Diary of a Man in Despair

[cali]

x-posted in General Discussion.

I can't stop thinking about garbage.

I use that line from the film "Sex,Lies and Videotape" to describe things I obsess about. In this case, it's "Diary of a Man in Despair". I can't stop thinking about this book, the nature of evil- a word I'm extremely chary about using- Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump.

This book, written by a religious, conservative German nobleman (all characteristics I reflexively despise), is never out of my thoughts for long. It's haunted me for 40 years. My father gave it to me to read when I was around 20, enigmatically handing it to me with a comment like "you should read this". Thankfully, I found it far more readable than The Great Chain of Being or The Decline of the West, orany number of books my father handed to me.

From a review a couple of years ago in The Guardian:

This is one of the most extraordinary books you will ever read. It is the occasional diary, kept spasmodically between May 1936 and October 1944, of the novelist who called himself Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen (his name was Reck, but he added the name of his estate, bought with the proceeds of his popular fiction). The diary starts with some amusing anecdotes about the historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler, such as his eating, at a time of rationing towards the end of the first world war, an entire goose without offering his fellow diners a bite. "The most humourless man I have ever met," says Reck, surpassed in this only by "Herr Hitler".

And from then on it's more or less all about Hitler – or rather, about daily life under the Nazi regime. "My life in this pit will soon enter its fifth year," he writes in August 1936. "For more than forty-two months, I have thought hate, have lain down with hate in my heart, have dreamed hate and awakened with hate. I suffocate in the knowledge that I am the prisoner of a horde of vicious apes, and I rack my brains over the perpetual riddle of how this same people which so jealously watched over its rights a few years ago can have sunk into this stupor …"

The motif of hatred returns again and again. He bursts with it, the way some people burst with love; and it was this hatred that compelled him to write these diaries, and then, when he had finished for the evening, take them out in a tin box and hide them in the woods on his land, for, as you can imagine, their discovery would have resulted in a death sentence (he was eventually arrested for the offence, by then in effect a capital one, of "insulting the German currency", having complained in a letter to his publisher that inflation was eating away at the value of his advance. He was packed off to Dachau, where he died in 1945.

Many have come, especially since the publication of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, to think of the vast majority of the German population as having been complicit in the very worst of the Nazis' crimes; a depressing and controversial point of view, and one that has been desperately attacked ever since. But if you throw enough mud, some of it tends to stick, and Goldhagen is not to be lightly dismissed. Reck's book, which eventually gave him posthumous renown, is a valuable corrective.

<snip>

Reck can come across as a snob at times, but the prose is so good, and the judgments so astute – when he speculates about the future he is often right – that his position makes sense. His thoughts on Christianity are also worth paying attention to, whether you are religious or not. It is also pleasing to note that there was not a trace of antisemitism in him, and he foresaw that the Nazis' attitudes to the Jews would one day bring the country to its doom.

Meanwhile he dreams up names for Hitler – "the middle-class Antichrist" or "the Machiavelli for chambermaids" – and rails against the Prussian mindset which allowed such a man to thrive. He even castigates the officers behind the July 1944 assassination attempt – despite his wish that it had succeeded – for having hitherto betrayed both the republic and the monarchy, which is an original position. This is one of the most important personal documents to have come out of the war.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/26/diary-man-despair-reck-review

A more in depth review:

http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2016/04/14/friedrich-reck-diary-of-a-man-in-despair-2/

Some quotes:


“But we must be completely clear...if nationalism is truly the hallmark of a people in the prime of its youth and energies, how does it happen that under its aegis morality decays, ancient customs die out---that men are uprooted, the steadfast derided, the thoughtful branded, the rivers poisoned, and the forests destroyed? Why, if this is a high watermark of our national life, has our speech been vulgarized in this unprecedented way?”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“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.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/426886-tagebuch-eines-verzweifelten

“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 its history.”

Reck's description of meeting Hitler at a dinner party in 1920 is both powerful and eerily prescient:

When he had gone, we sat silently confused and not at all amused. There was a feeling of dismay, as when on a train you suddenly find you are sharing a compartment with a psychotic. We sat for a long time and no one spoke. Finally, Clé stood up, opened one of the huge windows, and let the spring air, warm with the föhn, into the room. It was not that our grim guest had been unclean, and had fouled the room in the way that so happens in Bavarian village. But the fresh air helped to dispel the feeling of oppression. iI was not that an unclean body had been in the room, but something else; the unclean essence of a monstrosity.

https://swiftlytiltingplanet.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/diary-of-a-man-in-despair-by-friedrich-reck/

This post, I know, is far too long. Odds are that it will swiftly sink, but I urge anyone who makes it to the end, to read it.

[20score]

1. Great post!

[cali]

2. Thank you so much

[OxQQme]

3. This quote feels familiar

>"he berates with venom the mind of "mass-man", with no more individual volition than that of a termite, enthusiastically parroting the moronic slogans of (insert name/meme here)............"<

[bemildred]

4. +1.

Yeah, I know that feeling.

So did Yeats:

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[malthaussen]

5. "Reck can come across as a snob sometimes..."

Yeah, you might say. As the reviewer points out, it is rather hard to emphasize with a Junker, but his bewildered impotence may find resonance with many of us come November.

-- Mal