Author Peter Fritzsche on an ‘ordinary Berliner’ who wrote his way through the turbulent 20th century…
When I first found the sprawling diary in a Berlin archive, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It was full of insight, but littered with self-pity. Political reportage on the terrible drama of twentieth-century German history often yielded to inflexible Social Darwinism, astrology combined with astronomy, aphorisms traded places with diatribes against women, self-laceration gave way to self-exculpation. Hitler, Stalin, Marx, Freud were all in the mix as well.
I knew that the diary was unusual because very few diarists comment on the world across a span of seventy years. Franz Göll began writing in 1916, just before his seventeenth birthday, and he continued until he died in 1984—the diary observes Kaiser Wilhelm as well as Ronald Reagan, the Age of Darwin as well as the Age of Aquarius.
That Göll was an ordinary man—a clerk, a publisher’s assistant, a night watchman—who lived all his life in the same crummy apartment in the “Red Island,” a well-known Berlin working-class district made the diary all the more tantalizing; most diarists are well-born and many rather indolent. Here was a man who had to make his way in life; he seemed to step right out of Hans Fallada’s classic Depression-era novel, Little Man, What Now?
Franz Göll apprenticed himself to the big city along Reichsstrasse 1 (Germany’s equivalent of the USA’s Route 66), which extends from Aachen in the west, traverses Berlin, and continues on to Königsberg in the east. This is the metropolitan broadway where Marlene Dietrich, who is almost an exact contemporary, grew up, where Franz scouted his first love, Klara Wasko, and where he searched for jobs and posed as a dandy.
If Franz Göll never moved, world history moved through him: from his perch on Rossbachstrasse, he witnessed the German Revolution in 1918, the rise of the Nazis in 1933, the pogrom against the Jews in 1938, the bombing of Berlin and the rape of his neighbours in the last years of World War Two, and the frightening prospect of nuclear annihilation after 1945.
Yet the diary is also cluttered with the musing of a lonesome man: a solitary child, he played horsey and whipped himself; linkisch or bumbling, he was too frightened to pick up the candy thrown out during party showers. His mother had to accompany the boy to school because he couldn’t get his winter coat off by himself. Classmates teased him for being fit only for a coffin, not a career.
An avid reader, Göll turned inward and spent hours in the local library and sometimes willed himself to be an unrecognized genius who, following the wildly misogynistic yet widely influential philosopher Otto Weininger, had chosen creativity over sex. Elsewhere, and very much in the spirit of this eugenic age, Göll prepared biological studies of his family to confirm his degeneracy. At one point, he was attracted to the Nazis and developed into an anti-Semite before turning against the bullies whom he hated in the public square as much a…