Diary Of A Man In Despair

"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." - The Spectator

"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." - Frederic Raphael, The Sunday Times, London

"Probably not since A Tale of Two Cities has the European aristocrat been seen as a heroic victim....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