Diary of a Man in Despair

by Friedrich Reck

  I believe that Germans generally are trying to appease their own bad consciences by shifting the blame to a single man. It was Germany itself which overnight tore itself loose from all its old ties, its ideals and its gods, and dismissed Bismarck from his functions that day in March. I believe that the Kaiser merely acted as the executive of the will of the people—and was himself the final expression of a time when almost every German was secretly a miniature Wilhelm II: just as progress-happy, just as loud, just as much adrift, torn loose from the old moorings. Just as provoking, just as tactless, just as much in love with himself as an irresistible force—and yet so insecure, so harmless, basically.

  In 1905, I was at Torbole, on Lake Garda, when a convention of German druggists was held there. During the day, the delegates attended meetings, and at night they cruised the lake with their wives aboard chartered steamers. Their singing of Still ruht der See resounded across the lake—they were so sure of themselves, so certain that everyone about was as pleased by their activity as they themselves were. Suspended between dream and reality, they were really deeply to be pitied—symbols of a Germany basically quite harmless, but completely and entirely lost.

  I am not, as I would imagine is obvious by now, an adherent or apologist for the House of Hohenzollern. I am not a gentleman of the bedchamber, nor am I inclined to Byzantinism. Nevertheless I believe that the way the sons of those singing pharmacists denied the Kaiser who was their own true representative during the days of catastrophe in 1918 was shameful.

  In 1914, during those last days of July in Berlin, a crowd so huge I could not see to the end of it stood before the castle and chanted up to the Kaiser’s windows. . . .

  ‘We want to see our Kaiser!’

  ‘We want to see our dear Kaiser!’

  This is what they chanted. They roared in tempo, and without ragged edges—as only a well-trained people who, at a moment’s notice, can also organise their enthusiasm, can roar.

  That was at the end of July, in 1914—and yet, 220 weeks later, or 1,540 days, no impropriety was improper enough, no cynicism was cynical enough, to fling at him. This was after twenty-six years of his reign, more than enough time to make changes in leadership and come to know those areas in which he was insufficient. What did that gray-haired old man do in the 1,540 days following that chorus ending in curses and shame that was so much worse than he had done in the twenty-six previous years?

  I know that the overthrow of the monarchy was inevitable, but I do believe that especially in a case like this, when an entire nation must also feel itself responsible, this should happen in a different way than it did. I do not believe that the Germans have a right to be ironic and superior, as the Goebbels press is in its articles about the Kaiser. Quite the contrary, I believe that there is every reason why the Germans should ponder their own sins and their own insufficiency—especially the General Staff, north German oligarchy, and the Prussian nobility.

  Where was Ludendorff in his sovereign’s hour of need? Where were these generals who, after Ludendorff, joined with the industrial oligarchy to drag this insufficient monarch into their bloody gamble? And where in that hour was that gray-haired Constable of the Throne of Prussia himself, Hindenburg, when his royal master, of whose weaknesses he was certainly well aware, needed help? He certainly could have done better than to wave his hand helplessly, and advise what was most comfortable for the generals: that Wilhelm kindly take himself off to another country.

  It is easy to write, ‘Loyalty is the mark of honour.’ But it is not so easy to accept the fact that loyalty can be sworn to just once in a man’s life; that once sworn to, it cannot be retracted the way one takes back an IOU that has been paid off; and that to be true until death is to take responsibility for one’s life.

  But this is precisely what the Swiss Guard did, when they defended with their lives, on 10 August 1792, the empty palace of a runaway king: they had taken an oath.

  These victories in Russia may continue and history may even some day celebrate them as great and important (a thing I do not want to believe). Nevertheless, these generals, who only yesterday were so agitated over the wording of the oath of allegiance, and then turned about and swore to every possible thing that came into the minds of a gang of political criminals, will never be honoured as those Swiss farmers were. No one will ever place the marble figure of a wounded lion atop their graves.

  Pain, and sorrow, and the unbearable shame in which we have been living these past eight years provide new perspectives. We are to be given a second chance. Once more, and for the last time, we are given the opportunity to look deep into ourselves and hold that private discourse which in 1918 in so cowardly a fashion we avoided doing.

  ‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good,’ as Hamlet says. He might have spoken for us, as well. No good can come of this cloud of victories, with the stink of crime, no good to a country whose foundations are propaganda and treason—no good to a people which pharisaically and self-righteously shifts the burden of its own sins onto its own ancient symbols, takes its oath to criminals, and is ready to take any oath and make any contract with Satan. No, the Devil’s price merely goes up and up!

  A storm is coming up over the heads of a people blindly drunk with victory, and the man who sees it is alone today in Germany. He is alone with his knowledge, and can see that the day is coming when he himself will have to make good on all large statements, spoken or written, that he has made. Of all the things that have ever been asked of life, just one remains: that in the hour of martyrdom, which our epoch requires of any man not part of the mass, a man be able to bring forth out of himself the strength that comes from having kept faith with the truth.

  Surely, all human wishes, provided only that they are big enough, must come to fulfilment?

  September 1941

  This is how we live in Germany today. . . .

  Monday, a gigantic victory is announced. Tuesday, not a soul can remember what it was. Huge numbers of prisoners are reported captured; no one believes the figures. Day in and day out, trumpets on the radio announce more victories—and we switch off as soon as we hear the first notes of the fanfare, with a feeling of insult.

  I don’t know why it is that nothing remains in people’s minds about these ‘most gigantic pincer movements of all times’ or of these trapped enemy armies many times bigger than at Sedan—or little more, anyway, than about the latest foot-and-mouth epidemic, or the fact that the ground frost is early this year—but so it is. Sometimes I think it is because of our general termite-heap condition, the termites being incapable of awareness of things outside the heap—I ponder this for a moment, and then I reject the idea. There is something else here, something more complex, something quite eerie, not quite to be put into words.

  I do not know what it is, but I feel, as other people feel, that it is there and goes about in our midst, invisible –

  If, despite my expectations, the facts really turn out to accord with the propaganda, I will nevertheless feel what I now do: these things are beyond history.

  Another example of our living beyond history: Herr Bruno Brehm, who just a few years ago was a fixture in the ante-rooms of Jewish literati, writes gory dispatches from Lemberg about the corpses found there and supposed to be the work of the Cheka—and blames it all on the Jews.[55] And so, without honour or truth or justice, we vegetate here. The lower classes, which we can say includes everybody but swastika-wearers, do not have enough food. The bureaucracy—former tailor’s apprentices, bank trainees, and seminarians and theology students—calls for the hard life of the front line, and lives on ‘diplomat’ ration stamps, worth three times the ordinary food stamp.

  Recently, when Herr Gauleiter Wagner honoured our little town with his presence, practically every chicken in the area was slaughtered to meet the needs of his entourage of drunkards and felons. Herr Hitler has his own private vegetable farm in Solln, near Munich, where SS guards patrol an electrically charged fence enclosing the hothouses of our
vegetarian Tamerlane.

  In the meantime the plebes are feeling the full fury of a German food industry gone chemical-crazy. Sugar is now made out of firwood pulp, sausage out of beech-wood pulp, and the beer is a stinking brew made of whey. Yeast is made out of a chemical, and marmalade is coloured to fool people into thinking it is the real thing. The same for butter, except that the colouring matter here also contains a vile and indigestible substance poisonous to the liver and doubtless responsible for the biliousness so common today. Everyone’s eyes are yellow, and if I am to believe friends of mine who are doctors, the incidence of cancer has doubled in the last four years.

  A true Prussian, an old hand at ‘improvising’ his life out of garbage cans, is in his glory when he can sweep away the natural abundance of Germany, which is more than enough to satisfy demand, and put in its place the substitute, the ersatz. Canned vegetables are also artificially coloured. The wine, except for what is guzzled by young officers, or black-marketed by Army paymasters, is unholy snake poison. The soap stinks as badly as ‘New German’ corruption, and the soles of the ski shoes I bought last winter after a series of battles over the ration coupon, turned into a sodden mess of cardboard after a half hour’s walking. There is a story about a man who was clapped on the shoulder of his wood-synthetic suit by a friend, and absent-mindedly invited him to ‘come in’.

  The consequences of all this are already beginning to be apparent. As a result of the fermentation and gas resulting from pulpy, clayey bread, the air in the Cafés is pestilential. No one even bothers anymore to hold back his wind. As a result of this systematic poisoning of the blood, people go about with boils and abscesses and their body liquids are fouled. The daily hunt for immediate necessities and envy of one’s darling neighbours have combined to produce a nastiness, and a slackness in behaviour, such as would have been impossible even a short time ago.

  A very chic and expensive sailing school, catering to the daughters of industrialists, is located on the lake nearby. Externally, it is a highly snobbish affair, but actually it is a little whorehouse, where the slim young things sleep with their bluff and rough and oh so marvellously brutal instructors. And in the Café of the little village on the lake I heard the plump wife of Göring’s personal physician give the details, in extenso, to her companion on exactly how the artificial insemination of Frau Göring had been achieved.

  The absence of the men has led to grotesque situations. Since French prisoners of war are considered delectable, if forbidden fruit, it has happened in north Germany that a peasant woman will hide a Frenchman under her wheelbarrow load of potatoes and so smuggle him into her house.

  In a village near here, the thirty-year-old straw-widow of a peasant off fighting in Russia strangled her two children by her 65-year-old father-in-law, on the moor. In my own basically highly moral little town, boulevard life has been introduced by north German females sent here by the Nazi ‘Mother and Child’ organisation; and the infection has spread to a portion of the native population. With the prisoner-of-war camp guards, the women have set up an ‘Isle of Delight’ here.

  Recently, on my way to town I heard loud cries for help: What had happened was that one of these females had not paid attention to her three-year-old, and just while Madame was dallying with her lover, the child had fallen into the river and was drowned. I spent an hour trying to revive the infant, to no effect. The child was dead. The lady finally appeared, and although she played to the hilt the role of tragically bereft mother, that very evening I saw her promenading with her friend in front of the windows behind which her dead child was lying.

  This was too much. That night, the village entertained the lady with a real cat’s concert, ewers, fire horns, fire-fighting equipment. It was almost in the style of the old Habern, which up to fifty years ago ensured propriety in the villages in the simplest and most effective way possible, and which was unfortunately outlawed through the intervention of ignorant priests.

  But now it begins to appear that a number of things which were supposed to have been finished are coming to life again, as such things do, on occasion: good and evil, the gods and the evil spirits of greed and bestiality. I do not know if the end of the world is at hand, as Dostoyevsky said. But this I do know, that these are years of a turning in human affairs which can never be changed again, and that the tyranny of an arrogant civilisation is at an end.

  January 1942

  This winter has fallen on us like an Apache. Apparently, the eternal sickening invocation of the Nordic which has gone on here these last years has been answered with this series of Hyperborean winters. For eight weeks now, like an image of the desolation which weighs down on this people’s soul, whiteness has blanketed the contours of the earth. I have had to have a tunnel the height of a man dug from the house to the barns. Standing at the highest point of this Spitzbergian mass of ice, I am on a level with the second floor of the house.

  Thus, for two months I have been as good as cut off from the world. To get a pound of meat is a two-hour journey on skis, it is a 24-hour, polar expedition to the nearest bank or to the dentist, and it takes two full days of travelling in a disgustingly filthy train, filled to the luggage racks with unclean and bad-smelling people, to get to Munich—a trip that used to take ninety minutes by car. This waste of time, inflicted on us by a regime which takes everything and gives nothing, means that you can do practically nothing involving the use of the mind. In the absence of all repairmen, a man has to become his own electrician, roofer, and plumber to thaw out frozen pipes and drains, and keep his household functioning.

  Recently, on a walk through the frozen woods, I found a starving fawn that had been torn by a dog. I took it home, fatally wounded as it was, but it died in my arms—died with tears in its eyes, and a look of endless sadness, an indictment of the Creator for allowing one of His creatures to suffer so. Once, in the South Atlantic, I saw a whaler in the process of killing a female accompanied by one of her offspring. The harpooner, a red-bearded Irishman, kept putting harpoons into the whale. The intestines were hanging out of the mangled body of the huge animal, and nevertheless it continued to swim back and forth in the water made red by its blood, trying with its shattered body to shield the little whale. Since then, and the sight of that harpooner’s freckled face as he laughed derisively, and of that poor creature, faithful to the end, I have believed in the existence of Satan as I believe in the existence of God.

  The winter has also changed the war. A spectre is rising out of the snowy wastes of Russia, the spectre of retaliation, and my honest countrymen are now trying to drown out their growing fear by believing in miracles that will change everything. They have hopes for gas which will destroy all life in a large country in ten seconds, and a fantastic ‘atom bomb’, three of which would suffice to sink the British Isles—yes, and an even more fantastic tunnel, which is now supposedly being secretly dug under the Channel from Calais, and out of which, one fine day, will come strolling the German Army to cast all enemies of Brandenburg into the dust.

  In connection with this rumour about a Channel tunnel a rather strange story was told me on the Salzburg train about Captain Theodor Koch of the Hapag Line. Koch was one of those gentleman-captains whose excellent appearance and perfect manners assured them of a distinguished career, and to whom were entrusted the big ships on the North Atlantic route to New York. I imagine that many Englishmen will remember this elegant and well-poised officer. Koch, then, who had been commander of a corvette in the Imperial Navy, was in this war put in charge of one of the British islands in the Channel which we had occupied. But late last autumn, a high-ranking Gestapo functionary appeared on the island. A long palaver followed, voices were raised, and at the end Koch took his service revolver and shot himself.

  The strange part of the story is that orderlies in the ante-room outside, who were able to hear fragments of the conversation, distinctly heard repeated mention of a tunnel. My Hamburg travelling companion, about whom I would very much like to have mor
e information, evidently could have told me more if he had wanted to, but refused.

  For my part, I will believe that the circle has been squared before I will believe in this tunnel. But what is reality is the fear these Nazi desperadoes have of the fate awaiting them. They will try anything, including going to the moon, to escape it.

  So much for the rather sparse sum of my lonely days this winter. What else? Recently, whom should I be seated next to at the Regina Hotel but former Reichsbank president Herr Hjalmar Schacht himself, now fallen into disgrace, a veritable cobra swollen with poison, delivering himself rather loudly—loudly enough so I could hear, anyway—of the opinion that if inflation were avoided now, he would gladly begin to believe in perpetual motion. The next day I joined a table of regular customers at the Café Helbig, at which the argument of the Catholic theologians present centred about various techniques of punishment. For the Herr Propaganda Minister, an appearance, naked, in the monkey cage at the Hellabrunn Zoo at increased prices was proposed, but with popular prices on special days. For the Great Man himself, nothing less than a world tour, in a cage ‘with rings on his fingers and bells on his toes’. The precedent here would be the punishment of Bockelson, king of the Anabaptists, whom the medieval authorities had put in a cage and then exchanged among one another like a canary, so that each in turn could have him on hand during coffee to enliven things with his gallows humour and saucy bons mots before being put to death.

  I was rather entertained by all this. The prospect of seeing Hitler singing the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’, naked on the Broadway stage—this idea, aside from providing a certain personal satisfaction, has deep, and it appears to me, politically practical significance. There should be room in the coming German revolution for laughter after almost a decade in which this has been forbidden, as a safety valve through which some of the pent-up rage can be vented. Close this valve, as was done in 1919, with ‘Law and Order’ and the explosive charge will blow into the face of the maker of political fireworks. This martyrdom that is Hitlerism might have been spared us if at that time and even if for the most conservative reasons, we had faced up to a thorough-going revolution, and had allowed the masses to rid themselves of their anger, and roar until they had tired themselves out.