Diary of a Man in Despair Quotes

“But we must be completely clear...if nationalism is truly the hallmark of a people in the prime of its youth and energies, how does it happen that under its aegis morality decays, ancient customs die out---that men are uprooted, the steadfast derided, the thoughtful branded, the rivers poisoned, and the forests destroyed? Why, if this is a high watermark of our national life, has our speech been vulgarized in this unprecedented way?”
― Freidrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s .”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“Once, in the South Atlantic, I saw a whaler in the process of killing a female accompanied by one of her offspring. The harpooner, a red-bearded Irishman, kept putting harpoons into the whale. The intestines were hanging out of the mangled body of the huge animal, and nevertheless it continued to swim back and forth in the water made red by its blood, trying with its shattered body to shield the little whale. Since then, and the sight of that harpooner's freckled face as he laughed derisively, and of that poor creature, faithful to the end, I have believed in the existence of Satan as I believe in the existence of God.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“I hate you. I hate you waking and sleeping; I hate you for undoing men’s souls, and for spoiling their lives; I hate you as the sworn enemy of the laughter of men.... Oh, it is God’s deadly enemy which I see, and hate, in you.
In every one of your speeches you make a mockery of the Spirit, which you have silenced, and you forget that the private thought, the thought born in sorrow and loneliness, can be more deadly than all your implements of torture. You threaten all who oppose you with death, but you forget: our hatred is a deadly poison. It will creep into your blood, and we will die shouting with joy when our hate pulls you down with us into the depths.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“In our hatred, we are like bees who must pay with their lives for the use of their stingers”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“I still remember our first meeting, when Albers brought him to my house. On the little carriage which carried him from the station, and which was hardly built with such loads in mind, sat a massive figure who appeared even more enormous by virtue of the thick overcoat he wore. Everything about him had the effect of extraordinary permanence and solidity: the deep bass voice; the tweed jacket, already, at that time, almost habitual; the appetite at dinner; and at night, the truly Cyclopean snoring, loud as a series of buzz saws, which frightened the other guests at my Chiemgau country house out of their peaceful slumbers.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“But we cannot go back to the life we shared with you yesterday, a life which you will spread before us so temptingly when you return. We have suffered too much to believe any more that the way to what we see as the Absolute can go in any other direction than through the deep valley of sorrow. Hell has not opened before our eyes to no purpose, and he who has once seen it cannot find his way back to earthly symposiums.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“[Spengler] made peace with contemporary Germany, not with the Nazis, for I know of no one who hated them as he did, on lying down, in sleeping, and in rising up!”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“Ah, now, really, gentlemen, this is a little late. You made this monster, and as long as things were going well you gave him whatever he wanted. You turned Germany over to this arch-criminal, you swore allegiance to him by every incredible oath he chose to put before you—you, officers of the Crown, all of you. And so you made yourselves into the Mamelukes of a man who carries on his head responsibility for a hundred thousand murders and who is the cause of the sorrow and the object of the curses of the whole of the world.
And now you are betraying him, as yesterday you betrayed the Republic, and as the day before yesterday you betrayed the Monarchy.
[...]
For years, these men were the cover for every treasonable act, every orgy of rape and murder, because Hitler allowed them prominence once again in a debased, Prussianised Germany. They defended him, verbally and physically, every time he committed one of his criminal acts, they went blithely on past the suffering of all the bombing victims, the prisoners in the concentration camps, and the religious persecutors, and they hummed a little tune to words like ‘Germany’ or the ‘German spirit’, because a different regime would have meant the end of their power...
And now that the firm is going bankrupt, they are betraying it to provide themselves with a political alibi— just as they betrayed all the others who were no longer useful in their drive to get and hold power.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“You, up there: I hate you waking and sleeping. I will hate and curse you in the hour of my death. I will hate and curse you from my grave, and it will be your children and your children’s children who will have to bear my curse. I have no other weapon against you but this curse, I know that it withers the heart of him who utters it, I do not know if I will survive your downfall.

But this I know, that a man must hate this Germany with all his heart if he really loves it. I would ten times rather die than see you triumph.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“If nationalism is truly the hallmark of a people in the prime of its youth and energies, how does it happen that under its aegis morality decays, ancient customs die out—that men are uprooted, the steadfast derided, the thoughtful branded, the rivers poisoned, and the forests destroyed?”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair