Essential peri-WWII reading discovered thanks to one of those “readers also enjoyed” recommendations on Goodreads’s upper-right margin. I was like, hey, Diary of a Man in Despair, quite a catchy title, sounds like an uplifting romp to help me through the cold dark days of winter. GR was right: I liked this a good deal, this journal of a country’s suicide, a document that every Fox News aficionado and anyone who self-IDs as “deplorable” should have forcibly uploaded into them to debug their corrupted morality programming (in a Philadelphia parking garage, I recently saw a huge “deplorable” sticker aggressively rendering the word in proud script across a pickup’s back window). Translated by Paul Rubens, I also liked imagining that this was rendered from the original German into an active, erudite, often angry, and always flowing English by Pee Wee Herman.
An aristocratic, conservative, monarchistic gentleman writer who lives on an estate in an idyllic valley in a 600-year-old Gothic house bitterly opposes the Nazis, in part because they’re petty thief louts. This is worth it for the portraits of his three encounters with Hitler, particularly the early one where Hitler is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and is accompanied by a collie, rants a lot in some aristocrat’s house, and then when he leaves the host casually opens the windows to let in some fresh air to spiritually clear the room. Hitler is presented as a low-life psychopath from the beginning, a man whose doughy face wouldn’t have even been respected by servants in the late 1890s. Yet still/nevertheless women scoop and eat the gravel on which he’s walked. I could go on and on listing striking images and insights.
Interesting that at no point does he mention the Holocaust although he does witness antisemitism and mentions hearing about the machine-gunning of 50,000 Jews. He’s mostly isolated from the war, really, and receives it via rumor and the radio, often unwanted official visitors, and the sound of distant bombs and the occasional shot-down bomber falling to the ground like a leaf in autumn. The descriptions of the American bombing of Hamburg, with a rain of phosphorous burning and shrinking civilians, 200,000 purportedly dead and the city flattened, deliver exactly the perverse “pleasure” I derive from reading these accounts — the prose elevates as it relays absolute satanic horror and attains the highest levels of heft and lesson but also so often achieves a sort of magic as the text disappears, replaced by a vision of the worst possible world, Bosch-like landscapes superimposed over what only recently had been perfectly civilized civilization.
The key impression is erudition and anger. The author is insightful, knowledgeable, educated, moral, and always takes a long view of the present, seeing it from the perspective of “the world of yesterday” and a future in which the Nazis receive what’s coming to them. He understands that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” For the author, the Kaiser and the fallen monarchy are his Obama; the Nazis are his Trump. This is of course valuable now for its parallels. The lying is most striking, how they twist the truth at all times, how both Hitler and Trump seem like psychopaths addicted to screens (movies for Adolph, Fox News for Trump), how they both are essentially puppets of industrialists/financiers behind the scenes and harnessed lower-middle-class fear and anger and nationalism to gain power and enrich themselves ultimately at great cost to the soul of their countries (I’m hopeful that the parallel ends before “ultimately”).
Here’s a bit worth re-typing:
“It does sometimes happen that a would-be great man is allowed to toy with the levers of the gigantic machinery of history. But suddenly the wheels begin to move, faster and faster, and he is thrown into the machinery and crushed . . . A miserable hysteric may play Alexander the Great before the world for a while. But sooner or later, history comes along and pulls the mask off of his face.”
Loved this but I also found his fury repetitive after 150 pages or so. For a journal — and not a memoir recollected in anything resembling tranquility — it’s surprisingly cogent and moving, filled with anecdotes and history, and it relays a sense of a sort of life lost now to time. I also couldn’t find in the foreword or back cover how the journal was discovered and brought into print. A quick Google session revealed not much more than this sweet Guardian review. I suppose his publishers knew where he had hidden it in case he didn’t survive the war?
It’s easy to write quick impressions online about a book in part criticizing our current and most likely comparatively temporary regime in power but in no way do I imagine that doing so is in any way courageous. Reck absolutely risked his life to write this (if the Nazis had found it he would’ve been immediately executed, possibly beheaded). So, considering how dangerous the simple act of keeping this diary was, it merits the highest medal of honor I can offer.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput). Follow @litfunforever for notification of future updates if you’d like