Many lovers of German culture have asked how could it happen, how could this "people of philosophers and poets" be taken in by this "böhmischen Gefreiten" and his laughing gallery of government ministers who soon changed the disdainful sneers into cries of fear?
There have been many answers given to this question, and, after the fact, many books written by Germans to excuse or to whitewash their own collaboration. The book "Diary of a Man in Despair" excuses no one, including the other European powers who stood by and watched until Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland.
The author, Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, died in Dachau in February, 1945. Somehow, the Nazis did not find his diary; "Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten" ("Diary of a Man in Despair") was first published in 1947 in the midst of Europe's ruins.
It's one of the most powerful, moving, and unclassifiable documents of opposition to Nazism to emerge from the Third Reich. It is not a diary in the conventional sense of the word; it does not chronicle daily events in the life of the writer, but rather brings together thoughts, reflections, stories, and reminiscences recorded at intervals over the years following the death in 1936 of the philosopher Oswald Spengler (best known for his book "The Decline of the West"), who was a major influence on the writer, to Rock's death in the final months of the war.
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