[This book has been translated into English under the title Diary of a Man in Despair.]Born into a noble Prussian family down on its luck, Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen (1884-1945) was a failed officer and a failed medical doctor and so wrote articles for newspapers and books for the mass market in order to keep his head above water. But beginning in May, 1936, he secretly wrote a diary in which he eloquently and dangerously vented his hate for the Nazis and those who helped them to power - the big German industrialists, his own Junker class, and the petite bourgeoisie - and expressed his despair at the sight of the German people acceding to the lawless, ruthless and shameless activities of the Nazis in power since January, 1933. The few signs of active resistance from the Communists, from idealists like the Weisse Rose,(*) and from efforts in the military to assassinate Hitler alleviate for moments his despairing vituperation of the nearly unspeakable decay and collaboration he saw around him. But only for moments. Many lovers of German culture have asked how could it happen, how could this "people of philosophers and poets" be taken in by this "böhmischen Gefreiten" and his laughing gallery of government ministers who soon changed the disdainful sneers into cries of fear? There have been many answers given to this question, and, after the fact, many books written by Germans to excuse or to whitewash their own collaboration. This book excuses no one, including the other European powers who stood by and watched until Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland.One is simply mesmerized as Reck-Malleczewen makes his unwhitewashed reports from inside Nazi Germany about the increasingly thorough control of all aspects of German life by the Nazi party and its domestic security apparatus and the increasing unwillingness of Germans to utter any objections of any sort. He, and anyone else with eyes, clearly saw the huge ramping up of the military-industrial complex at the end of 1937. And there are many passages of perfect clairvoyance like this one, written directly after the violent Anschluss of Austria to the Drittes Reich in March, 1938:All around, the other states shrug their shoulders while watching this miserable rape of a small state; no one grabs the criminal by the collar in time and all seem to want to wait until out of the yet vulnerable snake's egg the great cobra will crawl. But I see the day coming when one will remember this politics of cowardly passivity. ... I pose the question already now and see the day coming when I, after the unavoidable Second World War, will pose it a second time. [my translation]Reck-Malleczewen surprises with a bitter humor which caused me to laugh many times. The text is also full of unexpected stories of all kinds, not the least of which is the one about the former German officer, who, standing before a firing squad, turns around and drops his britches and a load right in front of the speechless executioners...Reck-Malleczewen's critique of Nazi Germany is that of the stock conservative elite, not that of a progressive democrat. It is, therefore, more than anything an aesthetic critique. The Nazis are crude, vulgar, physically repulsive lower middle class persons who have no appreciation for culture and breeding. And though he has a paternalistic sympathy for the honest, hard working proletariat, there is no sign of any real social conscience in this book. Because of this, the editor of the progressive weekly Der Spiegel wrote an editorial upon the re-publication in 1966(**) of Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten to remind his readers that there was an abyss separating Reck-Malleczewen's critique of Nazism from that of the modern German progressives (in the '60's the Social Democrat Party was still socialist).The last entry is dated October, 1944, when the German armies are being thrown back on all fronts, and is full of reports of people being arrested or simply disappearing. Since he did not attend a call up of the Volkssturm(***) because he, a 60 year old man, was experiencing angina pectoris, he was arrested for Zersetzung der Wehrmacht, a crime which entailed the guillotine. He does not explain how he came home to write the entry...Later in 1944, Reck-Malleczewen was denounced again to the Nazis; the second one took. He died in Dachau in February, 1945. Somehow, the Nazis did not find his diary; Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten was first published in 1947 in the midst of Europe's ruins.(*) A group of students and one professor at the University of Munich who wrote and distributed leaflets in 1942 and 1943 calling the German people to oppose the tyranny of the Nazis. Nearly all were arrested and executed by the guillotine. In at least one case it has been documented that the Nazis sent the widow a bill for 600 Reichsmarks for "Abnutzung des Fallbeils" ("wear of the guillotine"). (**) This is the edition I read. For this edition a historian checked all of Reck-Malleczewen's assertions and allusions, finding nearly all of them to be supported by historical documents. Details, corrections and sources are provided in 10 small print pages at the back of the book.(***) The people's militia of the very old and very young that was going to do what Germany's professionally trained armies were not capable of doing. Rating http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/918...
This is an interesting book not only from the setting (Germany from 1936-1944), but also from the unique perspective within Germany. The author is a conservative and former monarchist, who sits in his estate and rails against the 'Prussian' character of the new state, but also the dehumanizing effects of money and industrialization, how it will destroy farms to build armaments factories. He also has a snobbish disdain not just for the greedy herds of bourgeoisie which he calls 'mass-men', but also the parliaments of swine in the Nazi government. He comes up with vivid names and insults for them - 'typists and salesmen pretending to have court intrigue'. Nazi ideology is a 'colossal self-deception'. The Party Members are 'Termites', 'Bandits', 'Eunuchs', an 'ant heap'. Hitler is a 'Teetotaling Alexander', a 'vegetable Genghis Khan'.This book is also of interest for its arguments against historical cliches - for example, the old lie that fascist governments are efficient - due to wartime rationing, the food is like sawdust, the streets are empty and dirty, the clothes are like rags, the buildings are falling apart, the Hitler Youth and SS act like drunken gangsters and many people loathe the propaganda and Jew-bashing news they receive. Most covertly listen to the British anyway. Herr Reck also writes down the rumors he hears, which are also of interest. Some are very clearly wrong, but the majority are only too prescient. Apparently there was information on the harsh conditions in prison camps as early as the late 1930s, and of the mass killings on the Eastern Front by 1942. After 1942 or so, his diaries take a more forlorn turn. After Stalingrad, he knew that the end would soon come for the Nazis, but it would be immensely painful for his own beloved Germany. He salutes von Stauffenberg's final attempt to kill Hitler in 1944, but regrets that it was too little, and far too late. He knows the government was powerful, and that people disappear for saying the wrong things, or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.It is not a diary in the traditional sense, as it is not daily, nor was it intended to be private. Instead it is a chronicle of his time, and a warning to future generations about tyranny. I quote one of his best lines: "The Nazis could not yet send poems to the concentration camp." They tried, however, as the author died of a shot to the back of the neck in 1945, but this work endures after the tyrants have been buried.
Do You like book Diary Of A Man In Despair (2015)?
A conservative German predicts the events of the end of the war with creepy prescience. Startling scenes of the aftermath of the Hamburg firestorm as experienced by average Germans. Compelling analyses of the degradation of the average Nazi and the class structure that brought a regime of insane brutes to power. Beautiful passages describing his pure hate for the Nazis and the Nazis pure hate for everyone. Powerful evidence that the average German knew full well what awaited deportees at the end of the train ride to the East. You will sit in your armchair and stare into the middle distance for a few moments after reading the last page.
—Kim
A great book by a true member of German aristocracy: his diary from 1936-1944. Here's a sample from the year 1937. On the way home I heard the latest scandal. The first year that they came to power, the Nazis proclaimed that duelling belonged to the natural rights of every man - a consistent extension of the philosophy of 1789 - and with much fanfare announced that all classes of society now had state approval for this method of solving differences. Any difference of opinion between master and servant over badly polished shoes could be resolved with pistols.But the very first duesl held under the new dispensation has struck down one of their own - and by an ancient law, not the worst of the lot. Herr Roland Strunck, a journalist of a calibre that exceeded their usual level of a schoolmaster gone beserk....Strunck, then, discovered one day that a fellow Party member, a young lout, was carrying out Nazi tenets on sexual unrestraint by sleeping with Strunck's daughter. Hew called the fellow out and was killed. The duelling regulation has now been rescinded. The danger that a man may have to received his chauffeur's seconds becuase he complained of his badly washed car has been set aside.It's not all so jolly, I warn you.
—Sam Schulman
I have hated you in every hour that goes by, I hate you so that I would happily give my life for your death, and happily go to my own doom if only I could witness yours, take you with me into the depths.Very interesting perspective on the National Socialist rule of Germany under Hitler - the author is a self-styled conservative aristocratic reactionary monarchist, a perspective you don't usually get in anti-Hitler writings. According to him, Germany suffers from the rise of the "mass-man", the cog in the wheel without "Selbstreflexion", without care for his past or culture:Mass-man moves, robotlike, from digestion to sleeping with his peroxide-blonde females, and produces children to keep the termite heap in continued operation. He repeats word for word the incantations of the Great Manitou, denounces or is denounced, dies or is made to die, and so goes on vegetating. And there is not even a blush when he is confronted by the legacy of his fathers, by the monuments of a noble past, by the crowning achievements of his own culture.He hates Hitler and the NSDAP for their "Prussianness" (Reck styles himself as a anti-Prussian Bavarian, which still has the wonderful "Saupreissn", pig Prussians), their loud, blind and empty core, he hates the all-encompassing belief technology, he thinks that parliaments are chaotic and useless, he loves the Scholls - both for knowing how to live and knowing how to die - but he dislikes the soldiers around the Stauffenberg plot for doing too little too late, after the military itself allowed Hitler to rise to power.The annotation in the NYRB edition does a good job of picking up when Reck repeats unsubstantiated rumors as facts, and the afterword on Reck's "game of the self" is splendid. However it doesn't translate (or even note) some peculiar German turns of the phrase like "trained in Radau", which doesn't mean a city but more "trained in noisemaking".Recommended for: People interested in the Third Reich; people who're sick of reading "the usual" about this time and would like a unique perspectiveP.S.: How can it be that I can easily buy the English translation of this in Australia, but there's simply no ebook in German? As usual, German publishing lags behind the times.
—Philipp
