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drset 's review for:
Diary of a Man in Despair
by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen
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.