Fact and Fantasy of the Would-Be Aristocrat

ESTABLISHING A RELIABLE biographical portrait of Reck has proved a significant challenge, and autobiographical sources, in particular, have to be treated with the greatest caution and skepticism. Despite his undoubted, if modest, literary success, Reck felt an abiding need for public recognition and he repeatedly fabricated elements of his biography as a form of compensation. Until Kappeler's detailed biographical researches in the 1950s and 1960s, the accepted version of Reck's life, one propagated and perpetuated by various uncritical commentators, was based on the writer's own claim to an aristocratic heritage and a whole host of adventurous experiences and colorful episodes.

So who was the self-styled aristocrat Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen? He was born on August 11, 1884 as the youngest of four children on the family's Malleczewen estate in Kreis Lyck in East Prussia, close to the Russian border. His father, Hermann Reck, was a successful farmer, a Protestant monarchist and a Conservative member of the Prussian parliament and subsequently the Reichstag, where he represented the interests of Prussian landowners. His mother Emma, by contrast, was an Austrian national, a Catholic descended of a family of industrialists. Following his Abitur at the Royal Prussian Grammar School in Lyck in 1904, Reck was encouraged by his father to volunteer for the Fifth Thuringian Infantry regiment in Jena but abandoned his officer training after just six months and, contrary to his own fanciful imaginings, never returned to the military.

Declining to study law, as expected by the family, in the autumn of 1904 Reck opted for medicine and subsequently pursued his studies in Königsberg, Innsbruck, Rostock, and Jena, completing them in 1911. This too was not to be his vocation, however, as, following short periods of locum work in the country, the by now married Reck decided to pursue his literary ambitions and desire to travel. Although he had fallen out with his father and failed to receive the inheritance he had expected, his wife's parents were prepared to subsidize his ambitions. Following his trips to England, Belgium, and the Americas, he and his family relocated to Pasing in Munich. Reck found outlets for his writing in various newspapers, most notably up until 1914 in the newly reestablished Süddeutsche Zeitung. He did not participate in the war, having been declared unfit for military duty.