is unsubstantiated; the real story was perhaps even more depressing, namely that Hindenburg was persuaded that the conservative cabal around Franz von Papen would be able to keep Hitler in check and use Nazi mass support to legitimize their destruction of the Weimar Republic’s democratic institutions. Certainly Hindenburg did get state support for his estates in eastern Germany, but this was hardly a shameful secret that the Nazis could exploit by blackmailing him; it was in fact well known. On the other hand, Reck’s judgment of Hindenburg (that he “did not have the stature for the position he was given”) is perceptive and persuasive and, like so much that he wrote, went squarely against the less realistic assessment of the vast majority of his German contemporaries, particularly members of the country’s social and political elites. If Hitler did throw a bronze vase at General Keitel as recorded on August 11, 1936, Reck’s retelling of the story is the only evidence for it; and if Reck did see Hitler as recorded in the same entry, he cannot have seen him very close-to, since Hitler’s eyes were not “jet-black” but bright blue.

  May 1937’s account of Putzi Hanfstaengl’s dismissal follows Hanfstaengl’s own fantastic claim of an assassination attempt; in fact, nobody tried to throw him out of the plane. Hitler told him to go to Madrid to meet the press, then had him informed in midair that he was to be dropped behind enemy lines, sending Hanfstaengl into a hysterical panic. It was all caught on camera. Goebbels wrote that he nearly died laughing on seeing the film. Gossip recounted in September 1939 about the Fount of Youth (Lebensborn) program as a kind of SS stud farm had no basis in truth; the organization in fact ran maternity homes for senior party officials. In November 1939, Reck retells fantastic rumors circulating about an attempt to blow up Hitler at a Munich beer cellar, in fact mounted by a solitary ex-Communist carpenter, Georg Elser, who hid a bomb in a supporting pillar of the building. Unity Mitford, an upper-class English girl with fanatically fascist and anti-Semitic opinions who had a crush on Hitler, did not succeed in killing herself when the war broke out, as alleged in the entry for January 1940, but lived on until 1948. Reck reveals in the same entry that he knows about Eva Braun, Hitler’s long-term mistress, a well-kept secret from most Germans, but gossip about Hitler possessing “a complete harem of young girls” had no basis in fact. Nor does the rumor recounted in February 1942 that the Nazis were about to institutionalize prostitution, though they certainly tolerated and controlled it.

  These are, in the end, minor blemishes, unavoidable given the circumstances in which the book was written. The Diary attracted attention after its republication in the 1960s not so much for its detailed factual content (which is what, for example, brought fame to the much more voluminous diaries of Victor Klemperer) as for its startling analyses, its acute perceptions, its deeply felt hatred for Hitler and Nazism and everything they were doing to Germany. Reck’s unusual perspective on the Third Reich came from his almost uncanny ability to penetrate the bombastic self-presentation it purveyed through its
massive and all-pervasive propaganda apparatus. He saw himself as part of an intellectual and cultural elite, the representative of spiritual values betrayed by “Prussianism” over many decades and trampled underfoot by the Nazis. If this made him a snob, it was a very unusual kind of snob: carefully discriminating rather than all-encompassing, political and intellectual more than social or economic. He called the German people under Nazism “termites” and poured scorn on what he called “mass-man,” who had fallen victim to the blandishments of Hitler; yet in January 1942, he affirmed his “belief that mass-man is by no means identical with the proletariat,” more with the declassed younger generation of bourgeois and aristocrats. Although he found Berlin a city of falsity and pretension, he underlined his belief in “what really has substance in Berlin . . . the workers of Berlin-East, the streetcar conductors, the mail carriers and the truck drivers,” as he wrote in May 1937.

  Reck’s views have been taken by many, indeed the great majority of commentators, as reflecting the arrogance of the born aristocrat, an upper-class contempt for the masses, a snobbish disdain for Hitler and the Nazis above all for their vulgarity. This view will not convince anyone who has read the book carefully. Reck’s perspective was more original, more subtle than that. If he was a typical Prussian aristocrat, then why did he devote so much space in the Diary to pouring scorn on “Prussianism”? In fact, the Prussian aristocracy was overwhelmingly in favor of the Nazi Party, seeing in it a means of rescuing itself from the precipitous political and economic decline it had suffered under the Weimar Republic. Reck accurately conveyed the Nazi fanaticism of the younger generation of German aristocrats in his entry for April 1939, when he described in a brilliant and disturbing passage their chilling fanaticism observed at a party in Berlin. This was, as historians have recently described it, a “generation of the unconditional,” who believed that Germany had to be restored to greatness even at the cost of mass murder and cultural annihilation.

  How was Reck able to distance himself so clearly from the Nazism and anti-Semitism of the Prussian aristocracy and assume such a fiercely critical stance towards its behavior? His attitude is all the more puzzling since he frequently told people that he was descended from a long line of aristocrats, owner of the noble estate of Malleczewen in East Prussia, where he was born. This claim was challenged in 1975, however, when a six-hundred-page German doctoral dissertation, by Alphons Kappeler, was published (as a photocopied typescript, with a very limited distribution). Relying on the testimony of Reck’s surviving sisters, and on genealogical documents, Kappeler showed that Reck’s grandfather was not really, as Reck describes him in the entry for May 1937, a “true Junker,” or member of the hereditary Prussian aristocracy, except perhaps in spirit. Reck’s great-grandfather had been a peasant farmer and inn-keeper in East Prussia. There was no noble blood in the family. Reck’s grandfather August married the daughter of a brewer and bought a small landed estate of 166 hectares from his father-in-law in 1845.

  This was the Malleczewen estate, which during the days of serfdom (the last vestiges of which were swept away in the 1848 Revolution) had belonged to a free peasant farmer (Köllmer); it was not a noble estate (Rittergut), as Reck sometimes claimed. Reck’s father, Hermann, built up the estate successfully and made an advantageous marriage with the daughter of an industrialist who had moved to Posen from Austria. He was active in local politics and secured election to the lower chamber of the Prussian Parliament and subsequently to the Reichstag, the national legislature, for the German Conservative Party, which was closely identified with agrarian interests. But his hopes that his sons would follow in his footsteps were dashed by their decisions to devote their lives respectively to art, literature, and risky speculations in real estate. So Hermann sold the estate in 1913 and cut off relations with his sons; for Fritz, indeed, the break with his father was final, and had not healed before Hermann’s death in 1931. Despite this, Fritz subsequently added the name of the estate to his own and became Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, a frequent practice amongst Germans with relatively common names, adopted for example by the liberal politicians Ernst Müller-Meiningen and Erich Koch-Wesser, whose actual names were respectively Müller and Koch, but who attached the names of the parliamentary constituencies they represented in order to distinguish themselves from their namesakes. One might speculate, perhaps, that Reck’s visceral hatred of the Prussian aristocracy, its values, and its role in history was connected with the collapse of his relationship with his father, who clearly aspired to belong to it.

  5.

  Building on this deflating detective work, Kappeler went on to argue that Reck’s spurious claim to noble ancestry was only the tip of an enormous iceberg of lies and deceptions that ran through his entire life and work, including the Diary. What are we to make of this startling accusation? Certainly it seems clear from the accounts of his contemporaries that Reck’s vivid imagination often carried his anecdotes and reminiscences a good distance beyond the truth. Those who knew him testified to his habit of exaggerating to the point of invention. Ernst Niekisch, for example, “didn’t believe a word he said. I once answered someone who was angered by the unbelievability of what the man said: ‘Just let him be, enjoy it, he lies so beautifully!’”

  The anti-Semitic writer Bruno Brehm, much feted by the Nazis, took revenge on Reck’s critical references to him in the Diary by publishing a malicious roman à clef about Reck after the war with the title “The Liar.” In it, he declares of the character representing Reck that

  he wanted to live the life of a nobleman even though he wasn’t noble, an estate-owner though he wasn’t a farmer; he plays the role of an officer though he is no soldier because he can’t obey; he is a refugee from Prussia in Bavaria because Prussia is too disciplined, but plays the Prussian when he meets Bavarians and pretends to unwitting Prussians that he is a Bavarian, he always wants to be something other than he is because that what he is, is not honest.

  By all accounts, even Brehm’s, however, Reck was a celebrated and much-appreciated raconteur, popular in Munich’s literary and journalistic circles for his anecdotes and stories, and as with many raconteurs, the temptation to embellish the truth often proved irresistible. In various publications and conversations, according to Kappeler, Reck claimed to be half English and to have served with the British colonial forces in Africa, to have been a Prussian cavalry officer from 1901 to 1907, to have fought with German counterrevolutionary troops in the Baltic during the Russian Revolution, and to have taken part in the Mexican revolution and a coup d’état in Ecuador. According to Kappeler, all these stories were invented. Reck’s technique, which appears in the Diary as well, was to put together anecdotes, rumor, and gossip from a variety of sources and weave threads of truth and fiction together into a more or less coherent narrative. But did this make him a “pathological liar”? Kappeler pursues him relentlessly over more than six hundred pages, leaving no detail, even the most marginal and minor, untouched. Some of the letters sent by Reck’s acquaintances in response to Kappeler’s inquiries date from as early as 1950, yet the results of his researches were not published until 1975. A quarter of a century spent on a dissertation testifies to an assiduity that borders on the obsessive. The language Kappeler uses about Reck—“liar,” “fantasist,” “deceiver,” “psychopath”—has a vehemence that verges on the pathological and is in no way justified by the nature or extent of his discoveries, many of which unearth only trivial errors of detail. And, curiously, when examined more closely, Kappeler frequently seems to be engaging in precisely the kind of distortion and exaggeration that he accuses Reck of having perpetrated.

  Thus, for example, Kappeler cites letters sent to him by Gregor Strasser’s brother Otto as evidence that Reck did not have the conversation he claimed, in November 1939, to have had with Gregor late in 1932, but Otto was an extremely unreliable witness, and Gregor’s diatribe against Hitler, after his resignation as Nazi Organization Leader, rings true. Kappeler doubts Reck’s story
about the poet Stefan George in the same entry but presents no evidence to support his skepticism; and here too the anecdote confirms what others had written about George. On October 30, 1942, Reck reported that the writer Werner Bergengruen—who had also published an allegorical novel about Hitler, Der Grosstyrann und das Gericht (The Great Tyrant and the Law-court; 1935)—had lost most of his possessions in a bombing raid on Munich and offered the remaining fragments to passersby; according to Kappeler, Bergengruen’s wife had denied this in a letter written to Kappeler in 1950, calling Reck “a pathological liar.” Bergengruen certainly had lost his possessions in a raid in 1942, and the anecdote retold in the Diary would certainly have been embarrassing to his wife, but it is puzzling that the writer himself, who died in 1964, did not bother to deny the story, and in any case its source is just as likely to have been a rumor heard in conversation as it was to have been Reck’s own invention.