Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  Thus the Wilhelms led our society into the disastrously shapeless kind of thing in which men of learning became racing-drivers, bankers went in for breeding thoroughbreds, and cavalry lieutenants became absorbed in their industrial stocks . . . and so lost themselves in the mob, became as faceless as the rest under the spell of the only banner that could have held this amalgam together: materialism . . . and thus sank into a godforsaken troglodytism, which I believe has presaged certain destruction for a civilisation since the days of Caracalla. The ideal of the classless society as preached by Hitler is postulated on the limbless organism. But I believe that Nature, which in its very beginnings was form itself, abhors nothing as much as the amorphous.

  I am writing this in a Berlin hotel which is about as quiet and discreet as a howitzer. At this moment, a lady on the floor below whose name probably is Dolinski and who is certainly of the type I described earlier, is giving all the details of her divorce to her friend at the other end of the telephone. The windows are open, and all the spicy details are as though implanted in the still, hot air. Finally, whether I want to or not I learn what drove Herr Dolinski prematurely out of Madame’s arms. I hear it, and recall a parade of the League of German Maidens which I saw go past in the city yesterday . . . a procession of bowlegs and broad hips marching between the ecstatically ugly façades of a city in love with its own ugliness, an exhibition of joylessness, a declaration of war on everything that ‘comforts and pleases in life’.

  Pondering the great changes of the nineteenth century, and with this procession of females still in my mind, I realise that the moment, seventy years ago, Germany in its infatuation with prosperity agreed to let Prussia be its organiser and procurer, it did not merely go to the dogs—much worse, it went to the Dolinskis, who inhabit this place, as well. Prussia is a state patched together out of bits and pieces. It was never intended to be a nation. To hold together the monstrous structure formed this way, the Prussians had to put all their energies into their military machine . . . as a result, no middle class, no patrician class, and no true caste of the learned could ever come into being, and therefore, immediately following the disappearance of that oligarchy of mixed Vandal-Kashube antecedents described by Fontane, there rose to the surface that thoroughly un-German, that thoroughly colonial type which, when the men of the Holy Roman Empire were building cathedrals, was still busy tattooing green lizards around its belly button. The Elbe is a furrow in the landscape deeply significant in German history, and there are good reasons why certain species of birds and plants have never crossed from the left to the right bank of this river. For here, between the Elbe and the Vistula, is to be found the home of the Madonnas with the bowlegs previously mentioned; here, the breeding ground of this race with its eternal cry for more, the reservoir of all mass-man’s repressed drives, the hatchery for all treaty breaches and the robberies masquerading as acts of state which Herr Hitler has committed these last five years—with no one daring to contradict him when he gave these as proof of his statesmanship.

  Here, then, is where the preference for the provisional and second-rate was born. This disposition toward false-front ersatz can be seen even in the baroque trappings of the kings of Prussia, the gilded plaster of their palaces, accompanied by the demand, backed up by a gun, to please, if you will, be so kind as to accept all this as solid and definitive and fully valid. This, then, is where the eternal ‘More! More!’ originated, and the deification of the threadbare, the cult of the ugly, the gigantic fetishism which placed the statue of an ‘iron-will Hindenburg’ so that it towered over the trees of the Königsplatz; this is the place where the eye-bulging hatred against everybody who had more originated, the ceaseless eyeing of other people’s property, the readiness to sudden banditry, and the drive to make this Prussian cult-of-the-threadbare into the state religion of Germany, and following that, of the entire world. And they will, if the other peoples prove recalcitrant, use their guns!

  I recall the story of the corporal who told his infantrymen at the entrance to the church not to lose valuable time in ‘sitting around, dozing’ but to hurry and get done (‘From the altar to the organ and from the priest out the door!’) so as to use the time to better advantage elsewhere. This kind of thing was tolerable as long as a great and completely Machiavellian king used the army ‘pour l’honneur de l’épée.’ But armed might in the service of I.G. Farben—the waging of war for the propagation of economy-in-construction, rayon stockings, and the ersatz suit—is to become the scourge and plague of the world, the odium generis humani, in a world of abundance and plenty. Germany turned ugly, and malignant, and the centre of the disasters that have been coming now at twenty-five-year intervals, the day Bismarck established a Reich, and a nation began to be ruled by a colony—Prussia.

  And here I touch on the central political problem affecting Europe today. After the Prussian oligarchy—which was, at the very least, aware that it had responsibilities—disappeared, the men of Versailles were guilty of the incredible stupidity of dismembering Austria. After that, all that was needed was for Prussian greed to combine with a political condottiere—and the catastrophe which all of us knew was in the making was upon us.

  In southern Germany, the bitter battle being fought below the surface against the Nazis is at the same time a battle against Prussianisation, and a defence of Germany’s natural structure. This may be a German problem today, but tomorrow it will be a matter for Europe and the world to resolve. The time is fast approaching when Europe will have to decide whether it will let itself be engulfed by the gray wave, or finally defend its own heart from the drive for power of Prussianism.

  9 September 1937

  Most likely on the basis of a denunciation, the Gestapo appeared suddenly at the home of Theodor Häcker,[26] the theologian, who is keeping a journal, and made a search for the manuscript. One man actually picked up the document and was just about to read it when someone asked him a question, and the Gestapo man was distracted and put the manuscript down unread. Meanwhile, how poor Häcker—whose nerves are not too strong, anyway—must have trembled for his head as the seconds and minutes passed!

  My friends have taken the occasion to give me warning about my own writings. Driven as I am by my own inner necessity, 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.

  And this is how we now live, my vanished friends. Do you, who left Germany four and more years ago, have any idea of how completely without legal status we are, of what it is to be threatened with denunciation at any time by the next hysteric who comes along?

  Strange to think of you, strange now to hear your voices through the ether and over the ocean depths, coming from a world so long since barred to us! Strange to happen into places where just a few years ago we used to talk. I miss you, miss you even though, as was true for most of you, you were opponents of mine and politically on the other side—oh, believe me, finally it is the lack of all opposition and any dissension whatsoever, and the deadly monotony that results, that makes life here so unbearable.

  And yet, you will at first no longer understand us, who were your friends, when you come back to take up again the threads of our former ties. Or will you actually be able to understand that flight into civilisation was more comfortable than remaining at the dangerous outpost, an illegal watcher among the barbarians? Will you be able to grasp what it has meant to spend these long years with heart filled with hate, hate at lying down, and hate at rising, hate through the long hours of bad dreams—and all of this without rights under the law, without the smallest compromise, without a single ‘Heil Hitler’, a single attendance at a meeting—while through it all the stigma of illegality sits upon one’s brow? Will we still speak the same language when this is over? Will you, surrounded as you have been all these years by all the appurt
enances of civilisation . . . grasp that the deathlike loneliness of our lives and the misery-laden air of the catacombs we have been breathing for so long have made our eyes terribly clear-sighted? May it not be, in the first moments after your return, that the visions these eyes can now see in the distance will frighten you?

  What about the world of ideas of 1789—the world which surrounds you, and which is still the basis for your lives and thought, as self-evident to you as the fact that a crab has its protecting shell? Understand me: we, here, know full well that all of this—encyclopaedism, the whole process begun with the Renaissance of divesting man of his gods—was once a vital way of life. Let no one do me the injustice of holding my visions to be the nightmares of a homo temporis acti, or the hallucinations of one feverish with the plague that surrounds him! But isn’t what we are enduring here simply the final consequence of 1789? Hasn’t the bourgeoisie, which in 1790 began to conceal its seizure of the heritage of power left by the kings with a cry of ‘vive la nation’, shown itself to be a most unstable phenomenon? Didn’t Balzac foretell the Russian, as well as the German, tragedy when he said that ‘there will come a day when the bourgeoisie will hear its Marriage of Figaro played?’ Didn’t St Just so long ago announce the coming of this insane totalitarianism of the state? And doesn’t Girondism reach its final flower in the Krupps, the Vögelers, Röchlings and Associates, as cynically, throwing aside every restraint, they make themselves the centre of all things German, the focal point of German society—militant Girondism, devoid of all basic ethical content, sworn enemy of men of faith, ideological victor of Waterloo even though defeated on the battlefield?

  As far as National Socialism is concerned, I am sure that there will be agreement in seeing in it the arch-destroyer of a nation which has always tended towards the magical and unknown, and none of you, my old friends, will argue with me when I say that in 1500 there was a German nation, but no nationalism, whereas today, when our eyes are supposed to light up at every trouser button ‘Made in Germany’, we have the reverse: nationalism, and no nation. We will certainly be in agreement that this plutocratic government with its Hitler placed in the saddle by Herr Thyssen[27] and his friends reveals itself, in its complete demoralisation of the masses, to be nothing more than one last desperate attempt to prolong the nineteenth century. . . .

  Oh, no, there will be no lack of agreement when we again meet on a total rejection of the German present! But will we still be in agreement when we come to talk about the future? You will have just returned from a civilisation which is securely based for the present; will you still understand, or will you turn violently away from us when we tell you what we now see:

  The Hitlerism is only a symptom, indicating a deep disturbance of cosmic proportions in the world; that we have now come to the end of five centuries of rationalism and free thought; that in the area occupied by mankind, a new factor, the irrational, has again made its appearance.

  Shall we, whose eyes have been opened by our long martyrdom, overlook the signs of world crisis . . . the writing on the wall in the palaces of human rationality you thought were so indestructible? Is it really an accident that precisely in the exact sciences the bases are shaking? That the laws of gravity are now said to be ‘macrophysically’ correct, only? That by the latest measurements of the speed of light, astrophysics has suddenly transferred the earth, that tiny ball of yesterday, into the centre of a circumscribed cosmos? And that, scenting the bankruptcy of the last five centuries, the philosophers have come up with a shabby ‘as if’ theory to prop up what little has been left standing amid the ruins?

  I believe that mankind’s great spiritual evolutions basically affect physical life on earth, and that if the demoralisation of its inhabitants continues, the planet will be destroyed by its own non-viability, and crack into pieces in some kind of cosmic catastrophe. But what I see coming is not basically a cosmic, but a historical phenomenon: the inevitable catastrophic finale to mass-thought, and thus to mass-man, which is in the making here and which now I see on the horizon in all its frightfulness and all its promise.

  What else can the meaning be of this pervasive feeling of total bankruptcy, this secret fear and trembling like the feeling which precedes a great storm, of these spiritually empty people? We live in a gigantic spiritual vacuum. At any moment, awareness of the vacuum, and of horrifying chaos, could bring cataclysm. Massman, by mental and physical necessity, can only exist in his self-made womb of corruption and troglodytism. This is as necessary to him as mud to a pig. But what will he do if tomorrow his slimy cocoon is swept away?

  I do not doubt that the contemporaries of Caracalla lived in a similar spiritual eclipse. I am well aware how badly these poor lines fall short of bearing true witness to this deepest degradation into which man has ever fallen. Recently, following the rain of Nazi bombs on unhappy Spain, I read again Rilke and Stefan George . . . and laid them down again in the knowledge that all that I once had loved has become faded and mouldy in the air we have been breathing for years now, and that though Rilke is honest and deeply moving, his is only a tired game with dead forms; while George, in the red glare of a world on fire, is revealed as a pretentious poseur.

  Doesn’t the artist who claims that he can compose a string quartet now, or build a cathedral that can be something more than a blasphemy in stone, stand revealed before us as a liar and a fraud? As artists, are we not all standing before a wall, awaiting the appearance of the invisible hand striking against the wall—until the hand does appear? And what are the words, ‘The end of the world is at hand’, which Dostoyevsky wrote in his journal seventy years ago, but a presentiment of the apocalyptic horsemen now thundering down upon us, and a prophecy of how utterly lost we have become?

  No, I am not a millenarian, and a passionate belief in life’s regenerative powers makes me believe that the catastrophe I foretell will only be one more of many this planet has already seen. Nevertheless, I have come to the conclusion that the somatisation of life, which has been going on since the Renaissance, and which has been made complete these last years, has increasingly destroyed the balance between body and mind—and that without this balance physical life on the earth is impossible.

  Doctors who attended the athletes at the Olympics of hallowed memory last year told me that menstrual disturbances in the girls and sexual insufficiency among the men of apparently boundless vigour of this extremely sports-minded generation were almost something like the rule (and not merely among the ‘champions’ but among the average participants). There could be no better proof that the somatisation of life destroys life itself. Gasoline, as the basis for all motorised happiness, has contributed more to the inner decay of mankind than alcohol.

  And as regards mass-man—to be found in the uniform of a general or in the form of a university professor more often, almost, than in the overalls of a lathe-operator; mass-man who in his explosive reproductiveness, his corruption of all organic growth, and his biological instability finds a parallel only in the entirely similar cancer cell—his life cycle has already been completed once on this globe. Within two hundred years, bustling Rome had shrunk to the size of a provincial town, and the hermae and monumental structures of the Forum were half lost in fields of wheat.

  The technology and mechanisation so essential to the biological existence of mass-man may not be affected by the kind of reversal in mode of life which we know happened in the agony of the ancients. But the sediment of stenographers now spreading over the earth . . . the conglomeration of superfluous bureaucrats sending out totally useless questionnaires to paralyse areas which are still productive—they will not escape, if only because the rise of ‘national’ industries in former markets will make it impossible for Europe to go on exporting its surpluses; and it will become impossible to sustain rabbit-like reproduction.

  But truly I do not see how, after the breakdown of all known forms, and the emergence of a new conception—which I foresee—technology and mechanisation can escape being releg
ated to the dust heap, or at least to the periphery of life. Only the ‘New Adam’, a savage who by an accident still has a white skin; who today uses all this equipment with an unconcern bordering on impudence; to whom it never occurs that one must replenish the thought-world from which all this technology derives; only mass-man can doubt its destructibility. If only to maintain his own existence, this anonymous mass thing takes refuge in a world into which no question of the possible insufficiency of this can possibly enter. Any number of once great civilisations may lie in ruins about mass-man: in his world, the four-cylinder engine is a piece of eternity. In this atmosphere, filled with sweaty faith in progress, man’s knowledge has been steadily widened from the nature-philosophers of antiquity up to and including the most up-to-date college instructor. And if we can all just manage to live long enough, we will reach the point—thanks to this uninterrupted progress of mankind—when another college instructor drags His last heavenly secret out of God.

  Ortega y Gasset sees in the dull matter-of-factness with which the ‘up-and-coming young man of today’ takes for granted the existence of the radio and the electric engine a clear indication of detachment from reality. He rightly quotes Weyl, the scientist, according to whom ‘the apathy of a single generation would suffice to destroy the intellectual climate essential for the survival of technology.’