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One of the most important documents of the Hitler period. - Hannah Arendt <br> Very, very rarely one comes across a book so remarkable and so unexpectedly convincing that it deserves more to be quoted than to be reviewed.... I beg you to read this bitterly courageous book by as good a German as one could well imagine.... it is, without a doubt, my book of the year. Its light may seem to be cast on what is now ancient history, but it speaks, in thunder, to the present. 'At the end of the world, ' Reck Malleczewen says, the average man 'will want to know how the government proposes to hold next Sunday's Germany-Sweden football match on schedule.' Substitute Man United v Chelsea, and isn't that what mainly worries all of us today? --Frederic Raphael, The Sunday Times, London <br> In his visceral loathing of the Nazis, Reck was not, of course, unique. From our perspective, however, he had one great advantage over most of his like-minded friends: he possessed the makings of a great diarist. True, he was not at the centre of things, but he knew the world and had contacts in it. He was something of a connoisseur of rumours, collecting and savouring stories about the latest Nazi scandal or atrocity and adding to them his own trenchant reflections. And if he was a slightly gullible listener, he was a very acute observer.' -- The Financial Times <br> <br> Unlike many memoirs of the Nazi period, this one is not a totally gloomy account of persecution, brutality and horrors. The dominating quality is its tough exuberance and (often black) satirical humor. From a great height of aristocratic disrelish Fritz Reck-Malleczewen looks down on the Nazis as lower middle class scum, vengefully greedy for power, with Hitler as their avatar, at once sinister and ridiculous' -- The Wall Street Journal <br> His descriptions of Nazi Germany are not those of the scholar bent on documentation or of the victim who was tortured by sadists. Instead, we are offered a diarist

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen was a cultural conservative, monarchist and extreme pessimist, at once listlessly estranged from mid-century Germany and mournfully engaged with it. A Prussian aristocrat, he spent much of his life in rural isolation on his Bavarian estate. This book is the diary he kept of the Nazi years, covering the period from 1936 to February 1945, when his patrician disdain for Nazism led to his being executed in Dachau. The diary is widely known in Germany, but was published [in England] for the first time only last year, when it was rightly recognised as a masterpiece of the period. To read this diary is to encounter a kind ofGerman version ofthe late Alan Clark- but Reck has better jokes, adeeper intelligence (steeped as he was in Nietzsche and Dostoevsky) and amore exquisite aesthetic sensibility. Unusually for one of his class, Reck was no anti-Semite. To him, writing from the absurd aristocracy of his background, anti-Semitism was vulgar and Hitler the personification of mass man and the 'termite-heap' society, whose 'bovine and moronic roar of Heil' was the rancorous expression of the 'half-man' - The New Statesman <br> <br> Diary of a Man in Despair is animated by something deeper than the moans and sneers of degraded nobility wanting its clout back. Reck's awareness of Germany's fatal capacity, over the previous 70 years, for making more history than she can absorb without destroying herself, is accompanied by that kind of progress towards lucid self-realisation with which so many of the best diaries reward their readers. When at the end he is arrested as a subversive and then temporarily set free, a young corporal runs after him to brush his coat as he leaves the jail and whispers, 'Make this thing end soon.' For Reek it ended on 16 February 1945 in Dachau concentration camp with a bullet in the neck. - The Spectator <br> <br> Very, very rarely one comes across a book so remarkable and so unexpectedly convincing that it deserve

'one of the most powerful, moving and unclassifiable documents of opposition to Nazism to emerge from the Third Reich' New Statesman 'One of the most important personal documents to come out of the war.' -- Nicholas Lezard The Guardian

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Friedrich Reck (1884-1945) was born Friedrich Percyval Reck in Masuria, East Prussia, the son of a prosperous conservative politician and landowner. Having initially complied with his father's wishes to pursue a military career, he left the army to begin medical studies. By the beginning of the First World War, for which he was ruled unfit to serve, he had begun work as a full-time theater critic and travel writer. In the following decades he became a well-known figure in Munich society, the author of both literary historical novels and popular entertainments including Bomben auf Monte Carlo (Bombs on Monte Carlo), a best-selling comic novella and the basis of a hit musical film starring Peter Lorre. In October 1944 he was arrested for the first time; in December of the same year the Gestapo returned to detain him again; in January 1945 he arrived at the Dachau concentration camp, where he was to die shortly after. Paul Rubens (1927-2003), a self-educated native New Yorker, mastered the German language as a member of the U.S. occupation forces after World War II . Richard J. Evans is Regius Professor of History and president of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Third Reich at War.

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