Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  Kappeler’s dismissal of the opening passage of the Diary, which tells of an encounter with the pessimistic philosopher Oswald Spengler, as largely imaginary rests on a small number of minor inaccuracies and misremembered details, and there is no reason to doubt that Reck did know and admire Spengler and spent some time with him. Similarly with his criticisms of the June 1941 entry, in which Reck referred to a visit to Russia before the First World War: He had in fact only got as far as the Baltic States and Russian-occupied “Congress” Poland, and never been to St. Petersburg or the Urals, but a careful reader of the passage will note that Reck did not make any such claim. Once again, he was recounting stories told to him by others, and the areas he visited were commonly referred to as “Russia” at the time. Crucially, Reck’s book Von Räubern, Henkern und Soldaten: Als Stabsoffizier in Rusland von 1917–1919 (Of Robbers, Hangmen and Soldiers: As Staff Officer in Russia from 1917–1919), published in 1924, on which Kappeler bases many of his claims, turns out on closer inspection to be a diary written by an acquaintance who really did go through the experiences it describes, written in a style a good deal simpler than Reck’s rather convoluted German.

  Kappeler’s conclusion that “the Diary rests from A to Z, from the first page to the last, on untruths that put the truths that are also present there into the shadow” is therefore neither justified nor credible. Reck himself thought that strict adherence to the truth was a recipe for boredom and conventionality; he invented a persona and a history for himself that advertised his contempt for the times he lived in. Conformity to a dishonest age would be a betrayal of his true values and those of the civilized culture to which he aspired to belong. The Diary has to be read for what it is: a series of reminiscences, anecdotes, and reflections written in relative isolation from the political and social world of the Third Reich, in difficult and trying circumstances in which it was impossible to verify the stories it recounted, by a man whose marginality and individuality gave him a uniquely penetrating vision of the regime and its rulers as they pulled Germany down into the abyss. In his novel Hundertmark: Die Geschichte einer Tiefstapelei (Hundertmark: The Story of a Low Confidence Trick—a play on the German word Hochstapelei, meaning “imposture”), published in 1934, Reck tells the story of a man arrested for falsely claiming to have a PhD. He is, however, a “low confidence trickster,” someone “too stupid to be a real confidence trickster,” a man who has succeeded because it is easy to pretend to be an academic if people want to believe you are, but who fails in the end because he comes, fatally, to believe in his own assumed identity. He might have been describing himself. Yet what strikes the reader about Diary of a Man in Despair are neither the occasional and perhaps inevitable errors and exaggerations nor the pseudo-aristocratic, pseudo-military pretensions of its author, but the unflinching honesty and growing anger of the writer as he confronts a world seemingly gone mad, a world in which the standards and values of the civilization in which he believes so deeply are being trampled on at every level. It throws up a troubling question that remains almost impossible to answer: If Reck could see so clearly that the Third Reich was plunging Germany into a maelstrom of crime and degradation, why did hardly any other Germans share his penetrating clarity of vision?

  A final glimpse of Fritz Reck shortly before his death is provided by the Dutch antifascist writer Nico Rost (1896–1967), whose book Goethe in Dachau describes meeting a fellow prisoner emerging from the hospital barracks in the concentration camp, “very thin, extremely nervous, and completely exhausted.” He told Rost he was himself a doctor, though he had not practiced medicine for thirty years; perhaps Rost could help him get a position in the medical administration of the camp? His name, he said, was Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen. Was he the writer? Rost asked. Yes, he was. Rost had read Bockelson (which he described as “extremely suspenseful but without depth”) and other books of his, including Bomben auf Monte Carlo. His tongue loosened, the man “talked uninterruptedly about his possessions in Bavaria, where he had a large estate, about his career as a cavalry officer, and about the great reverence in which he held the Bavarian royal family.” It was terrible, Rost wrote, to see him “standing before me weakened by hunger and trembling with nerves, in grey linen trousers that were far too short for him, and a green Italian military tunic with a missing arm,” miserable, ill, starving, and old. “This man,” Rost remembered later, “is certainly called Reck-Malleczewen, but is he really identical with the writer? Did he perhaps just say ‘yes’ when I asked him, because he thought he could grasp at a straw onto which he could hold? I will gladly excuse him if he has deceived me. I hope at least that he’s a doctor . . .” Rost’s entry describing this encounter is dated April 15, 1945. Did Reck then survive until this late date, just a couple of weeks before the liberation of the camp, despite having been officially declared dead two months earlier? There seems no obvious reason why the camp officials should have declared him dead when he was still alive. Moreover, both his fellow-prisoner Ludwig Sternberg, who was in the same camp block as Reck and was with him in his final illness, and a camp doctor, Bruno Fialkowski, who was with him when he died, testified later that Reck had passed away on February 16. Perhaps, then, the man Rost encountered was pretending to be Reck, in a final episode of deception.

  —RICHARD J. EVANS

  NOTE

  I am grateful to Viktoria Reck-Malleczewen for her care in going through an early draft of this afterword and for providing essential information. Alphons Kappeler, Ein Fall von “Pseudologia phantastica” in der deutschen Literatur: Fritz Reck-Malleczewen (Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, No. 72 [Göppingen: Verlag Alfred Kümmerle, 1975]), and Christine Zeile, “Friedrich Reck: Ein biographischer Essay,” in Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten, ed. Hans Magnus Ensensberger (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag, 1984), 249-300, provide the key information on Reck’s life and works. Zeile uses the dissertation by Kappeler but adds archival material and information from Reck’s family, analyzes Reck’s ideas and psychology in greater detail and with greater sympathy, and provides the extract from Nico Rost’s Goethe in Dachau that ends this afterword, as it does hers. The deficiencies of Kappeler’s work are discussed above, but many of the letters and documents he provides are essential sources for Reck’s life and work, however much he over-interprets them. Hardly any of Reck’s other writings are available in English; an exception is A History of the Münster Anabaptists: Inner Emigration and the Third Reich: A Critical Edition of Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen’s Bockelson: A Tale of Mass Insanity, ed. Georg von der Lippe and Viktoria Reck-Malleczewen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). The prefatory material includes reminiscences by Reck’s daughter Viktoria, a perceptive preface by the translator, and an essay by Karl-Heinz Schoeps, “Conservative Opposition: Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen’s Antifascist Novel Bockelson: A History of Mass Hysteria,” also published in Neil H. Donahue and Doris Kirchner (eds.), Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature 1933–1956, eds. Neil H. Donahue and Doris Kirchner (New York: Berghahn, 2003), which provides useful contextual essays. The original version of Bomben auf Monte Carlo is available as an English-language DVD under the title Monte Carlo Madness.

  Notes

  1. August Albers was found on the tracks near Tutzing, on Lake Starnberg. The assumption is that he had decided to commit suicide following the death of Spengler.

  2. At that time, Oswald Spengler lived at 54 Agnesstrasse, Munich.

  3. Founded in 1871, the Langnamverein was a kind of National Association of Manufacturers in western Germany. The industrialists of the Ruhr were especially influential in it.

  4. An error: Spengler’s work was on Heraclitus.

  5. The widely circulated rumour that the second volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Hour of Decision was safe in a Swiss bank vault, in manuscript, later proved to be false. As H. Kornhardt notes, in his foreword to the new edition of Spengler’s work, issued in 1953, ‘Part Two was never written.’
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  6. Hermann Esser, an old-time Nazi, was named Bavarian Minister Without Portfolio and head of the Chancellery in 1933, Bavarian Minister of Economics in 1934, and President of the Reich’s Office of Foreign Travel in 1936.

  7. The vastly complex series of circumstances leading up to the so-called Assumption of Power by Hitler in 1933, and his being named Chancellor, is described by, among others, Alan Bullock, in his Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. About the Eastern Relief Scandal, Bullock writes that a conversation between Hitler and Oskar von Hindenburg on the subject took place on 22 January 1933, in the course of which Hitler ‘threatened’ that ‘he would launch an investigation of the Eastern Relief Scandal that could lead to damaging revelations about German President Paul von Hindenburg, and the exposure of the role Oskar von Hindenburg had played in it, as well as illegal use of public funds for the Hindenburgs’ Neudeck estate.’ There is no reference to Oskar von Hindenburg’s ‘13-million mark bank loan outstanding’ in Bullock’s book (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, revised edition, 1964)-Nor does any mention of this appear in Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republic by Karl D. Bracher (Villinger/Schwarzwald, 1964), or in Die Junker und die Weimarer Republik: Charakter und Bedeutung der Osthilfe in den Jahren 1928–33, by Bruno Buchta (East Berlin, 1959).

  8. ‘Bohemian’ here is a geographic reference.

  9. The Potempa murder refers to the killing of Communist worker Konrad Pietrzuch in his home in the Silesian village of Potempa by a number of SA men on 9 August 1932 The men involved were tried and convicted of the murder. Hitler’s telegram following the trial read: ‘My comrades! In the face of this unrelentingly vengeful verdict, I feel eternally bound to you. As of this moment, your freedom has become a matter of the honour of all of us, and the battle against a regime under which such things are possible, our duty. Adolf Hitler.’ The storm troopers were later amnestied.

  10. The strike against the Berlin Transport Authority was begun by the Communists, joined by the Nazis, and lasted from 3-7 November 1932

  11. In the days before the Nazis came to power, Gregor Strasser was the Party’s organisational secretary. However, in the course of inner-party battles, he opposed first Goebbels and then Hitler. He resigned his party posts in 1932. He was killed on 30 June 1934, in the course of the Röhm Putsch.

  12. No Frau von Schröter can be located in the records of the time in this connection. Probably Reck-Malleczewen is referring to the conversation between Hitler and Franz von Papen early in January 1933, at the home of Kurt von Schröder, the Cologne banker. There were later conversations between the two at Ribbentrop’s house in Berlin.

  13. For more on the role of Kurt von Schleicher in all of this; and about the rumour of the arrest of Oskar von Hindenburg; as well as about the attempt to prevent Hitler from coming to power, in which Kurt von Bredow played a part, see German sources, including Reichswehr, Staat und NSDAP, by Thilo Vogelsang (Stuttgart, 1962), and the Bracher work previously cited.

  14. One eye-witness to the deathbed scene between Hindenburg and Hitler on 1 August 1934, has described it this way: ‘Hindenburg was at the point of death when Hitler entered the room. Besides the doctors, his two daughters were present. Apparently he did not recognise Hitler. In any case, he paid no attention to him. He had gone back in his mind to a time and people more understandable to him. The last words he uttered were: “My Kaiser . . . ” And then, impossible to say in what context he meant them: “My Fatherland” or “My German Fatherland . . . ” He could be understood only with difficulty. Then he was silent. Hitler once admitted to an Army aide years later that Hindenburg’s last words had been about the Kaiser, and not about himself.’ (Translated from Walter Görlitz, Hindenburg: Ein Lebensbild, Bonn, 1953)

  15. General Max Hoffmann served with Ludendorff from 1914-16, then took command of German troops stationed on the Russian front and represented Germany at Brest Litovsk, when Russia agreed to get out of the war.

  16. Willi Schmid was the music critic of the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten. He was mistaken for another Willi Schmid and shot by the Nazis in the course of the Röhm Putsch.

  17. In 1950 it was learned that Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who in 1923 headed the Bavarian government which put down Hitler’s attempt on 23 November to seize power, was badly beaten in the course of being delivered to Dachau in June 1934, and then shot. His corpse reportedly was uncovered on the moor near the concentration camp.

  18. In Bad Wiessee, in June 1934, Hitler ordered a number of arrests. He did not, however, either carry out any executions on the spot, or order them. He met no resistance at the time.

  19. Clemens Freiherr von Franckenstein was a composer, and in 1914-18, and again from 1924-34, director of the Bavarian Court (later, State) Theatre.

  20. Ernst Hanfstaengl’s nickname ‘Putzi’ dated from childhood. He was Nazi foreign press chief. His own account, later, of his flight from Germany concords almost exactly with what Reck-Malleczewen relates. Only a few details differ: the fact, for example, that it was not his ‘eighty-year-old mother’ who was sent to England to fetch him back, but a Göring emissary, a General Bodenschatz. See Ernst Hanfstaengl: Hitler, the Missing Years, London, 1957.

  21. It is no longer widely believed—in Germany, in any case—that a Nazi directly set the Reichstag ablaze. In a book published in 1962 about the fire, called Der Reichstagsbrand: Legende und Wirklichkeit (Baden: Rastatt), author Fritz Tobias states unequivocally that the Dutchman van der Lubbe was alone in actually starting the conflagration. Hanfstaengl’s only connection with the event, by his statement of it, came when he saw the glare in the sky from his windows nearby, and called Hitler at Goebbels’ house.

  22. Federal German archives contain a manuscript entitled (in German) ‘Arnold Rechberg and the Problem of Germany’s Orientation to the West after World War I’.

  23. The woman who sheltered Hitler following the failure of his 9 November 1923 attempt to seize power was not Hanfstaengl’s sister, Erna, but his wife, Helene. Hitler was arrested at the Hanfstaengl house at Uffing, Bavaria, two days later. (See Hanfstaengl, op. cit.) A letter from Erna Hanfstaengl has this to say about the ‘Patroness’ reference: ‘I could hardly have been Hitler’s “Patroness” since I never, after 1923, either saw or spoke to him.’

  24. Unity Mitford, cousin by marriage of Winston Churchill and sister-in-law of Oswald Mosley, the English Fascist leader, is described in other sources as having hoped for marriage with Hitler. Reportedly, her attempt at suicide occurred in Munich’s English Garden in September 1939. She died of inflammation of the brain in 1948.

  25. ‘Dass mir hier keener uff den Ofen ruffkommt.’

  26. Theodor Häcker’s journal was published as Tag- und Nachtbücher. 1933–45, Munich, 1947.

  27. Fritz Thyssen, a top German industrialist, supported the Nazis ‘to save Germany from Bolshevism’. He opposed Germany’s launching of war in 1939, emigrated to Switzerland, and then went to France where he was arrested by the Germans following their occupation of France. The Nazis first put him into a mental institution at Babelstadt, then confined him successively in the Oranienburg, Buchenwald, and Dachau concentration camps. The ending of the war meant for him only a change of jailers: he was imprisoned by the Americans. Released finally, he went to Argentina, where he died in 1951. His book, I Paid Hitler, was published in New York and Toronto in 1941.

  28. By ‘Royal Master’ Reck-Malleczewen means Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria.

  29. Hitler talked about the ban on duels and the Strunck affair later. See Hitler’s Table Conversations, Tischgesprache in Fuehrerhauptquartier, 1941–42, edited by Henry Picker (Bonn, 1961).

  30. Adolf Ziegler, whom the Nazis awarded their Gold Medal, was named professor of art at the Munich Academy by the Nazis in 1933, and then president of the Reich’s Chamber for the Arts.

  31. Information on a ‘Red Anchor’ band of teenaged resistants who derived from the Haidhausen and Giesing sections of Munich is lacking.

  32. Austrian Chanc
ellor Kurt von Schuschnigg was arrested by the Germans following the Anschluss. He was kept first in the Hotel Metropol in Vienna under SS guard; then in the Gestapo’s Wittelsbach Palace centre in Munich. Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg and Dachau concentration camps followed. After the war, Schuschnigg taught in the US. See ‘Requiem in Red, White and Red’/Austrian Requiem, by Karl Schuschnigg (London, 1947).

  33. The reference to the ‘Jew-hunt staged by Goebbels’ is to the Night of Crystal, 9 November 1938, when Jewish stores were broken into (leaving broken glass littering the pavements, hence the reference), and synagogues all over Germany were set on fire. A German work on the officially sponsored pogrom is Der 9 November 1938. Reichskristallnacht, by Hermann Graml, Bonn, 1953.

  34. Hans Albers, the personification of masculinity to several generations of German women, was an actor and screen star perhaps most familiar to the rest of the world for his part in The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich.

  35. By ‘D.’ Reck-Malleczewen may be referring to the legal officer of the Bavarian Infantry Regiment in which Hitler served as courier in the First World War, a Dr Diess. A German work on this period of Hitler’s life is Der Mann, der Feldherr werden wollte, by Fritz Wiedemann, (Velbert, 1964).

  36. Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class in World War I. Wiedemann says he earned it.

  37. In the course of the abortive coup of 1923, Hitler badly injured his left shoulder. As noted, above, he then fled to Uffing.

  38. Hitler never lived on Barerstrasse in Munich, but the Nazi organ, the Völkische Beobachter, was published on that street.