Diary of a Man in Despair Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen Duckback, 249pp, £6.99 ISBN 0715631004
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen was a cultural conservative, monarchist and extreme pessimist, at once listlessly estranged from mid-century Germany and mournfully engaged with it. A Prussian aristocrat, he spent much of his life in rural isolation on his Bavarian estate. This book is the diary he kept of the Nazi years, covering the period from 1936 to February 1945, when his patrician disdain for Nazism led to his being executed in Dachau. The diary is widely known in Germany, but was published here for the first time only last year, when it was rightly recognised as a masterpiece of the period. To read this diary is to encounter a kind of German version of the late Alan Clark - but Reck has better jokes, a deeper intelligence (steeped as he was in Nietzsche and Dostoevsky) and a more exquisite aesthetic sensibility.
Unusually for one of his class, Reck was no anti-Semite. To him, writing from the absurd aristocracy of his background, anti-Semitism was vulgar and Hitler the personification of mass man and the "termite-heap" society, whose "bovine and moronic roar of Heil" was the rancorous expression of the "half-man".
Post this article to
Post your comment
Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website
