So. I have spoken. All the best.
Your X.X.
A letter written by a thug, an escaped convict? No, that letter was written by a young man with lively blue eyes and the irresistible laugh of a boy, a good fellow who in civilian life was entirely harmless . . . a young man of good Rhineland middle-class stock, of a certain tradition, of certain pretensions to culture. But this is the result of all these painless victories and this ‘National-Socialist piety’. The ‘crate’ may be a little ‘scratched’, but a man never hesitates about flying right past God’s nose, announcing: ‘I will not let go; bless me. If you don’t, we will come with an entirely new, German coldness, and put a number of angels against the wall.’
This is the meaning of these victories. This is the tone, this is the pimps’ jargon which now croaks out of every loudspeaker and flows from the pens of the newspaper thugs-in-uniform. And do not dare to contradict, or it’s the Gestapo for you. And children denounce their parents, and brothers, if there’s a little something in it for them, deliver up their sisters, and all in all, what is right is what is useful for Germany. . . .
And the effect to be achieved by this total war is the total flooding of the earth with this new generation of Germans, and if not enough new Germans are produced . . . why, there is even provision for this eventuality in the efficiency of the German order.
A young couple in Munich recently discovered that a defect of vision, with recurrent blindness, seemed to be hereditary in the man’s family. The young man had himself sterilised forthwith. But, since as good Germans, they were obligated to have children, the husband unflinchingly sent his wife to the Fount of Youth.[41] The Fount is an SS organisation, with offices in the remains of the synagogue on Lenbachplatz.
Available at the offices of the Fount is an album of the photos of guaranteed-pedigree, Nordic blonde SS men. The client chooses one of these according to taste, and then indicates her choice of stud to the Fount official. Soon thereafter the client finds herself pregnant, and in due course the mother of a little Germanic Pan, named Heinz-Dieter or Eike. And this little fellow will grow up to strike down, with a completely new and unusual German coldness, everything which dares to infringe on the New German Order or National Socialism.
All this is taken care of by the Fount of Youth, 13 Lenbachplatz, Munich. Telephone number so-and-so. German blood will out, even out of a brothel!
This is what we have come to, then, and this is the life of a people winning one victory after another.
Frankly, I do not believe there is an ideology behind all this. I believe neither in Founts of Youth nor little Germanic Pans; neither in dragon-killer eyes, nor in cherubic cheeks; neither in the retouched blonde braids of BDM girls demonstratively bouncing off their shoulders (‘Look! See how healthfully country-style we are!’), nor in the drums of the Hitler Youth. I believe neither in the New German Order, nor in this whole Wotan and Germanic gods business—in the midst of a people which is sixty per cent part-Slavic. . . . And the Wotan they are talking about probably came into the world in a Leipzig suburb as the son of a Teutonic-minded fencing instructor, while his Edda will turn out to be a high-school teacher from Schkeuditz, Saxony.
No, based on a perspective gained by many years of watching them, I say that all this comes down to colossal self-deception, behind which lurk all the inclinations of fettered masses: greed and resentment, looseness, and rut, and sexual libertinism, and a complete closing-off of the individual, not just from God but from the gods. The mobs in the cities during the decline of the Roman Empire showed the same drive to be considered a ‘young people’, the same belligerent uproar, the same challenging of other nations; then too, whatever demands were made, the rest of the world must accede, because this is how it is with a young nation!
In actual fact, what we have here are irremediably sick and futureless mass-men, whose ideal is amorphousness, whose ethos is formlessness, and who hate nothing so much as discipline, form, definition. It may very well be that responsibility for all of this is largely to be attributed to the businessmen and industrialists, great and small, of the turn of the century and postwar years, who gave impetus to the process by which this largely uprooted people huddled together to make a mass-man ant heap. It may have seemed to these leaders at that moment that the most satisfactory populace would be a mass of primitives. And the setting up of pseudo ideologies and symbolic pap—Wotan cults amidst the dynamos, kettledrums amidst the loudspeakers, Founts of Youth amidst VD clinics, and monkey-gland doctors—would be the most comfortable way of distracting attention from the real social and economic problems of the times.
In any case, Germany has been sinking deeper and deeper into unreality ever since. . . . It is now completely drugged on its own lies. The cure will be more awful than anything ever seen before in history.
One must hate Germany now, truly and bitterly, in order once again, if only for the sake of its glorious past, to be able later to enfold it in all of one’s love—like a parent with his misguided and unfortunate child.
November 1939
I am writing this in Munich, which is still reeling from the attempted assassination[42] in the Bürgerbraukeller. The newspapers are weeping crocodile tears about the ‘cowardly, murderous gangsters’ who dared attack the ‘greatest German of all time’. But there are, I think, probably no more than a thousand native Munichers who are not dejected because the attempt failed. The journalists joke cynically about their own articles. The official version has it that Otto Strasser placed the bomb for the British Intelligence Service. This has produced loud laughter. No one doubts that the whole display is a bit of pyrotechnics set off by the Nazis themselves. The fireworks cost nearly a dozen lives, but they serve to whip up hatred against the English and to provide Herr Hitler with the halo of a martyr.
I knew Otto Strasser only through his letters. Despite his Bavarian origins, he began calling himself a ‘Prussian Jacobin’ in the confusion of 1932, and pursued me throughout the entire summer of that year with indecent political proposals. His brother, Gregor, who was killed in the Röhm Putsch, was an honest chap, though he liked to hear himself talk. He came to see me several times in the late autumn of 1932, when it seemed that his star was rising, and I have him to thank for my knowledge of what happened behind the scenes as 1932 passed into 1933. I will never forget something he said that November, when the vote in the elections had gone against the Nazis, for the first time, after all their triumphs.
‘He is talking about suicide to frighten his apostles,’ Strasser said. ‘He is such a hysteric that they need not take him seriously, and so he will not carry out his threat unfortunately. But it is all or nothing for him now. If I know him, he will make one desperate attempt to get into power. If this fails and he does not get his way, he is finished. He will burst into pieces like a frog.’
Gregor Strasser paid with his life, in the Röhm Putsch, for his opposition. I understand his severed and rotting corpse was found in a cornfield. It is typical of the spiritual state of the German people that when his children were told of the death of their father, the reaction of one was: ‘He (Hitler) had father shot, but still, he is our Führer.’ The wife of Strasser’s friend Glaser[43] (Glaser was killed at the same time in his apartment on Munich’s Amalienstrasse) had a very similar comment to make about the death of her husband.
I have spent a week at Hechendorf on the Pilsensee, visiting my friend Clemens von Franckenstein. Just two weeks before the war, Clé conducted a concert in London, and was the guest of Winston Churchill. Those were restoring days for me in the house of my old friend, with the lake melancholy in the late autumn. We talked about the letters, just published, which Stephan George wrote to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and the incredible arrogance they revealed. I told Clé the details of an audience with George, when the writer, enthroned in an elevated armchair between two silver candlesticks, had asked me for my views on Aristotle: and how, two hours later, I saw King Stephan in Heidelberg, fat dripping from
his mouth as he tore with truly Gargantuan zeal into his roast ribs of beef and sauerkraut in the second-class waiting room of the railroad station.
And we talked about the curious and almost unbelievable letter in which Herr Hans Pfitzner complained to German theatre directors—that he, the German master, was being neglected, while Verdi, that ‘composer of brutal and blood-soaked works’, was constantly being played. . . .
An interesting comparison: Pfitzner, that ponderous, amateurish composer of amusing music, and Verdi . . . that he dared to name himself in the same breath and on the same piece of paper with a musical giant whose music streamed forth as effortlessly as his breathing!
We talked for a long time about Pfitzner, about the rose-coloured paper flowers which he caused to rain onto the opera stage in his Rose vom Liebesgarten, and about the poison in the second act of his Palestrina. I sat in at one of the endless rehearsals for the latter at the Munich Hoftheater. Paul Gräner noticed Pfitzner slinking about the theatre, eyeing the seated spear-carriers, singers, and assorted supernumeraries, with his nasty school-teacher’s look. ‘He is writing down the name of everybody who laughs,’ Gräner said.
Pfitzner also had a habit of changing instrumentalists’ music. Once he found, above music written for the oboe, the word ‘garbage’. He rushed to the director and demanded the immediate dismissal of the musician. It hardly helped when the oboist was punished with a fine of just five marks ‘for the benefit of the pension fund’.
A violinist at the Berlin Opera told me that recently Pfitzner, having conducted a Verdi aria, at a concert, interrupted the spontaneous applause, saying, ‘Do not laugh. It is only organ-grinder music.’ It is entirely logical that Pfitzner, that painstakingly mediocre musical watchmaker, should hate the endlessly bountiful talent of a Verdi with the virulence of a dwarf.
I have known Clé for almost thirty years . . . ever since those brilliant days when he was named director of the Royal Theatre, under the reign of the old Regent. The way the Nazis removed him from this office in 1934 is instructive. One day, Herr Christian Weber[44] arose in the Munich City Council and declared that the Munich Opera could no longer be considered a culturally significant institution, and that changes must be made. As evidence of the present spiritual state of the German people, I provide herewith a comparative summation of the critic and the object of his criticism. . . .
Herr Clemens von Franckenstein
Career: Composer of operas in the repertoires of various opera houses and known as a conductor throughout the world. Dismissed from his post.
Address: A small and modestly furnished villa in the Westpol section of Munich.
Herr Christian Weber
Career: Prior to delivering his judgement on the state of the Munich Opera, bouncer at the Blue Boar tavern; convicted several times of assault. As a crony of Hitler, now, president of the Munich Racing Association, and owner of a flourishing whorehouse on Senefelderstrasse, Munich.
Address: The Munich Residenz, in palatial surroundings occupied by Pope Pius VI in 1782 . . .
As a further note on the Third Reich, the following is now forbidden by the Führer’s orders:[45]
1. Discussion of the private life, past or present, of high Nazi officials.
2. Any presentation of factual evidence before a court in a criminal case which might possibly cast an unfavourable light on one of these newly created demigods.
But in the Public Defamer this verse appears:
The grain has gone to seed,
Transformed are the nations,
Our lives are a degradation
While the bad boys laugh.
What has happened before
Has become true once more:
The good have disappeared,
The bad are everywhere.
Once this misery is
Broken as is ice,
People will speak of it
As of the Black Death.
Then the boys on the moor
Will make a figure of straw,
Will turn pain to delight,
And the old horror into light.
This poem, written by old Gottfried Keller in a moment of almost uncanny pre-vision of things to come, is the most popular of Keller’s ballads in Germany today. Everyone knows it, everyone reads it aloud—as a matter of fact, I heard it at Steinicke’s Tavern in Schwabing, read by old Steinicke himself to his astonished customers. The Gestapo is in a fury, but it cannot send a poem to a concentration camp, nor even stop its circulation. We have not yet come to where we can be forbidden to listen to a ballad by Keller.
January 1940
Unity Mitford, of whom I have spoken before, has committed suicide. She tried first to shoot herself in a Munich hotel. But she only managed to wound herself. Then, taken back to London, she was more successful with poison and died there. It was the most sensible thing the lady, who saw herself as the Queen of Germany alongside our Adonis, could have done. Seriously, and with all due respect for the dead, male hysterics do quite enough damage when they get into history. But females who manage to get up on the heights are even worse. And worst of all among them is the would-be saviour type. We have enough of this species, titled ‘Nazi-esses’ by the man in the street. England has another class of this genus, a type of female who clutches Herr Gandhi’s white loincloth. The English should be thankful that there is one fewer, at least.
In the interim, we have a new scandal making the rounds in Munich. This one concerns Herr Fischer,[46] ‘Managing Director’ of Herr Hitler’s very own Operettenhaus theatre on the Gärtnerplatz. Fischer is also a protégé of Gauleiter Wagner,[47] and as such is richly hated by Eberstein,[48] the Munich police chief, who is Wagner’s deadly enemy. . . . Herr Fischer dined recently with an extremely young lady in the Regina Hotel, and slyly reserved a double room for the night. They went upstairs around midnight. . . . Shortly thereafter, a piercing cry for help rang out down the floor. Everyone rushed to the scene, and two young men from the adjoining rooms dashed inside. They found the young lady wearing pyjamas, in a state of considerable disarray, while Herr Fischer wore nothing but his ring. The maiden exclaimed tearfully that though she was ‘not quite fifteen’, Herr Fischer had tried to rape her, and she then proceeded to describe Herr Fischer to his face in terms used especially in the Giesing suburb of Munich.
The two men who had come to the rescue now revealed themselves to be members of the Gestapo, and Herr Fischer was arrested on the basis of the girl’s cry and her ‘tender age’. The rest I was told by the owner of the Regina: the girl and the Gestapo agents were all under orders from Eberstein, who hoped in this way to compromise and eliminate at least one of his enemy’s followers; and this ass promptly sauntered into the neat little trap. He is now supposed to appear at the prosecuting attorney’s office, and after that to be whisked off the scene, but I doubt that this will happen. Almost certainly, he will rise corklike to the surface of this rich brew of sewage and blood and tears again. Suddenly there he will be, rejuvenated and cleansed of sin. And the whole process will take as little time as it did to rehabilitate the head of the Nazis’ motor transport corps, Oldenbourg,[49] who was supposed to go to jail for profiteering in cognac.
Herr Julius Streicher,[50] the Third Reich’s great helden-tenor of anti-Semitism, was convicted by a jury of his Gauleiter peers for having taken bribes from rich Nuremberg Jews. Rumour was that he had been shot, but I was convinced from the start that not a hair of his head would be touched. Just as I predicted, Streicher, who committed perjury a couple of years before the Assumption of Power, came through safe and sound. He now rules over the estate he acquired, God knows how, and he is supposed to stay there.
The latest is that the Great Man himself now has a mistress, named Eva Braun. Of course, we all know what the circumstances are, and the lady should really be described as a maitresse en titre. She has been installed in one of the luxury villas erected on the Obersalzberg by her lover, close enough to be accessible at any time. There she p
lays at being First Lady of the Third Reich, if not Empress, dispenses chastisement and grace with fine impartiality, and is much sought after for her good offices by suppliants threatened by concentration camp. A prankish official who eavesdropped on a long-distance telephone conversation between the two of them has reported that Hitler figuratively cried on the blonde bosom of his girlfriend about the huge quantities of hormones and injections of vitamins being put into him. Nota bene: there is a complete harem of young girls on the Obersalzberg, who attend on Great Caesar exactly as their forerunners did on Bockelson. Like the young David who played on his lyre for Saul when that monarch was depressed, these girls dance for the King—who was formerly resident of a furnished room on Barerstrasse, in Munich—when he feels unhappy.
As with Bockelson, these young girls come almost entirely from families of Prussian nobility. They were procured and are presented in tasteful array before Divine and August Caesar by the procuress Frau von D., who was formerly secretary of the now renamed Herrenklub, in Berlin. Perhaps, when the inevitable cleansing of this Augean stable begins, we might start by rerouting everything belonging to this harem in the direction it should have taken: toward the South American bordellos. . . . And how would it be if at the same time the noble families who have allowed their names to be soiled by membership in the SS, the Gestapo, and the SA were removed forever from the Register of Nobility?
Diary of a Man in Despair Page 9