Review: Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair

I've been wanting to read the notebooks of Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen for some time, but was unsuccessful in locating a copy of Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten (1948).  A seller on Amazon was willing to part with his copy for $135 - out of my price range.  So I tracked down the 1970 English version Diary of a Man in Despair (trans. by Paul Rubens) at the Bowdoin College Library. 

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen was a writer, physician and gentleman farmer who opposed the Nationalist Socialist regime and kept a secret notebook about his thoughts and impressions from 1936 until 1944.  Reck-Malleczewen was a reactionary - a throwback to the 19th century: he was a monarchist, a devout Catholic, an aristocratic snob of the highest order, but also a brilliant stylist with a great talent for invective.  Here is Reck-Malleczewen on Hitler:

"There he stood, the most glorious of all, in his usual pose with hands clasped over his belly, looking, with his silver-decorated uniform and cap drawn far down over his forehead, like a streetcar conductor.  I examined his face through my binoculars.  The whole of it waggled with unhealthy cushions of fat; it all hung, it was all slack and without structure - slaggy, gelatinous, sick.  There was no light in it, none of the shimmer and shining of a man sent by God.  Instead, the face bore the stigma of sexual inadequacy, of the rancor of a half-man who had turned his fury at his impotence into brutalizing others."

For Reck-Malleczewen, the Nazis and their followers were representatives of a new type of savage human spawned by the modern age - what Ortega y Gasset labeled the "mass man" in his 1927 book The Revolt of the Masses. For Reck-Malleczewen, the German mass men will destroy everything in their wake - including themselves (Reck clearly saw in 1937 that war was inevitable).  Only then could there be a possibility for rebirth:

"The masses sensing that they are doomed, the will, no doubt, strike out against everything that is not masslike, but is, simply, "different." In Germany, whose Hitler regime is simply a massive attempt to prolong the existence of mass man, the target will be that small elite which has done more harm to this regime with its principled "No" than all the Chamberlain policy of impotence and endless appeasement."

The mass man should not be confused with the proletariat.  On the contrary, for Reck-Malleczewen the simple workers and farmers still had some measure of authenticity and integrity.  No, above all the mass man was represented by the petite bourgeois, the academics, the managerial class, and - not least - the Prussian aristocracy - of which Reck-Malleczewen was one - who betrayed their heritage to serve the "middle-class antichrist" (Hitler).  In the end, the Nazis and the enthralled masses were doing the bidding of the hated industrialists - "Deutsche Bank and the German Steel Association."  

As the years pass, the tone of Diary of a Man in Despair becomes less shrill and more resigned.  Reck-Malleczewen loses everything: he watches his beloved Munich destroyed by the firebombing, his friends die off or are arrested, his books are taken from him, the Nazis destroy every last trace of the German culture he loved.  The aristocrat is isolated, alone:

"I have lost myself. The distant worlds are enclosed in icy separation. The THrone of God is even further away, and with it the great Book of Wisdom, whose pages my friends will soon be reading. My life is loneliness, and the growing awareness that it must be so - loneliness among a people whom Satan has overcome, and the awareness that only by suffering can the future be changed."

In the final entry of Diary of Man in Despair in October 1944, Reck-Malleczewen has been arrested by the Gestapo - denounced for "defaming the German currency."  The diary ends here but we know that he was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp where  - as he anticipated - he was murdered by the mass man he so despised. 

Comments

[Hattie]

Fascinating insights. The aristocracy had already lost the game well before Hitler came into power, of course.

[Rudolph Lea]

Amazing diary and fascinating look at the Nazis from inside in Bavaria. I was startled to read him describe the reaction to the North African landings by the Allies in 1943, a reaction by Bavarians of actual relief at the news that the Nazis would now be opposed in earnest. They invented a derisive acronym for Hitler - "Grofaz" - meaning the "Greatest Field Marshal of Our Time".

[robert alpert]

his description of the scholes is as fine and moving as I have ever read