Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  But the time is 1940, and not 1848. We do not think of St Paul’s Church when asked to associate with the word ‘Germany’; we at once think of ‘Deutsche Bank’ and ‘German Steel Association’. Therefore, let us put the following problem in arithmetic to the nationalists:

  Your up-to-date man, who prides himself on his knowledge of technocracy, will certainly agree that the geopolitical importance of a particular country can be measured by the time it takes to cross it. But new techniques are constantly being used in transportation, and from year to year the time it takes to cross a particular country is lessened. Once, it took twenty-four hours to go from Memel to Lindau. Today, it takes only two. Thus technology has reduced the geopolitical importance of Germany to something comparable, let us say, to that of the one-time Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. And yet, hardheaded realism and materialism are to be laid aside while I view this same geopolitical atom with the same awe and wonder as did the princely Electors being carried to Frankfurt behind a creaking span of oxen! Technology, which is supposedly so logical, thus becomes inconsistent in its very own area!

  Is such a symbiosis of technology and autarchy even possible? Doesn’t technology itself mix different peoples, and standardise their tastes and requirements? What is the point of building an auto to go two hundred kilometres an hour when after an hour’s drive you come to a border post, where a full-bearded Teuton waggles a threatening finger as he forbids further travel as ‘contrary to the interests of the government’?

  I will be glad when the day comes that technology is sent to the Devil, like all the other overrated ideas of mankind. I see a time coming when science, if it does not actually disappear, will be relegated to the periphery of our way of life, and mankind will have a totally different central interest. But because science is now so important, those in control think that this perverse condition can be maintained indefinitely. For example, one region has a surplus of lemons, and another does not have enough. Powerful means of transportation are constantly running back and forth between the two regions—and yet no lemons can be carried from one to the other. If this kind of thing can really be enforced indefinitely, what other purpose can technology serve than filling all life with stench, noise, filth, and the roar of the degenerate masses?

  Nationalism, no matter how loudly defended today, is almost finished, and the coup de grace will come in this most mob-like of all wars. Tomorrow it will be behind us, an ugly, sweaty dream. The idea of a united Europe was not always upheld by me, but I know now that we can no longer afford the luxury of considering it a mere idea. Europe must either make any further wars impossible, or this cradle of great ideas will see its cathedrals pulverised, and its landscape turned into a plain.

  Today, on the way home from Villach, I stopped at the quarry, shimmering under the autumn sun. A sand viper, about to take its midday siesta, was just crawling into the protecting shadow of the rocks. I looked at it for a long time, and the brightly coloured reptile looked back at me out of its knowledgeable and weird and mutely mournful eyes. There is a legend at home that these reptiles were created out of the old and ever renewed earth to suck up all the acids and poisons which ooze out of the deeds resulting from human cruelty, and out of all our sins.

  For a long time I remained there, watching. Then I walked the rest of the way back to the lake. The sun was setting behind the mountains, and I felt the cold breath of autumn; felt, also, sadness for another year almost gone, and for all of the life out of which we are being cheated because Herr Krupp wants more money and the generals cannot stop their self-aggrandisement.

  Nor has this quiet valley escaped their noisy attentions: in the street below, a company of soldiers marches by, under the command of a lieutenant sitting on a brindled mare like a dog on top of a picket fence. They are singing some new marching song introduced by the Nazis. The old soldiers’ songs have been discarded as ‘sentimental’—and the new ones have the thin, overworked sound of something heard from a bar-room.

  But on the local billboard where yesterday the conscientious head of the local Nazis had painted ‘God Punish England’ amidst all the other greatly oversized slogans, there was today something else. An inconceivable, an almost godless thing had happened, and I was perhaps the first to come upon it. There, where ‘God Punish England’ had been inscribed in letters of fire across the billboard, someone had erased ‘England’ and had put in its place the name of a geographical region far from this outermost region of the onetime Holy Roman Empire. The wrath of God had been invoked to fall down upon—Prussia.

  9 November 1940

  Dr Strauss is an Armed Forces psychologist, and passes on the mental condition of prospective officer candidates. He told me that one young man, asked about his feelings and the impression made upon him by his reading of Faust, replied: ‘Well, that Faust was certainly quite a boy. But you know, Doctor, that thing with Gretchen, he probably shouldn’t have done that.’

  So much for the legacy left to his people by great Goethe.

  The twenty-second anniversary of the 1918 Munich Revolt had just passed, and we talked about it. As a Royalist, I had opposed it. All the old pictures rose up in my mind: the artillery unit from the Rhineland sent to put down the uprising, which camped the evening before the King’s abdication almost in front of the windows of my place in Pasing, and which was immediately disarmed . . . the emaciated nags, torn horse collars, hungry cannoneers. . . . And the rattle of the machine guns, and the dead lying on the much-trodden ground, so tiny and flat against it that they seemed already part of the earth. . . .

  Then the triumphal parade of the newly born republic! Ingenuous, middle-class, as only that dear old Munich could be! Bearers of red flags who had obtained their banners only after hurrying about days earlier to get the required procurement orders; behind them, veterans of many a Socialist battle at the polls, little, bent gentlemen in spotted tailcoats. . . . Oh, I remember that this parade of the protesting masses even included several frightful, camel’s-hair top hats waggling in the crowd, old-fashioned and thin as sawn-off stovepipes, towering over the Revolution.

  Then, standing on buckboards, a couple of excited old fogies beating away with hammers at the brightly painted metal of the court purveyors’ shields, and finally a completely unforgettable scene: on one of the strange stone animals in the Lenbach Fountain, old Mūhsam, looking not too unlike a winged Assyrian ox with his berry-brown beard, holding forth rapturously to an enraptured throng. . . .

  That was the revolution in Munich.

  In Munich, just after the turn of the century, it was the custom for officials charged with the issuance of driving permits to appear for the tests wearing top hats. I can remember that on the second day of the Revolution, in the midst of a mass uprising which proclaimed to the world its determination to topple all crowned heads into the dust, there suddenly came a vast and jubilant roar from the great crowd at the Karlsplatz: somehow, the rumour had spread that King Ludwig was coming—King Ludwig, who had drowned thirty years before in Lake Starnberg, but who never died in the imagination of his subjects—King Ludwig, who built castles and ruined himself for Richard Wagner, who drove across the mountains in deep snow in an eight-horse sleigh seated behind powdered, periwigged lackeys.

  But this is Munich: infinitely unpolitical, possessed of a baroque little gambler’s soul that the Prussians will never understand—Berlin’s natural opposite.

  The Nazis, with their imbecile technocratic goals, will never remake Bavaria in their image, even if their occupation lasts another ten years. And even if they were to win the war, they would still fail, for the following reasons: (a) they lack souls; and (b) they lack humour. As the enemies of the laughter of men, they are more afraid of humour than of a new declaration of war.

  To come back to Munich: I was there recently, and the hotel was unheated, the service poor, and the linen of doubtful cleanliness. The restaurants are open at certain hours only, and the moment the doors are opened a hungry, hysterical mob stre
ams into the dining-room. Elbows in the neighbour’s ribs, this horde flies off to the nearest empty table, and crouches there, eyes bloodshot, teeth bared, until a bowl in which a paper-thin slice of some strange meat is swimming in an even stranger kind of gravy is brought to them. The whole thing has the look of the zoo when the keepers begin their regular feeding of the apes.

  But this is not the main thing that will remain in my mind from this latest visit to the once elegant city the Prussians have ruined. Near the main station, a long line of people wound down Senefelderstrasse, that hideous and endlessly dismal thoroughfare. When I asked someone what the line was for, I was told that these people were waiting to get into a bordello—in broad daylight, in a queue that stretched to the station square and blocked traffic—soldiers on leave, war workers, and even a few women. (The women were there certainly by error and out of a herd instinct, had no idea of the purpose of the line, and were the subject of the cynical, half-audible jokes and nasty laughter of the men.) I learned that this day’s business was about what it usually is, but that when there were trains crowded with soldiers on leave, the police had to be called. At such times, the line might be limited to a hundred at a time, and maids employed by families in the area might be called in to ‘help out’.

  Really, this is the kind of thing that goes on in Munich today. This discreet establishment belongs to the same Christian Weber who was a busboy at the Blue Boar Café before he became Herr Hitler’s pet, and able to criticise an artist like Clemens von Franckenstein, and live in the papal chambers of the old Royal Residence. Munich’s sense of humour found expression recently when a whole flock of new field-marshals and other new demigods were created by the regime. To satisfy Göring and his insatiable hunger for titles, the position of World Marshal was created, according to the joke; Goebbels, in view of his gay temperament, was named Half-World Marshal; but Christian Weber received the title of Senefeld Marshal.

  The title, of course, has reference to this discreetly flourishing establishment, which brings in handsome sums to the Great Man’s dinner companion, and is, as I have said, on Senefelderstrasse.

  June 1941

  I have a tenuous contact with the German Embassy in Moscow, and I knew, therefore, what had to come—and what now has come.[52]

  The horrible part of it is, that these people are so lost in their own inner darkness that they did not even realise what was happening. They persisted in deluding themselves with: ‘And now he is negotiating with Russia.’ And their eyes, big enough for the digestion of half the world, glittered even more greedily than usual. ‘Russia is going to let us march across its territory to get to India! German divisions are already in the Caucasus!’ This, at a time when grim, dark, smoke-filled clouds were already blotting out the sun in the East!

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll be in India.’ And Obersturmbannführer Semmelbei thinks of himself as Viceroy over the Indians, in place of some haughty British aristocrat. Hatred of England is something that dates from the Boer War of 1899. It has a specifically mob character, and is the dominant emotion of the German masses at the moment. It is essentially a hatred of an oligarchy—the German elementary schoolteachers who manipulate public opinion feel insulted at the very existence of a clearly defined society of classes anywhere in the world. For example, one of their badly paid foreign correspondents, Frau Irene Seligo of the Frankfurter Zeitung, has never been able to forgive England for not according her the treatment ordinarily given an ambassador, and immediately on her arrival, whisking her off to Buckingham Palace for a reception by the King and Queen.

  Underneath, there is the rumbling of all the various little hidden desires. One wants to emigrate, and has his eye on an English coffee plantation. Another wants to get hold of English cloth and English tobacco to be sent home. And our ‘experienced secretary’, now the typical example of German womanhood, hopes that her fiancé in the SS will ship home the Chippendale pieces she requires to complete her four-room dream apartment.

  Kostja Leuchtenberg informs me that the Nazis have completed their ‘economic planning’ insofar as overseas posts are concerned, and that all the openings in Nigeria, Kenya, or South-West Africa have been filled by German engineers.

  Recently, I saw Jannings’ film, Ohm Krüger. The audience was not moved by scenes representing the camp for women prisoners, nor by the cruelties which were supposedly perpetrated on the Boer women. No, the clamour came in a court scene when an English aristocrat wearing the Order of the Garter was shown going to an audience with Queen Victoria! . . . the hatred of the termite heap for everything not yet reduced to the size of a termite. A termite heap, this is what the industrialisation of Germany has brought about, this is what the sociological ideal of the Messrs. Krupp, Thyssen, Röchling, and Hösch amounts to.

  Oh, there are still a few people who have not been absorbed into the heap. There are the intellectuals, once the best part of Germany and now barely three per cent of the population. There are the farmers, a sociological anchor to windward in any epoch, who have not let themselves be fooled, no matter what the propaganda, and who know that they are threatened by the ‘industrial penetration of the flatlands’ advocated by Herr Röchling. There is also Bavaria, once considered the Cradle of the Movement, which long since put a fence between it and Nazism, and now hold itself as much apart as the Vendée during the French Revolution.

  Towards the end of March, as German tank columns were rolling south-west down the wide Wiener Chaussee highway on their way to ‘punish Serbia’ by throttling a little country, I saw an old farmer standing at the side of the road. Each time a tank rumbled by, the old man spat forcefully. When Hess flew to England, there was widespread rejoicing among the villagers because, as they said, ‘the Crown Prince got out,’ signifying that he had left because he knew the game was up, and was getting out while he could.

  But these elements, the intellectuals, the farmers, and the Bavarians are, of course, all that has survived of the Old Germany. The majority, that vast termite heap, was dreaming about a bargain between Germany and Russia at a time when the first shots were already being fired in the East. Nobody here had any idea of the real situation. Never did a people tumble more helplessly, more stupidly into catastrophe!

  And never was a people so badly, so irresponsibly led! Schulenburg,[53] highly esteemed as a gentleman of the old school in Moscow, tried last winter after Molotov’s trip to Berlin to warn against an attack, but Hitler would not even receive him. Köstring, the military attaché, was roared at by Hitler, and called a Russophile because he pleaded the urgent necessity of correctly assessing the Red Army. The barometer obstinately refused to register ‘clear and fine’—so they smashed it.

  I can remember as a boy listening to discussions of General Staff officers who came to our house. With what care these men of the old von Moltke school approached the problem called Russia! But the General Staff men of today were trained in Ludendorff’s school. They are still planning in terms of the First World War. With the arrogance of their dead mentor, they are counting on a promenade militaire.

  And the German industrialists are planning to swamp Russia with cheap radios and consumer goods! The Russian people are to be bribed with the promise of electrification and cheap, mass-produced consumer goods. The man of the vast stretches of the Volga steppes, this enigma, who will always be completely beyond the understanding of a West German—who specifically wants his own Russian system and who, above all, wants ‘not to become like the West’—this man is now equated to a German by our brilliant businessmen!

  This stupid, arrogant view of the Russians as Hottentots to be bribed with trinkets and cast-off top hats is the first basic mistake. The second is the incredible underestimation of the distances involved. At the time of my visit to Russian ten years ago there were villages in the northern Urals and the Pechora River Basin which had still—fourteen years after the November Revolution—not heard of the fall of the Czar, in fact, did not even know that there had been a world war.
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br />   But worst of all is the underestimation of the strange Slavic soul, only now beginning to be awakened, still haunted by awful nightmares. Never will I forget the comment made in St Petersburg in 1912 by a Russian farmer newly come to town on seeing an aeroplane take off for the first time in his life: ‘Most likely, he gets thirty roubles a month, at most thirty-five. Thirty-five roubles a month, and for that he dares deny God!’

  German technocrats who put this utterance down as belonging to a primitive do not understand. But they will meet this peasant in the vast Hyperborean stretches of Russia, and then they will find what was not dreamed of in their philosophy; the demon world of a people which is really ‘young’, not as a phrase in propaganda, but which has not, despite everything, let go of its gods.

  I talked about this last Easter Sunday with Kostja Leuchtenberg, who came back from the Rand mines two years ago, and who, as a native Russian, knows that world as he knows the West. He agreed that with this war we come at last to that moment in history when for the first time the Slavic world directly confronts the Western. Despite the constant talk here, through Hitler’s mouth, of ‘Destiny’ and the ‘All-powerful’, this Germany is as cynical as only an ageing Western nation can be. Russia, on the other hand, which twenty-four years ago took up its Cross and for the sake of distant goals has suffered, frozen, and gone hungry, is like that blasphemer I described earlier who in Dostoyevsky’s words is closer to God than the sceptic.

  Yesterday, at the dawn of a burning-hot day, I turned the knob on my radio and to my surprise heard Herr Goebbels declaring war on yesterday’s allies. I turned away, deeply affected. It is entirely possible that the war now beginning will engulf me, my worldly goods, my physical life, and my children as well. It is entirely possible, also, that I myself will be pulled by the eddies from this latest stroke of Hitler’s genius, and dragged down.