Diary of a Man in Despair

It's hard to believe this isn't a work of fiction. This guy is filled with hate and rage and loathing as he watches the German-speaking people descend into madness. Incredible writing, powerful ideas. Get it.

The title is a calumny. As his translator, Paul Rubens, points out, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen was a prophet - not in the vulgar sense of one who predicts future events, but a prophet after the fashion of Jeremiah, William Blake and Dostoyevsky: one who comments on the present from the perspective of the Most High. As such, even when his own death is imminent, Reck most certainly does not despair. Like the three individuals mentioned above, he is angered, disgusted, saddened and horrified by what he sees around him; his journal is filled with images of Calvary, the plague, and the Apocalypse; yet he continually strives to see his own and his country's ordeal as a time of suffering and repentance which must be endured to make way for a new and better world. None of which is to say that his thinking is "mystical" in the sense of being vague or escapist; indeed, the immense value of Reck's diary, both as literature and as a historical document, lies in its brilliant combination of sharp observation and lucid analysis. Although he makes the all-too-common error of lumping in the plotters of 20 July 1944 with the many opportunists who tried to dissociate themselves from the regime as defeat began to loom, Reck's analytical passages offer as clear and concrete a picture of the corruption underlying Hitler's Germany as any historian I have encountered. Telling details of life in the Third Reich - the omnipresent thuggery and tale-bearing, the forced barracks-gymnasium atmosphere, the all-pervasive lies and propaganda - spring out of every page through tartly written anecdotes and vignettes. The peculiar detestability of the Nazi functionaries - frustrated schoolteachers and jumped-up mailmen posing as masters of the world - is described and analysed with perception and admirable loathing. This elderly, conservative, royalist aristocrat - a member of a class who, because they did not support the Weimar Republic, are too often labelled supporters of the Nazis - displays a courage, intelligence, breadth of culture and (I cannot emphasise it enough) a faith which makes his journal as moving a human document as the more famous diary of Anne Frank.

It is true that Reck has a sense of class superiority to the Nazi's but that does not obscure his central point--he knew they were monsters--and he died for that. Counts for something you know. The invective is superb and more over Reck recognizes real resistance like the Scholl's (were they aristocrat?) and damns the generals assisanation plot as a an opportunistic move. Furthermore The Nazis crimes were pandemic--the annhilhation of the Jews, but also gypsies--and if one is making measurements which seems to me silly--the obliteration of 20,0000 soviet citizens. By the other reviewers logic if the destruction of the Jews is the question by which Germans will be judged, then Stalin becomes a heroe for saving the bulk of Soviet Jewry --sending them behind the Ural mountains--I don't think I want to go that route. It also explains why Israel refuses to make Dietrich Bonhoeffer a "rightious gentile" which is a scandal.No The Nazis were monsters such total monsters that any costly resistance derserves honor. This is the best anti-Nazi book theis Jew has ever read.

If, like me, you view the nazi era as a reaction against modernity, this is a book that will cause severe cognitive dissonance.It's Written by a member of the old Prussian aristocracy whose biggest problem with the nazis appears to be their populism. It's laden with classist terms like "canaille" and "mass-man" to the extent that he almost appears to blame german workers for their own alienation which led to the development of nazism. This is not the only dubious historical claim: he seems to believe that ndudstrailisationwas responsble fro the two world wars and not the other way around. Nevertheless, there are enough fascinating insights to make the book worthy of your attention, and it's worth bearing in mind that he wasn't writing with the same sense of historical distanciation that we have. Just remember, the worst thing about the nazis wasn't that they were boorish illiterate charlatans but that they killed 6 million jews and almost brought an end to western civilisation.