Diary Of A Man In Despair (new York Review Books Classics)
by Richard Evans /
2013 / English / EPUB
1.8 MB Download
Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not
just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the
part of a landed gentleman, deplored democracy, and rejected the
modern world outright. To Reck the Nazis were ruthless
revolutionaries in Gothic drag, and helpless as he was to counter
the spell they had cast on the German people, he felt compelled to
record the corruptions of their rule. The result is less a diary
than a sequence of stark and astonishing snapshots of life in
Germany between 1936 and 1944. We see the Nazis at the peak of
power, and the murderous panic with which they respond to
approaching defeat; their travesty of traditional folkways in the
name of the Volk; and the author’s own missed opportunity to shoot
Hitler. This riveting book is not only, as Hannah Arendt proclaimed
it, “one of the most important documents of the Hitler period” but
a moving testament of a decent man struggling to do the right thing
in a depraved world.
Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not
just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the
part of a landed gentleman, deplored democracy, and rejected the
modern world outright. To Reck the Nazis were ruthless
revolutionaries in Gothic drag, and helpless as he was to counter
the spell they had cast on the German people, he felt compelled to
record the corruptions of their rule. The result is less a diary
than a sequence of stark and astonishing snapshots of life in
Germany between 1936 and 1944. We see the Nazis at the peak of
power, and the murderous panic with which they respond to
approaching defeat; their travesty of traditional folkways in the
name of the Volk; and the author’s own missed opportunity to shoot
Hitler. This riveting book is not only, as Hannah Arendt proclaimed
it, “one of the most important documents of the Hitler period” but
a moving testament of a decent man struggling to do the right thing
in a depraved world.
