Books like Diary of a Man in Despair

Essential peri-WWII reading discovered thanks to one of those "readers also enjoyed" recommendations on GR's upper-right margin. I was like, hey, that sounds like a catchy title, an uplifting romp to help me through the recent extreme Arctic freeze. GR was ultimately right: I liked this a good deal, this journal of a country's suicide, a document that every Fox News aficionado and anyone who self-IDs as "deplorable" should have forcibly uploaded into them to debug their corrupted systems of morality (yesterday morning in a Philadelphia parking garage, I saw a huge "deplorable" sticker aggressively rendering the word in proud script across a pickup's back window). Translated by Paul Rubens, I also liked imagining that it was rendered from the original German into an active, erudite, often angry, and always flowing English by Pee Wee Herman. An aristocratic, conservative, monarchistic gentleman writer who lives on an estate in an idyllic valley in a 600-year-old Gothic house bitterly opposes the Nazis, in part because they're petty thief louts. This is worth it for the portraits of his three encounters with Hitler, particularly the early one where Hitler is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and is accompanied by a collie, rants a lot in some aristocrat's house, and then when he leaves the host casually opens the windows to let in some fresh air to spiritually clear the room. Hitler is presented as a low-life psychopath from the beginning, a man whose doughy face wouldn't have even been respected by servants in the late 1890s. Yet still women scoop and eat the gravel on which he's walked. I could go on and on listing striking images and insights. Interesting that at no point does he mention the Holocaust although he does witness antisemitism and mentions hearing about the machine-gunning of 50,000 Jews. He's mostly isolated from the war, really, and receives it via rumor and the radio, often unwanted official visitors, and the sound of distant bombs and the occasional shot-down bomber falling to the ground like a leaf in autumn. The descriptions of the American bombing of Hamburg, with a rain of phosphorous burning and shrinking civilians, 200,000 purportedly dead and the city flattened, deliver exactly the sort of perverse "pleasure" I derive from reading these accounts -- the prose elevates as it relays absolute satanic horror and attains the highest levels of heft and lesson but also so often achieves a sort of magic as the text disappears, replaced by a vision of the worst possible world, Bosch landscapes superimposed over what only recently had been perfectly civilized civilization. The key impression is erudition and anger. The author is insightful, knowledgeable, educated, moral, and always takes a long view of the present, seeing it from the perspective of "the world of yesterday" and a future in which the Nazis receive what's coming to them. He understands that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." For the author, the Kaiser and the fallen monarchy are his Obama; the Nazis are his Trump. This is of course valuable now for its parallels. The lying is most striking, how they twist the truth at all times, how both Hitler and Trump seem like psychopaths addicted to screens (movies for Adolph, Fox News for Trump), how they both are essentially puppets of industrialists/financiers behind the scenes and harnessed lower-middle-class fear and anger and nationalism to gain power and enrich themselves ultimately at great cost to the soul of their countries (I'm hopeful that the parallel ends before "ultimately"). Here's a bit worth re-typing: "It does sometimes happen that a would-be great man is allowed to toy with the levers of the gigantic machinery of history. But suddenly the wheels begin to move, faster and faster, and he is thrown into the machinery and crushed . . . A miserable hysteric may play Alexander the Great before the world for a while. But sooner or later, history comes along and pulls the mask off of his face." Almost gave it the full five stars but I found his fury repetitive after 150 pages or so. For a journal -- and not a memoir recollected in anything resembling tranquility -- it's surprisingly cogent and moving, filled with anecdotes and history, and it relays a sense of a sort of life lost now to time. I also couldn't find in the foreword or back cover how the journal was discovered and brought into print. A quick Google session now reveals nothing. I suppose his publishers knew where he had hidden it in case he didn't survive the war? Anyway, after writing this, I feel like I have to give this the full five. It's easy to write a quick review on Goodreads that criticizes our current and most likely comparatively temporary regime in power, but in no way do I imagine that doing so is in any way courageous. Reck absolutely risked his life to write this (if the Nazis had found it he would've been immediately executed, possibly beheaded). So, considering how dangerous the simple act of keeping this diary was, it merits the highest medal of honor available here.