Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Diary of a Man in Despair (New York Review Books Classics) (1947)by Friedrich Reck (Author), Paul Rubens (Translator), Richard J. Evans (Afterword), Katy Homans (Cover designer), Mario Sironi (Cover artist)
Work InformationDiary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck (1947)
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I'm not capable of writing a review that would do this justice, so I'll just say this: I highlighted like mad and can't stop thinking about what I've read. Reck's words are prophetic, insightful, engaging, disturbing, unforgettable and timely. His diary ought to be required reading in universities across the globe to serve as a warning against the blind hero-worship of political leaders that makes it possible for immoral aberrations like Hitler to become men of power. Yes, they can eventually be stopped, but only after so much blood and bone become grist to the mill. Some wrongs can never be made right. Better to be a martyr than a cog in the wheel of evil. If this wasn't a diary, I would give it a five. One of the back cover reviews used the word "stunning", and I agree. I couldn't believe that this guy, with so much to lose, felt and wrote as he did. I was thinking more than once that the predictions or fears for the future were so close to what eventually played out that the book had to have been written long after when it actually was in order to get so much right. I read that Reck fabricated some and puffed himself up a bit, but that doesn't detract from the story. I could hardly put this book down. The diary runs from 1937 to 1944. The last entry was written in prison. How did that happen? How did these writings survive, how were they discovered? But then the author was well connected and with other opponents of the Nazi regime, so it is possible, however remarkable. My theory is that right wing political thinkers believe in some natural order to the world, that what is proper is what is natural. On the other hand. the left wing types don't really believe in any fixed natural order but see things are more fluid and needing some steering to head in the right direction. Of course, among right wingers, there can be considerable difference in the vision of just what the natural order is. Reck describes himself as a monarchist. He expresses support for duels to settle matters of honor rather than court cases. He is a blood and soil conservative. This diary is constant stream of hatred for the Nazis. The Nazis are brutal industrialist, allied with technology. They level everything to the lowest common denominator. Reck sees this leveling as extending far beyond the Nazis. The origins seem to go perhaps back to 1870... ah, my German history is shaky,... Reck calls Prussia a colony. The servants took over the house when the master was away and are getting drunk on the wine from the cellar. This Mass Man take-over is not limited to Germany either, though that's the principal manifestation at the time of writing. Really this is a scary book. Reck points out that the lunacy of Nazi Germany can well strike elsewhere. I thought about Pol Pot's Cambodia. Really though: Stalin, Mao... What is a curious puzzle is: why? Is this a pattern that happens again and again through history? Of course our globalized culture is somewhat unique, but maybe that just gives a bit of a different flavor but doesn't touch the essence. Or maybe modern mass media, rapid transportation, just the scale of industry like strip mines. The cult of greed probably does become prominent from time to time, but when has it had such material forces at hand? It remains a disturbing mystery: how could the Germany of Beethoven and Goethe and Kant fall into such blind and brutal depravity? If it can happen there, what will stop it here? To hear the perspective of a monarchist... that is not so common nowadays. And no idle monarchist but a prominent social figure and well educated, thoughtful, etc. This diary brings a rare and valuable perspective to a crucial problem.
Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the part of a landed gentleman, deplored democracy, and rejected the modern world outright. To Reck the Nazis were ruthless revolutionaries in Gothic drag, and helpless as he was to counter the spell they had cast on the German people, he felt compelled to record the corruptions of their rule. The result is less a diary than a sequence of stark and astonishing snapshots of life in Germany between 1936 and 1944. We see the Nazis at the peak of power, and the murderous panic with which they respond to approaching defeat; their travesty of traditional folkways in the name of the Volk; and the author's own missed opportunity to shoot Hitler. This riveting book is not only, as Hannah Arendt proclaimed it, "one of the most important documents of the Hitler period" but a moving testament of a decent man struggling to do the right thing in a depraved world. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)943.086092History and Geography Europe Germany and central Europe Historical periods of Germany Germany 1866- Third Reich 1933-1945 History, geographic treatment, biography Biographies, Diaries And JournalsLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
He acts like an old nobleman... but one who is generally kind to the proletariat and the peasantry, and reserves his scorn and hatred for the bourgeoisie and other nobles (at a time when these words still meant something). He's a reader of Spengler, and acts at times like a genuine pessimist... but a pessimist who has great hopes for the future, in which the vulgarity, cruelty, barbarity and injustice of the present may be overcome. Most of all, he depicts himself as an extraordinarily kind man, willing to use his (I assume) gravity and bearing in defense of the victims of petty arrogance, but at the same time harbors an incredible hatred.
DMD is one of the best books I've read recently thanks to these two things: the qualities of its probably half fictional narrator, and the openness with which he hates everything that deserves hatred--Nazis, of course, but everything they stand for. Vulgarity, pettiness, barbarity, stupidity, irrationality, self-interest, gullibility (whether conscious or not). Reck's narrator scorns everything that deserves scorn, and any book that reminds us of that is worth reading. That you get the scorn, and the narrator. And above all you get the incredible sensation--like seeing a Greek tragedy--of reading about Nazi Germany while knowing what's going to happen (i.e., Reck's hopes for the defeat of the Nazis will be fulfilled, but he won't live to see the future).
A clearer head could probably criticize this book heartily; Reck obviously lives in a fantasy world that is part medieval and part modern. But I forgot that while I was reading. Recommended for all.
"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... of all the things that have ever been asked of life, just on 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 f 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 fulfillment?" [129]. ( )