A veritable torrent of accusation

‘This afternoon, I was brought to a hearing. This was done before a captain wearing the insignia of a former noncom, and the look of a decent Bavarian petit bourgeois (he could have been a clerk behind a post-office counter, or in a busy law office). Still, when I declared that what had brought me here was foul denunciation, the machinations of a low intriguer, these attractive features contorted and he blared at me like a tuba. I waited until all this lung power was exhausted, and then, looking him earnestly in the eyes, ventured that at the moment a defenceless man stood there before him - with emphasis on at the moment. Then there flooded down on my head a veritable torrent of accusation.’ This is from the very last entry in the diary of Friedrich Reck, a German writer born 140 years ago today. He was fiercely opposed to Hitler, and within three months of this diary entry he would be deported to Dachau, and then executed.

Reck was born on 11 August 1884 in Masuria (Maleczewo, Poland), the son of a Prussian politician and landowner. He studied medicine in Innsbruck for a while, and spent a year as a ship’s doctor. He served as an officer in the Prussian Army though was dismissed due to a diagnosis of diabetes. He married Anna Louise Büttner in 1908. They had three daughters and a son (before divorcing in 1930). He graduated in 1911, and moved to Stuttgart to become a journalist and theatre critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and then to Pasing near Munich in 1914.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Reck was a novelist, mainly of children’s adventure stories. In 1933, he converted to Catholicism, and in 1935 he married Irmgard von Borcke, with whom he had three more daughters. In 1937, he published a historical novel on the Münster rebellion, Bockelson: History of a Mass Delusion, which is today seen as a critical allegory of Hitler and Nazism. However, his books began to be banned by the Nazis, and many were not published until years after his death. In October 1944, he was arrested, and subsequently released, only to be re-arrested in December and charged with ‘insulting the German currency’. A few weeks later he was transferred to Dachau, and, in February, he was shot dead. Further information is available from Wikipedia.

Today, Reck is best remembered for his journal. It was published for the first time in German in 1947, republished in English translation in 1970, and reissued by New York Review Books in 2013. Diary of a Man in Despair contains thirty-nine dated entries covering the period from May 1936 to October 1944, most of them are several or many pages long. The diary has its own Wikipedia page, and is available to read via a digital loan at Internet Archive. 

Nicolas Lezard in The Guardian has this assessment: ‘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.’

The following extract is taken from the very last entry in the published diary.

14 October 1944
‘All that was entailed, supposedly, was a single night at a hotel, and so I had come with just a small valise. They searched it for weapons: It was not a good beginning. And when I asked for a lawyer, the response was harsh.

Soon I was in a cell, and standing (against regulations) on the plank bed could see out into the perfect autumn day. The right to be out in that perfection had been taken from me, stolen as surely as they have stolen from us those years that were the First World War, and those of the years of inflation of the Twenties, and the Hitler-years - a quarter of a century, the best of a man’s life - robbed by these militarist maniacs.

Across the caserne yard in the officers’ quarters, moving from room to room behind the cheap curtains considered elegant these days was a blond of the new officer breed, very likely yesterday a lavatory attendant into whose hand (the same hand which had just been clearing away various blockages and encumbrances) you slipped two marks. They have come up, these people, as far as we have gone down these last twelve years; obviously, since it is our money which has raised them up. The little schizophrenic who is their leader had nothing and was nothing, but from 1918 those like him in their rage began to puff him up into what he has become. What an Augean stable that will be, the one they leave for us to clean up!

Now they’re marching on the parade-ground. I hear this from morning to night, the latest in military marches, snappy little melodics bellowed by a leader sheep, shouted back by his flock of 250. Shattering, these idiotic songs, these faces, this spiritual castration-by-propaganda. They march and rumble past - here, five men attached to one machine, there, a lumbering behemoth belching clouds of stinking gas with ten aboard, then another new mechanical monster with another five. What do these iron-plated apparitions have to do with soldiers? Better take the regimental insignia off their uniforms, and sew on instead gold-threaded representations of screwdrivers, or oil cans!

I want to be clear: I come from a long line of soldiers. At seventeen, on a horse behind the silver kettle-drums, that is exactly what I felt myself to be - a soldier. But the coming of the machine gun and the four-cylinder engine has raised a question, and that is, does the profession of soldier still exist, any more than that of statesman, or king, or poet or intellectual - supplanted as these have been by surrogates - so that all that’s left among the traditional professions is that of licensed whore. (And even the public whore is close to being regulated out of existence, with the woman being required twice each session, at foreplay and at climax, to shout a politically knowledgeable ‘Heil Hitler!’) As for me, I can see myself ending as a pacifist . . . not because I set that much store by the inherently fragile artifacts of this world; no, because I want to officiate at the funeral of a damnable lie - the lie that the concept of ‘soldier’ can be infinitely further perverted!

This afternoon, I was brought to a hearing. This was done before a captain wearing the insignia of a former noncom, and the look of a decent Bavarian petit bourgeois (he could have been a clerk behind a post-office counter, or in a busy law office). Still, when I declared that what had brought me here was foul denunciation, the machinations of a low intriguer, these attractive features contorted and he blared at me like a tuba. I waited until all this lung power was exhausted, and then, looking him earnestly in the eyes, ventured that at the moment a defenceless man stood there before him - with emphasis on at the moment.

Then there flooded down on my head a veritable torrent of accusation:
- I had falsely stated my rank (to which I responded that in the course of my life I had waded in too much blood to give undue importance to rank).
- That in the course of my earlier admission of wrongdoing, I had made light of the People’s Militia. With my statement before me, I proceeded to show that the very opposite was the case.
- That I had organised a demonstration of women protesting against the removal of crucifixes from public buildings, did not say ‘Heil Hitler’ when I should have, and downplayed the value of the German currency.

I answered with a question: was I being questioned here under military or Party auspices? Also, in the matter of the currency charge, could I get further details?

This was not a fruitful approach. What followed was a torrent of invective that burst over me like burning lava, covering all argument, all protest. I was silent. They took me away.

But I was not to get off so lightly. They called in the major, and when I saw him I knew: only a Higher Power could save me now. He was an apparition, a man-doll, a frightful stumbling puppet smashed by shot and shell and put together with prostheses. Nothing worked naturally, nothing was normal - the man was a mechanical horror. And in the eyes, that sadism. . .’