Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck

Author:Friedrich Reck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-599-6
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2013-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

September 1941

This is how we live in Germany today. . . .

Monday, a gigantic victory is announced. Tuesday, not a soul can remember what it was. Huge numbers of prisoners are reported captured; no one believes the figures. Day in and day out, trumpets on the radio announce more victories—and we switch off as soon as we hear the first notes of the fanfare, with a feeling of insult.

I don’t know why it is that nothing remains in people’s minds about these ‘most gigantic pincer movements of all times’ or of these trapped enemy armies many times bigger than at Sedan—or little more, anyway, than about the latest foot-and-mouth epidemic, or the fact that the ground frost is early this year—but so it is. Sometimes I think it is because of our general termite-heap condition, the termites being incapable of awareness of things outside the heap—I ponder this for a moment, and then I reject the idea. There is something else here, something more complex, something quite eerie, not quite to be put into words.

I do not know what it is, but I feel, as other people feel, that it is there and goes about in our midst, invisible –

If, despite my expectations, the facts really turn out to accord with the propaganda, I will nevertheless feel what I now do: these things are beyond history.

Another example of our living beyond history: Herr Bruno Brehm, who just a few years ago was a fixture in the ante-rooms of Jewish literati, writes gory dispatches from Lemberg about the corpses found there and supposed to be the work of the Cheka—and blames it all on the Jews.[55] And so, without honour or truth or justice, we vegetate here. The lower classes, which we can say includes everybody but swastika-wearers, do not have enough food. The bureaucracy—former tailor’s apprentices, bank trainees, and seminarians and theology students—calls for the hard life of the front line, and lives on ‘diplomat’ ration stamps, worth three times the ordinary food stamp.

Recently, when Herr Gauleiter Wagner honoured our little town with his presence, practically every chicken in the area was slaughtered to meet the needs of his entourage of drunkards and felons. Herr Hitler has his own private vegetable farm in Solln, near Munich, where SS guards patrol an electrically charged fence enclosing the hothouses of our vegetarian Tamerlane.

In the meantime the plebes are feeling the full fury of a German food industry gone chemical-crazy. Sugar is now made out of firwood pulp, sausage out of beech-wood pulp, and the beer is a stinking brew made of whey. Yeast is made out of a chemical, and marmalade is coloured to fool people into thinking it is the real thing. The same for butter, except that the colouring matter here also contains a vile and indigestible substance poisonous to the liver and doubtless responsible for the biliousness so common today. Everyone’s eyes are yellow, and if I am to believe friends of mine who are doctors, the incidence of cancer has doubled in the last four years.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.