Brave Old World

By R.Z. Sheppard

DIARY OF A MAN IN DESPAIR by Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen. 219 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

In the fall of 1932, Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, monarchist, amateur philosopher and member of Bavaria'-landed gentry, was dining with a friend at a Munich restaurant. Like many other Germans during those disorderly times, he carried a revolver to protect himself against street thugs. Seated alone at an adjacent table was a sullen, self-conscious political comer named Adolf Hitler. "I could easily have shot him," Fritz Reck wrote in his diary four years later. "If I had had an inkling of the role this piece of filth was to play, and of the years of suffering he was to make us endure, I would have done it without a second thought. But I took him for a character out of a comic strip, and did not shoot."

Reck must have shown an amusing side to the Nazis. He was an old-school Wilhelmist and a South German intellectual whose broad range of ideas included a distaste for modern mass man that could be traced through his friend Oswald Spengler and back to such Slavophiles as Dostoevsky and Danilevsky. Because of Reek's all-German background and community prestige, the Nazis appear to have tolerated a good deal of unsympathetic behavior from him. He invariably used the old greeting "God be praised" instead of "Heil Hitler." In 1940 he huffed out of a packed Berlin movie house during that famous newsreel in which Hitler jigs over fallen France. Even when he threw a government industrial-site surveyor off his estate, nothing happened.

But in October 1944, at the age of 60, with Nazi defeat in view, Reck went too far. He had already become participant in a circle of intellectuals planning for a Hitlerless Germany. When he ignored his draft notice requiring him to serve in the last-ditch Volkssturm, he was arrested for "undermining the morale of the armed forces" and shipped to Dachau. In February 1945, Reck was executed.

The sporadic journal of the Nazi plague years, which Reck began in 1936 and whose last entry is dated October 1944, survived to be published in Germany two years after the war. Reck wrote it secretly and kept it hidden in the woods on his land not far from Munich. It is easy to see why. In the journal, Hitler appears as a "gypsy baron," 'a teetotaling Alexander," a "vegetarian Tamerlane," "an unclean essence." Mein Kampf is dismissed by Reck as "Machiavelli for chambermaids." Albert Speer's clean-cut expression is "the epitome of this whole, sickening, mechanical, little-boy-at-heart generation." Goring, the son of a waitress, is rendered among his looted art and phony coat of arms as a preposterous sham. In fact, Reck saw the whole Third Reich as ludicrous kitsch compounded of dueling-club romanticism, gymnastics and "a touch of Hegel."

In Reek's passionately conservative view, Germany's troubles were born with the spirit of nationalism spawned by Bismarck's victory in the Franco-Prussian War. It enabled the Prussian oligarchy and the rich northern manufacturers and bankers to force industrialization throughout a country whose spirit, Reck believed, was basically agricultural. This led to an erosion of pastoral values and encouraged the weedlike growth of indiscriminate commercialism and technology. The result was mass men who, in their confusion of broken values and deflated deutschmarks, accepted as real the fatal delusions of an irrational clown like Hitler.

It is not Reek's familiar and rather simplistic view of German history that compels the reader to keep turning the pages of his diary. It is his obsessive imagination of disaster, his specific visions of decay. Even in the mid-'30s, Reck saw Hitler as the culmination of an age of pseudorationalism that would destroy itself with its own greed, stupidity and madness. His pages are full of fleeting evidence: workers lined up in front of bordellos in broad daylight, language corrupted beyond nonsense, people bombed into insanity carrying their dead children in suitcases from city to city.

Like Dostoevsky, Reck believed that the end of the world was at hand. And like Dostoevsky's "underground man," Reck spat his hatred and isolation into the face of history. He had no way of knowing that it is an ironic history. Like a classical Fury giving birth to poetic justice, Diary of a Man in Despair pursues ex-Nazi Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich into English (TIME, Sept. 7).

In his posthumous rage and disgust. Reck seems more alive than the 65-year-old Speer, whose coolly confessional document sometimes suggests a cadaver performing an autopsy on itself. . R.Z. Sheppard

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