Background

Friedrich (Fritz) Reck-Malleczewen was born on August 11, 1884, in Maleczewo, Poland. Friedrich was a Prussian aristocrat who came from a wealthy family. His father was the Prussian politician and landowner Hermann Reck.

Education

Friedrich studied medicine in Innsbruck.

Career

In 1911, Reck got a job as a ship's doctor and sailed in American waters for a year. After that, he moved to Stuttgart, where he chose the career of a journalist and theater critic at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and then in 1914, he moved closer to Munich, in Pasing.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Rivers also acted as a writer, specializing in children's adventure stories. One of his books, Bomben auf Monte Carlo, was filmed four times. After Hitler came to power, many of Reck's books fell under the ban and were published only years after his death.

Achievements

• Friedrich Percival Reck-Malleczewen is best known as a novelist, mainly of children's adventure stories. One of his most famous works is Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten (The Diary of the Desperate), which describes years of life under the rule of the Nazis, whom the writer fiercely hated.
  
  

Works

More photos

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  • Diary of a Man in Despair

    (Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazis...)

    1970
  • Der Admiral der roten Flagge 1917
  • Die Siedlung Unitrusttown 1925
  • Frau Übersee 1926
  • Sven entdeckt das Paradies 1928
  • Bomben auf Monte Carlo 1930
  • Krach um Payta 1935
  • Der grobe Brief 1940
  • Diana Pontecorvo 1944
  • Das Ende der Termiten 1946
  • Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten 1947

Religion

In 1933, Friedrich converted to Catholicism.

Views

Reck-Malleczewen began keeping a diary in 1936, as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime began their rise to power in Germany. In his journal, he chronicled the rise of Nazi sympathies among the people, as well as his own personal encounters with Hitler. The journal ends when he is arrested by the Gestapo, or secret police. During his encounters with Hitler, he considered shooting the dictator but did not, and regretted it for the rest of his life. Reck-Malleczewen was consumed by his hatred of the ruling regime. In 1936 he wrote in his journal, He was shocked at how easily the Nazis had taken over society, and at how many people believed in their cause and unthinkingly followed it.

Quotations: "I could easily have shot him. If I had had an inkling of the role this piece of filth was to play and of the years of suffering he was to make us endure, I would have done it without a second thought. But I took him for a character out of a comic strip, and did not shoot."

"For more than forty-two months I have thought hate, have lain down with hate in my heart, have dreamed hate and awakened with hate. I am the prisoner of a horde of vicious apes."

Personality

Reck- Malleczewen was a complex character because he was not easy to admire. Apart from his hatred of the Nazis, he had other qualities that made it difficult to consider him a hero. For example, she noted, he had his own peculiar prejudices and hatreds of particular groups of people, as strong as those of the Nazis. He was secretive, reactionary, and snobbish, and although he wrote many bitter diatribes, did not take any real action against the Nazis until August of 1943.

In the end, his hatred for the regime became too obvious for the Nazis to tolerate. He was arrested and taken to the Dachau prison camp because he had ridiculed Hitler. Diseases were widespread there, and under these conditions, Friedrich soon contracted typhoid. According to the official death certificate, he died on February 16, 1945. There another source that says that he was executed with a gunshot to the neck on February 16, 1945.

Connections

In 1908, Friedrich married Anna Louise Büttner but in 1930 the couple divorced. They had three daughters and a son. In 1935, Friedrich married Irmgard von Borcke, with whom he also had three daughters.

Father:

Hermann Reck

ex-wife:

Anna Louise Büttner

Wife:

Irmgard von Borcke

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series (Volume 198) brings researchers the most recent data on the world's most popular authors.
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