Patrick
11-04-2004, 06:02 AM
Excerpts from Diary of a Man in Despair
Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen
Anyone here ever read this before? I'd have to put it down as one of the more startling books I've read over the past year or two. It certainly gives lie to any claim that a "Paleo-con" (and I think it fair to consider that Reck was one, even if no such term existed then) would ever be happy living in a National Socialist regime. I'd like to say I discovered the title in some sort of profound way, but I simply saw it on the shelves of my local library, and picked it up out of curiosity. Such are the happy chances of fate.
So, in finest Phora tradition, I shall now bore everyone to death with some excerpts, typed as fast as my pudgy fingers can manage. I shall mark each period as the it is his diaries, and I shall also mark skips within with ***. I am not going to otherwise note anything with italics or any of that. If I do feel like adding my own comments, I will clearly indicate them.
My copy is the 1970 translation, translated by a Paul Rubens. Apparently there was an edition in English from the late 1990s, same translation but with a different cover and some pictures added.
Translator's Preface
This book is history of a kind that will be found in few history books. It is, in the real sense of the word living history, because it is the history of Germany in the Nazi period as was experienced by an extremely vital and aware man, Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen.
This is the accurate account of the forebodings of Reck-Malleczewen, who put his thoughts down as the only means of defending himself from a horror that finally engulfed him. Its entries cease with October 1944, because Reck-Malleczewen was killed by a Genickshuss, a shot in the neck, the following February 23, in the Dachau concentration camp.
When the author began his journal he was fifty-two, and therefore well into middle age. And yet, what is so extraordinary here is the power of the personality that emerges - his vitality, his immense passion. The writer has had "certain experiences, and looked into certain depths," as he says, and yet even in despair he remains a full blooded man of powerful commitment. This is the real importance of the book: that a man who stood solidly on the soil of Bavaria looked on as millions of his fellow countrymen became automatons, moving and yelling and salivating to order, and set down what it was to be a full human being among these walking machines.
***
Fritz Reck -- born Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen , in 1884, the son of an East Prussian Protestant Junker family -- was a prophet. He belongs with his great hero Dostoyevsky, and with Kafka, and with George Orwell, of whom he probably never heard, among that vision-afflicted little ban who say, with Dostoyevsky, that "the end of the world is at hand," because men and women no longer knew they had a center, could no longer hear what it said, could now only continue to move about the earth by various tricks of the mind or body.
Diary of a Man in Despair
May, 1936
Oswald Spengler is dead. He was a dominant figure in our time. A kind of maharaja himself, his death had something of a maharaja's about it. His editor at Beck, which publishes Spengler, killed himself a few days later, like a household member immolating himself following the death of his ruler. The editor, Albers, threw himself under the Starnberg train. A grisly death: his legs were severed at the thighs.
I last met Spengler only a few weeks ago, on Bayerstrasse, in Munich. He was dressed as usual in an expensive tweed suit. As usual, too, he looked and sounded angry. He had been deeply hurt, and out of that pain came penetrating insight. It was, as usual, time well spent…
I remember the first time we met. Albers, the same man who committed suicide, brought him to the house. I had sent the small trap to bring him from the station, a vehicle hardly built for the massive figure in the thick overcoat who appeared on it. Everything about him had a solidity and permanence that was more than merely mortal: the thick tweed jacket; the voice, a deep bass; the huge appetite; the great snoring in bed, that startled my other guests wide awake.
He had not yet become famous at this time. He made his about-face back into the arms of big business later. He was still able to be easy and unworried about his image. You could even persuade him sometimes to go for a swim. Later, this became unthinkable: that he exhibit himself in a bathing suit before mere peasants, emerge from the depths huffing and puffing like Triton -- impossible!
The man was the strangest combination of good, truly human greatness, and bad, weaknesses small and large, that I have ever seen. I am going to recall some of these by way of leave-taking.
One evening, he sat down to supper with Albers and me. This was just before the First World War ended. I had one goose for the three of us. Spengler began declaiming and speechifying, and ate the whole goose, leaving us nothing.
***
I never new a man so completely lacking in a sense of humor. He would not allow the slightest criticism of his work. The Decline of the West is full of marvelous insights, but there are errors, too. Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow, and not in St. Petersburg, as Spengler had it; Duke Berhard of Weimar died before Wallenstein was assassinated, and not after: and Spengler hated people who threw out statements without foundation in fact. Yet mistakes like these can happen to anyone. Yet woe to you if you happened to say so!
***
Really, he was the most humorless man I have ever met -- with one exception. That exception is Hitler and his cohorts. The Nazis are slowly choking to death on their own stultifying lack of humor; that, and the dreary wasteland they have made of German political life. But Spengler had much to redeem his lack of humor. There is his early work on Theocritus, an indispensable source. And there is the fact that in his major work he gave form to the vague presentiments of a generation. He had the nimbus of the significant about him, and aura which stayed even when he was off-guard. He represented the best in humanism: it was in his face: the stoicism of the bust of a late-Roman emperor.
Did he ever realize the irrationality that was about to take over our lives? Did he know that what he called The Decline of the West was really only the decline of Renaissance man over a period of four hundred years? I don't know. Halfway through his work he let himself become dependent on the industrialists, and began to think less well. How else can one possibly reconcile that really magnificent piece of writing he did in 1922 in which he prophesied the coming of a new, Dostoyevskian Christendom, with that technocracy-nonsense in his later work. Spengler always had something of the sour-faced down-at-the-heels pedagogue about him. It kept him finally from believing in the gods, much less in God. People began to stop believing in him around 1926, when he made piece with the Germany of his time. I do not mean that he ever accepted the Nazis. I know no one who hated them as he did, on lying down, in sleeping and in every waking moment. But for Spengler, surrender meant acceptance of the Ruhr industrialists.
***
And the Nazis dare to claim him as one of their own! Their controlled press, consisting of newspapers run by the dregs among public school teachers and Army officers, is full of triumphant articles: one former opponent after another is going the same way.
July 1936
A new story out of Munich: dearly loved city, once so familiar, now like a foreign place occupied by the Prussians.
It seems that one Herr Esser, the local Transport Minister, was involved with the daughter of a tavern owner. That gentlemen found out, and beat Herr Esser badly, so badly the Minister of Transport (or Sexual Transport) stayed in total seclusion at home. But the Nazis are not people to worry about such lapses in their officials, and so they promoted Herr Esser to a much higher post in Berlin.
Now comes word from Herr Esser in Berlin that the individual traveling abroad is about to become extinct. From now on every German will travel abroad, if he does, as part of an organizational herd, the Strength Through Joy flock. They are taking away even the little that remains of our freedom to move about. This gang of apes which seized hold of us three years ago is about to make us completely its prisoners.
***
I repeat, I am not going to judge a dead man. Hindenburg did not have the stature for the position he was given. He was also too old, and very likely too sick to handle it. But the stupidity of an entire people in agreeing to this combination of corruption and inadequacy in its leadership is something else again. The cabinet system is responsible, too; as long as this country agree to that political institution, convulsions, and political mayhem will accompany it. No, the Germans as they now are need a master. And by this I most certainly do not mean that forelocked gypsy type we have been given to lead us in our hour of need.
August 11, 1936
I have been working on my book about the Münster city-state set up by the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century. I read accounts of this "Kingdom of Zion" by contemporaries, and I am shaken. In every respect, down to the most ridiculous details, that was a forerunner of what we are now enduring. Like the Germany of today, the Münster city-state for years separated itself from the civilized world; like Nazi Germany, it was hugely successful over a long period of time, and appeared invincible. And then, suddenly, against all expectation and over a comparative trifle it collapsed….
As in our case, a misbegotten failure conceived, so to speak, in the gutter, became the great prophet, and the opposition simply disintegrated., while the rest of the world looked on in astonishment and incomprehension. As with us (for in Berchtesgaden, recently, crazed women swallowed the gravel on which our handsome gypsy of a leader had set his foot), hysterical females, schoolmasters, renegade priests, the dregs and outsiders from everywhere formed the main supports of the regime. I have to delete some of the parallels in order not to jeopardize myself any more than I already have. A thin sauce of ideology covered lewdness, greed, sadism, and fathomless lust for power, in Münster, too, and whoever would not completely accept the new teaching was turned over to the executioner. The same role of official murderer played by Hitler in the Röhm putsch was acted by Bockelson in Münster. As with us, Spartan laws were promulgated to control the misera plebs , but these did not apply to him and his follwers. Bockelson also surrounded himself with bodyguards, and was beyond the reach of any would-be assassin. As with us, there were street meetings and "voluntary contributions," refusal of which meant proscription. As with us, the masses were drugged: folk festivals, useless construction, anything and everything, to keep the main in the street from a moment's pause to reflect.
Exactly as the Nazi Germany has done, Münster sent its fifth columns and prophets forth to undermine neighboring states. The fact that the Münster propaganda chief, Dusentschnur, limped like Goebbels is a joke which history spent four hundred years preparing: a fact which I, familiar as I am with the vindictiveness of our Minister of Lies, have most advisedly omitted from my book. Constructed on a foundatoin of lies, there existed for a short time between the Middle Ages and modern times a bandits' regime. It threatened all the established world -- Kaiser, nobility, and all the old relationships. And it was all designed to still the hunger for mastery of a couple of power-mad thugs. A few things have yet to happen to complete the parallel. In the besieged Münster of 1534, the people were driven to swallow their own excrement, to eat their own children. This could happen to us, too, just as Hitler and his sycophants face the same inevitable end as Bockelson and Knipperdolling.
***
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 dreamt 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 jealously watched over its own rights a few years ago can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself to be dominated by the street-corner idlers of yesterday, but actually, height of shame, in incapable any longer of perceiving its shame for the shame that it is.
I saw Hitler last in Seebruck slowly gliding by in a car with armor plated sides, while an armed bodyguard of motorcyclists rode in front as further protection: a jellylike, slag-grey face, a moonface into which two melancholy jet-black eyes had been set like raisins. So sad, so unutterably insignificant, so basically misbegotten is the countenance that only thirty years ago, in the darkest days of Wilhelmism, such a face on an official would have been impossible. Appearing in the chair of a minister, an apparition with a face like this would have been disobeyed as soon as its mouth spoke an order--and not merely by the higher officials in the ministry: no, by the doorman, by the cleaning woman!
***
I have met him a few times -- not at any of his meetings of course. The first time was in 1920, at the home of my friend Clemens von Franckenstein, which was then the Lenbach villa. According to the butler, one of those present was forcing his way in everywhere, had already been there a full hour. It was Hitler. He had managed an invitation to Clé's house under the guise of being interested in operatic scenic design. (Clé had been general intendant of the Royal Theater.) Hitler very likely had the idea that theatrical design was connected with interior decorating and wallpaper hanging, his former profession.
***amusing, but rather tedious description of a Hitler rant. Too lazy to type it out.***
When he had gone, we sat silently confused and not at all amused. There was a feeling of dismay, as when on a train you suddenly find you are sharing a compartment with a psychotic. We sat a long time and no one spoke. Finally, Clé stood up, opened one of the huge windows and let the spring air, warm with the föhn, into the room. It was not that our grim guest had been unclean, and had fouled the room in the way that so often happens in a Bavarian village. But the fresh air helped to dispel the feeling of oppression. It was not that an unclean body had been in the room, but something else: the unclean essence of a monstrosity.
May, 1937
***
And so it goes in the City of Berlin. This is a place of formulas and stereotypes. The only things that bloom here have to do with numbers, columns, formulas and patterns. And with it all, there is this repulsive poverty, which has nothing to do with simplicity, which is merely a cover for inferiority and stupidity. Sparse and skimpy is the motto of this land. When I was still in short pants, I read that Frederick the Great's grenadiers wore waistcoats that were not waistcoats at all but merely triangles of red cloth which had been sewn to their doublets. And whether this story is true or not, I see these triangular pieces of cloth everywhere, in big things and small. Appearance, artifice, a patched on thing, and with it all the deeply ingrained idea of being something special. Why? Because they have the urge to rob and pillage -- which is characteristic of all who live meanly.
"Germany is never satiated; with no sense of form or taste, lacking all idea of what comforts and pleases in life, it has just one ambition: for more. And when it finally has more than it can possibly use, it puts what is left to one side, and woe to him who touches it! A nation of pirates, making its forays on dry land, but always with Te Deum's, for the greater glory of God or the Faith. For there has never been a shortage of inscriptions to put on the flags in this land."
Is this a Rhine Confederation intellectual speaking? Is this Bavarianism the style of Doctor Sigl? No, this is Theodor Fontane, claimed by this city as one of its very own, a Prussian pur sang, as they say. I can cite myself here. I, too, am of old Prussian stock, although my mother was of Austrian descent.
***
I am writing this in a Berlin hotel which is about as quiet and discreet as a howitzer. At this moment, a lady on the floor below whose name is probably Dolinski and who is certainly of the type I described earlier, is giving all the details of her divorce to her friend at the other end of the telephone. The windows are open, and all the spicy details are as though implanted in the still, hot air. Finally, whether I want to or not I learn what drove Herr Dolinski prematurely out of Madame's arms. I hear it , and recall a parade of the League of German Maidens which I saw go past in the city yesterday….a procession of bowlegs and broad hips marching between the estatically ugly facades of a city in love with its own ugliness, an exhibition of joylessness, a declaration of war on everything that "comforts and pleases in life."
***
In southern Germany, the bitter battle being fought below the surface against the Nazis is at the same time a battle against Prussianization, and a defense of Germany's natural structure. This may be a German problem today, but tomorrow it will be a matter for Europe and the world to resolve. The time is fast approaching when Europe will have to decide whether it will let itself be engulfed by the gray wave, or finally defend its own heart from the drive for power of Prussianism.
Comment: Maybe more later if I get bored. Note that Reck-Malleczewen is just getting warmed up at this point.
Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen
Anyone here ever read this before? I'd have to put it down as one of the more startling books I've read over the past year or two. It certainly gives lie to any claim that a "Paleo-con" (and I think it fair to consider that Reck was one, even if no such term existed then) would ever be happy living in a National Socialist regime. I'd like to say I discovered the title in some sort of profound way, but I simply saw it on the shelves of my local library, and picked it up out of curiosity. Such are the happy chances of fate.
So, in finest Phora tradition, I shall now bore everyone to death with some excerpts, typed as fast as my pudgy fingers can manage. I shall mark each period as the it is his diaries, and I shall also mark skips within with ***. I am not going to otherwise note anything with italics or any of that. If I do feel like adding my own comments, I will clearly indicate them.
My copy is the 1970 translation, translated by a Paul Rubens. Apparently there was an edition in English from the late 1990s, same translation but with a different cover and some pictures added.
Translator's Preface
This book is history of a kind that will be found in few history books. It is, in the real sense of the word living history, because it is the history of Germany in the Nazi period as was experienced by an extremely vital and aware man, Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen.
This is the accurate account of the forebodings of Reck-Malleczewen, who put his thoughts down as the only means of defending himself from a horror that finally engulfed him. Its entries cease with October 1944, because Reck-Malleczewen was killed by a Genickshuss, a shot in the neck, the following February 23, in the Dachau concentration camp.
When the author began his journal he was fifty-two, and therefore well into middle age. And yet, what is so extraordinary here is the power of the personality that emerges - his vitality, his immense passion. The writer has had "certain experiences, and looked into certain depths," as he says, and yet even in despair he remains a full blooded man of powerful commitment. This is the real importance of the book: that a man who stood solidly on the soil of Bavaria looked on as millions of his fellow countrymen became automatons, moving and yelling and salivating to order, and set down what it was to be a full human being among these walking machines.
***
Fritz Reck -- born Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen , in 1884, the son of an East Prussian Protestant Junker family -- was a prophet. He belongs with his great hero Dostoyevsky, and with Kafka, and with George Orwell, of whom he probably never heard, among that vision-afflicted little ban who say, with Dostoyevsky, that "the end of the world is at hand," because men and women no longer knew they had a center, could no longer hear what it said, could now only continue to move about the earth by various tricks of the mind or body.
Diary of a Man in Despair
May, 1936
Oswald Spengler is dead. He was a dominant figure in our time. A kind of maharaja himself, his death had something of a maharaja's about it. His editor at Beck, which publishes Spengler, killed himself a few days later, like a household member immolating himself following the death of his ruler. The editor, Albers, threw himself under the Starnberg train. A grisly death: his legs were severed at the thighs.
I last met Spengler only a few weeks ago, on Bayerstrasse, in Munich. He was dressed as usual in an expensive tweed suit. As usual, too, he looked and sounded angry. He had been deeply hurt, and out of that pain came penetrating insight. It was, as usual, time well spent…
I remember the first time we met. Albers, the same man who committed suicide, brought him to the house. I had sent the small trap to bring him from the station, a vehicle hardly built for the massive figure in the thick overcoat who appeared on it. Everything about him had a solidity and permanence that was more than merely mortal: the thick tweed jacket; the voice, a deep bass; the huge appetite; the great snoring in bed, that startled my other guests wide awake.
He had not yet become famous at this time. He made his about-face back into the arms of big business later. He was still able to be easy and unworried about his image. You could even persuade him sometimes to go for a swim. Later, this became unthinkable: that he exhibit himself in a bathing suit before mere peasants, emerge from the depths huffing and puffing like Triton -- impossible!
The man was the strangest combination of good, truly human greatness, and bad, weaknesses small and large, that I have ever seen. I am going to recall some of these by way of leave-taking.
One evening, he sat down to supper with Albers and me. This was just before the First World War ended. I had one goose for the three of us. Spengler began declaiming and speechifying, and ate the whole goose, leaving us nothing.
***
I never new a man so completely lacking in a sense of humor. He would not allow the slightest criticism of his work. The Decline of the West is full of marvelous insights, but there are errors, too. Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow, and not in St. Petersburg, as Spengler had it; Duke Berhard of Weimar died before Wallenstein was assassinated, and not after: and Spengler hated people who threw out statements without foundation in fact. Yet mistakes like these can happen to anyone. Yet woe to you if you happened to say so!
***
Really, he was the most humorless man I have ever met -- with one exception. That exception is Hitler and his cohorts. The Nazis are slowly choking to death on their own stultifying lack of humor; that, and the dreary wasteland they have made of German political life. But Spengler had much to redeem his lack of humor. There is his early work on Theocritus, an indispensable source. And there is the fact that in his major work he gave form to the vague presentiments of a generation. He had the nimbus of the significant about him, and aura which stayed even when he was off-guard. He represented the best in humanism: it was in his face: the stoicism of the bust of a late-Roman emperor.
Did he ever realize the irrationality that was about to take over our lives? Did he know that what he called The Decline of the West was really only the decline of Renaissance man over a period of four hundred years? I don't know. Halfway through his work he let himself become dependent on the industrialists, and began to think less well. How else can one possibly reconcile that really magnificent piece of writing he did in 1922 in which he prophesied the coming of a new, Dostoyevskian Christendom, with that technocracy-nonsense in his later work. Spengler always had something of the sour-faced down-at-the-heels pedagogue about him. It kept him finally from believing in the gods, much less in God. People began to stop believing in him around 1926, when he made piece with the Germany of his time. I do not mean that he ever accepted the Nazis. I know no one who hated them as he did, on lying down, in sleeping and in every waking moment. But for Spengler, surrender meant acceptance of the Ruhr industrialists.
***
And the Nazis dare to claim him as one of their own! Their controlled press, consisting of newspapers run by the dregs among public school teachers and Army officers, is full of triumphant articles: one former opponent after another is going the same way.
July 1936
A new story out of Munich: dearly loved city, once so familiar, now like a foreign place occupied by the Prussians.
It seems that one Herr Esser, the local Transport Minister, was involved with the daughter of a tavern owner. That gentlemen found out, and beat Herr Esser badly, so badly the Minister of Transport (or Sexual Transport) stayed in total seclusion at home. But the Nazis are not people to worry about such lapses in their officials, and so they promoted Herr Esser to a much higher post in Berlin.
Now comes word from Herr Esser in Berlin that the individual traveling abroad is about to become extinct. From now on every German will travel abroad, if he does, as part of an organizational herd, the Strength Through Joy flock. They are taking away even the little that remains of our freedom to move about. This gang of apes which seized hold of us three years ago is about to make us completely its prisoners.
***
I repeat, I am not going to judge a dead man. Hindenburg did not have the stature for the position he was given. He was also too old, and very likely too sick to handle it. But the stupidity of an entire people in agreeing to this combination of corruption and inadequacy in its leadership is something else again. The cabinet system is responsible, too; as long as this country agree to that political institution, convulsions, and political mayhem will accompany it. No, the Germans as they now are need a master. And by this I most certainly do not mean that forelocked gypsy type we have been given to lead us in our hour of need.
August 11, 1936
I have been working on my book about the Münster city-state set up by the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century. I read accounts of this "Kingdom of Zion" by contemporaries, and I am shaken. In every respect, down to the most ridiculous details, that was a forerunner of what we are now enduring. Like the Germany of today, the Münster city-state for years separated itself from the civilized world; like Nazi Germany, it was hugely successful over a long period of time, and appeared invincible. And then, suddenly, against all expectation and over a comparative trifle it collapsed….
As in our case, a misbegotten failure conceived, so to speak, in the gutter, became the great prophet, and the opposition simply disintegrated., while the rest of the world looked on in astonishment and incomprehension. As with us (for in Berchtesgaden, recently, crazed women swallowed the gravel on which our handsome gypsy of a leader had set his foot), hysterical females, schoolmasters, renegade priests, the dregs and outsiders from everywhere formed the main supports of the regime. I have to delete some of the parallels in order not to jeopardize myself any more than I already have. A thin sauce of ideology covered lewdness, greed, sadism, and fathomless lust for power, in Münster, too, and whoever would not completely accept the new teaching was turned over to the executioner. The same role of official murderer played by Hitler in the Röhm putsch was acted by Bockelson in Münster. As with us, Spartan laws were promulgated to control the misera plebs , but these did not apply to him and his follwers. Bockelson also surrounded himself with bodyguards, and was beyond the reach of any would-be assassin. As with us, there were street meetings and "voluntary contributions," refusal of which meant proscription. As with us, the masses were drugged: folk festivals, useless construction, anything and everything, to keep the main in the street from a moment's pause to reflect.
Exactly as the Nazi Germany has done, Münster sent its fifth columns and prophets forth to undermine neighboring states. The fact that the Münster propaganda chief, Dusentschnur, limped like Goebbels is a joke which history spent four hundred years preparing: a fact which I, familiar as I am with the vindictiveness of our Minister of Lies, have most advisedly omitted from my book. Constructed on a foundatoin of lies, there existed for a short time between the Middle Ages and modern times a bandits' regime. It threatened all the established world -- Kaiser, nobility, and all the old relationships. And it was all designed to still the hunger for mastery of a couple of power-mad thugs. A few things have yet to happen to complete the parallel. In the besieged Münster of 1534, the people were driven to swallow their own excrement, to eat their own children. This could happen to us, too, just as Hitler and his sycophants face the same inevitable end as Bockelson and Knipperdolling.
***
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 dreamt 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 jealously watched over its own rights a few years ago can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself to be dominated by the street-corner idlers of yesterday, but actually, height of shame, in incapable any longer of perceiving its shame for the shame that it is.
I saw Hitler last in Seebruck slowly gliding by in a car with armor plated sides, while an armed bodyguard of motorcyclists rode in front as further protection: a jellylike, slag-grey face, a moonface into which two melancholy jet-black eyes had been set like raisins. So sad, so unutterably insignificant, so basically misbegotten is the countenance that only thirty years ago, in the darkest days of Wilhelmism, such a face on an official would have been impossible. Appearing in the chair of a minister, an apparition with a face like this would have been disobeyed as soon as its mouth spoke an order--and not merely by the higher officials in the ministry: no, by the doorman, by the cleaning woman!
***
I have met him a few times -- not at any of his meetings of course. The first time was in 1920, at the home of my friend Clemens von Franckenstein, which was then the Lenbach villa. According to the butler, one of those present was forcing his way in everywhere, had already been there a full hour. It was Hitler. He had managed an invitation to Clé's house under the guise of being interested in operatic scenic design. (Clé had been general intendant of the Royal Theater.) Hitler very likely had the idea that theatrical design was connected with interior decorating and wallpaper hanging, his former profession.
***amusing, but rather tedious description of a Hitler rant. Too lazy to type it out.***
When he had gone, we sat silently confused and not at all amused. There was a feeling of dismay, as when on a train you suddenly find you are sharing a compartment with a psychotic. We sat a long time and no one spoke. Finally, Clé stood up, opened one of the huge windows and let the spring air, warm with the föhn, into the room. It was not that our grim guest had been unclean, and had fouled the room in the way that so often happens in a Bavarian village. But the fresh air helped to dispel the feeling of oppression. It was not that an unclean body had been in the room, but something else: the unclean essence of a monstrosity.
May, 1937
***
And so it goes in the City of Berlin. This is a place of formulas and stereotypes. The only things that bloom here have to do with numbers, columns, formulas and patterns. And with it all, there is this repulsive poverty, which has nothing to do with simplicity, which is merely a cover for inferiority and stupidity. Sparse and skimpy is the motto of this land. When I was still in short pants, I read that Frederick the Great's grenadiers wore waistcoats that were not waistcoats at all but merely triangles of red cloth which had been sewn to their doublets. And whether this story is true or not, I see these triangular pieces of cloth everywhere, in big things and small. Appearance, artifice, a patched on thing, and with it all the deeply ingrained idea of being something special. Why? Because they have the urge to rob and pillage -- which is characteristic of all who live meanly.
"Germany is never satiated; with no sense of form or taste, lacking all idea of what comforts and pleases in life, it has just one ambition: for more. And when it finally has more than it can possibly use, it puts what is left to one side, and woe to him who touches it! A nation of pirates, making its forays on dry land, but always with Te Deum's, for the greater glory of God or the Faith. For there has never been a shortage of inscriptions to put on the flags in this land."
Is this a Rhine Confederation intellectual speaking? Is this Bavarianism the style of Doctor Sigl? No, this is Theodor Fontane, claimed by this city as one of its very own, a Prussian pur sang, as they say. I can cite myself here. I, too, am of old Prussian stock, although my mother was of Austrian descent.
***
I am writing this in a Berlin hotel which is about as quiet and discreet as a howitzer. At this moment, a lady on the floor below whose name is probably Dolinski and who is certainly of the type I described earlier, is giving all the details of her divorce to her friend at the other end of the telephone. The windows are open, and all the spicy details are as though implanted in the still, hot air. Finally, whether I want to or not I learn what drove Herr Dolinski prematurely out of Madame's arms. I hear it , and recall a parade of the League of German Maidens which I saw go past in the city yesterday….a procession of bowlegs and broad hips marching between the estatically ugly facades of a city in love with its own ugliness, an exhibition of joylessness, a declaration of war on everything that "comforts and pleases in life."
***
In southern Germany, the bitter battle being fought below the surface against the Nazis is at the same time a battle against Prussianization, and a defense of Germany's natural structure. This may be a German problem today, but tomorrow it will be a matter for Europe and the world to resolve. The time is fast approaching when Europe will have to decide whether it will let itself be engulfed by the gray wave, or finally defend its own heart from the drive for power of Prussianism.
Comment: Maybe more later if I get bored. Note that Reck-Malleczewen is just getting warmed up at this point.