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Title: Diary of a Man in Despair: A Masterpiece About the Comprehension of Evil by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Paul Rubens ISBN: 0-7156-3000-8 Publisher: Duckworth Publishing Pub. Date: 01 May, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the greatest books ever
Comment: It's hard to believe this isn't a work of fiction. This guy is filled with hate and rage and loathing as he watches the German-speaking people descend into madness. Incredible writing, powerful ideas. Get it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Diary of a man among apes
Comment: The title is a calumny. As his translator, Paul Rubens, points out, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen was a prophet - not in the vulgar sense of one who predicts future events, but a prophet after the fashion of Jeremiah, William Blake and Dostoyevsky: one who comments on the present from the perspective of the Most High. As such, even when his own death is imminent, Reck most certainly does not despair. Like the three individuals mentioned above, he is angered, disgusted, saddened and horrified by what he sees around him; his journal is filled with images of Calvary, the plague, and the Apocalypse; yet he continually strives to see his own and his country's ordeal as a time of suffering and repentance which must be endured to make way for a new and better world. None of which is to say that his thinking is "mystical" in the sense of being vague or escapist; indeed, the immense value of Reck's diary, both as literature and as a historical document, lies in its brilliant combination of sharp observation and lucid analysis. Although he makes the all-too-common error of lumping in the plotters of 20 July 1944 with the many opportunists who tried to dissociate themselves from the regime as defeat began to loom, Reck's analytical passages offer as clear and concrete a picture of the corruption underlying Hitler's Germany as any historian I have encountered. Telling details of life in the Third Reich - the omnipresent thuggery and tale-bearing, the forced barracks-gymnasium atmosphere, the all-pervasive lies and propaganda - spring out of every page through tartly written anecdotes and vignettes. The peculiar detestability of the Nazi functionaries - frustrated schoolteachers and jumped-up mailmen posing as masters of the world - is described and analysed with perception and admirable loathing. This elderly, conservative, royalist aristocrat - a member of a class who, because they did not support the Weimar Republic, are too often labelled supporters of the Nazis - displays a courage, intelligence, breadth of culture and (I cannot emphasise it enough) a faith which makes his journal as moving a human document as the more famous diary of Anne Frank.
Rating: 5
Summary: Reck does not dismiss them as boorish charlatans
Comment: It is true that Reck has a sense of class superiority to the Nazi's but that does not obscure his central point--he knew they were monsters--and he died for that. Counts for something you know. The invective is superb and more over Reck recognizes real resistance like the Scholl's (were they aristocrat?) and damns the generals assisanation plot as a an opportunistic move. Furthermore The Nazis crimes were pandemic--the annhilhation of the Jews, but also gypsies--and if one is making measurements which seems to me silly--the obliteration of 20,0000 soviet citizens. By the other reviewers logic if the destruction of the Jews is the question by which Germans will be judged, then Stalin becomes a heroe for saving the bulk of Soviet Jewry --sending them behind the Ural mountains--I don't think I want to go that route. It also explains why Israel refuses to make Dietrich Bonhoeffer a "rightious gentile" which is a scandal.
No The Nazis were monsters such total monsters that any costly resistance derserves honor. This is the best anti-Nazi book theis Jew has ever read.
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Title: In Parenthesis (New York Review Books) by David Michael Jones, W. S. Merwin ISBN: 1590170369 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald, Anthea Bell ISBN: 0375504842 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 11 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag ISBN: 0374248583 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 19 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges ISBN: 1586480499 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell ISBN: 0195133323 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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