Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.12 AVERAGE
4.12 AVERAGE
For obvious and depressing reasons, one of the books that has achieved a peculiar new vogue recently is Milton Mayer's 1955 They Thought They Were Free, in which he gives voice to 10 German noncombatant Nazis after World War II. I picked it up in January but gave up after 50 pages because it seemed to me far too generous in letting these men plead ignorance about the regime's cruelties and true objectives.
Diary of a Man in Despair is the opposite: the firsthand account of a high-born German man's fury and terror at Hitler, Nazism and the eagerness of his fellow countrymen to embrace the party's cruelties and objectives. So many passages speak down the decades to this moment. It's a grim, upsetting book, not least because (as the translator writes in his preface; this is not a spoiler) Reck was murdered in a concentration camp in February 1945. His entries go right up to his arrest the previous October. Unlike Mayer's book, this one shows that it's possible to see with total clarity how wrong, how immoral, how evil a government and its supporters can become.
Diary of a Man in Despair is the opposite: the firsthand account of a high-born German man's fury and terror at Hitler, Nazism and the eagerness of his fellow countrymen to embrace the party's cruelties and objectives. So many passages speak down the decades to this moment. It's a grim, upsetting book, not least because (as the translator writes in his preface; this is not a spoiler) Reck was murdered in a concentration camp in February 1945. His entries go right up to his arrest the previous October. Unlike Mayer's book, this one shows that it's possible to see with total clarity how wrong, how immoral, how evil a government and its supporters can become.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
sad
tense
medium-paced
How do you give less than five stars to the writings of someone in Hitler’s Germany who had to bury the pages in a tin box in a field? Do you feel like your views are qualitatively better than the old conservative who thought the French Revolution led European history and thought astray? Well, maybe they are but this document is incredible and indispensable. But you do you, weirdo.
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
This is a first-person recount of the raise to power of the Nazis by a German man of middle-high class living in Bavaria.
The author is violently opposed to the Regime and it’s at times poetic in his hatred for it:
“My life in this pit will soon enter its fifth year. 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 jealousy watched over its rights a few years aga can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself to be dominated by the street-corners idlers of yesterday, but actually, height of shame, is incapable any longer of perceiving its shame for the shame that it is.”
He met Hitler several times before he became famous and describes him as a “psychotic” and “hysterical” with nothing but contempt for him and his policies:
“I got the impression of basic stupidity… He basically hates himself, and that his opportunism, his immeasurable need for recognition, and his now apocalyptic vanity are all based on one thing – a consuming drive to drown out the pain in his psyche, the trauma of a monstrosity.”
“It was that little-man Machiavellianism by which German foreign policy became a series of legalized burglaries and the activity of its leaders a succession of embezzlements, forgeries, and treaty breaches, all designed to make him appeal to the assortment of schoolteachers, bureaucrats, and stenographers who have since become the true support and bastion of his regime.”
He also knew several of the main Nazi party members and his opinion of them is no better:
“What we have here is a bid for power by the degenerates.”
“The pose of revolutionaries, de facto dirty little bourgeoisie who cannot rid themselves of the feel of the dog collars they wore only yesterday, and who – the candles burned low and the food partly eaten – have seated themselves at the table of their evicted lords.”
He also shows an extreme condemnation for the general people that exudes a very disturbing classist view of the world. He basically praises his rural south region of Bavaria and pins the blame in the industrial north and Prussia in the form of “military and the industrial men behind the scenes”. He expresses a very hateful and discriminating view of their people and the lower middle classes (he calls them assortment of schoolteachers, bureaucrats, and stenographers) while he praises the working lower class and specifically relieves them of all fault.
“These Berlin potato faces fill the streets, together with their full bosomed females. They are behaving like a horde of servants whose masters are away, who have found the keys to the wine cellars and now are having an orgy with their women.”
“It should be noted that the people I am talking about are not of proletarian origins. These are derived from the middle-class ”
Regarding the rest of Europe, he laments that he “must now put our hopes in a war to free us as of a plague of locusts.”
“I foresee a day when the nations will regret their cowardly passivity. The cost is beyond measuring: but they will have to pay, someday. In this first breach of the peace, the criminal has been let go unpunished.”
“If at the time of the so-called Assumption of Power, the European Nations had taken action everything would have ended with a police raid, with the gang being hustled off to jail but the collars.”
Regarding the Jew’s persecution he is as clueless as to why but strongly opposes it.
“I rack my brains trying to discover the meaning of this persecution of the Jews which Goebbels has instigated … I cannot find the motivation, not even when I try to imagine myself a Nazi, and follow what I would imagine would be his train of thought.”
Perhaps the most disturbing of all is the realization that the general public knew as early as 1939 what was happening in the concentration camps to the Jews and did nothing, or worst, collaborated it.
The author is almost comical in his obsession with gossip and bickering to the point that he sounds like an old woman that has nothing better to do old day but to talk trash of other people around her. He delights in every little mischief and petty corruption that the Nazis and their supporter indulge upon, but he redeem himself by proving almost perfectly prophetic in his general analysis of the future and what the consequences of the Nazi regime will have for Germany and the world.
All and all, the book it’s a very interesting window into what a decent person would had experienced living in Germany during the Nazi years.
The author is violently opposed to the Regime and it’s at times poetic in his hatred for it:
“My life in this pit will soon enter its fifth year. 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 jealousy watched over its rights a few years aga can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself to be dominated by the street-corners idlers of yesterday, but actually, height of shame, is incapable any longer of perceiving its shame for the shame that it is.”
He met Hitler several times before he became famous and describes him as a “psychotic” and “hysterical” with nothing but contempt for him and his policies:
“I got the impression of basic stupidity… He basically hates himself, and that his opportunism, his immeasurable need for recognition, and his now apocalyptic vanity are all based on one thing – a consuming drive to drown out the pain in his psyche, the trauma of a monstrosity.”
“It was that little-man Machiavellianism by which German foreign policy became a series of legalized burglaries and the activity of its leaders a succession of embezzlements, forgeries, and treaty breaches, all designed to make him appeal to the assortment of schoolteachers, bureaucrats, and stenographers who have since become the true support and bastion of his regime.”
He also knew several of the main Nazi party members and his opinion of them is no better:
“What we have here is a bid for power by the degenerates.”
“The pose of revolutionaries, de facto dirty little bourgeoisie who cannot rid themselves of the feel of the dog collars they wore only yesterday, and who – the candles burned low and the food partly eaten – have seated themselves at the table of their evicted lords.”
He also shows an extreme condemnation for the general people that exudes a very disturbing classist view of the world. He basically praises his rural south region of Bavaria and pins the blame in the industrial north and Prussia in the form of “military and the industrial men behind the scenes”. He expresses a very hateful and discriminating view of their people and the lower middle classes (he calls them assortment of schoolteachers, bureaucrats, and stenographers) while he praises the working lower class and specifically relieves them of all fault.
“These Berlin potato faces fill the streets, together with their full bosomed females. They are behaving like a horde of servants whose masters are away, who have found the keys to the wine cellars and now are having an orgy with their women.”
“It should be noted that the people I am talking about are not of proletarian origins. These are derived from the middle-class ”
Regarding the rest of Europe, he laments that he “must now put our hopes in a war to free us as of a plague of locusts.”
“I foresee a day when the nations will regret their cowardly passivity. The cost is beyond measuring: but they will have to pay, someday. In this first breach of the peace, the criminal has been let go unpunished.”
“If at the time of the so-called Assumption of Power, the European Nations had taken action everything would have ended with a police raid, with the gang being hustled off to jail but the collars.”
Regarding the Jew’s persecution he is as clueless as to why but strongly opposes it.
“I rack my brains trying to discover the meaning of this persecution of the Jews which Goebbels has instigated … I cannot find the motivation, not even when I try to imagine myself a Nazi, and follow what I would imagine would be his train of thought.”
Perhaps the most disturbing of all is the realization that the general public knew as early as 1939 what was happening in the concentration camps to the Jews and did nothing, or worst, collaborated it.
The author is almost comical in his obsession with gossip and bickering to the point that he sounds like an old woman that has nothing better to do old day but to talk trash of other people around her. He delights in every little mischief and petty corruption that the Nazis and their supporter indulge upon, but he redeem himself by proving almost perfectly prophetic in his general analysis of the future and what the consequences of the Nazi regime will have for Germany and the world.
All and all, the book it’s a very interesting window into what a decent person would had experienced living in Germany during the Nazi years.
challenging
dark
funny
informative
reflective
fast-paced
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Remarkably moving journal of a conservative, anti-Nazi German writer living under the Nazi regime. Provides not only a glimpse of everyday life under the Nazis but also shows a particular worldview - monarchist, anti-mass society - that did not survive the war (barely survived the first world war).
This journal by Friedrich Reck, aristocratic monarchist, portrays the Nazi era eloquently. Reck despised the Nazis and his prose drips with fury and insults at Hitler, his party, and his mindless followers. But it also depicts opposition to the Nazis. As the years go by, and the war and atrocities against Jews intensify, the book is filled increasingly with a sense of despair and the smell of death. Some of the observations strike quite close to home, as we witness the continued threat of authoritarian Trumpism in the US. For example:
"How much do we really know about the vaults and caverns which lie somewhere under the structure of a great nation—about these psychic catacombs in which all our concealed desires, our fearful dreams and evil spirits, our vices and our forgotten and unexpiated sins, have been buried for generations?"
Highly recommend this one.
"How much do we really know about the vaults and caverns which lie somewhere under the structure of a great nation—about these psychic catacombs in which all our concealed desires, our fearful dreams and evil spirits, our vices and our forgotten and unexpiated sins, have been buried for generations?"
Highly recommend this one.