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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