This is, by turns, a fascinating and frustrating book. Using the voluminous and unpublished writings of one Franz von Göll as a starting point, Peter Fritzsche gives us a work that is part biography of Göll, part intellectual history of twentieth century Germany, and part psychosexual analysis.

As Fritzsche notes, Göll was a “graphomaniac.” Beginning at age sixteen (he was born in 1899), he kept a voluminous diary until his death in June 1984. He also left two memoirs. After Göll's death the materials were deposited in the Berlin State Archive, where first the French scholar Marie-Odile Berne and then Fritzsche made use of it. As Fritzsche modestly notes, as a result of his efforts, Göll has now been rescued from obscurity.

The book is not an edition of the diaries. Rather, Fritzsche uses the raw material to reveal Göll's thoughts on a variety of topics and, equally important, to comment upon Göll's reflections. Who was Franz Göll? According to Fritzsche, he was “an ordinary Berliner and German, typical of Germans in the twentieth century, although at one point (p. 8), Fritzsche also notes that Göll was not typical of twentieth-century Germans. Göll lived his entire life in the same apartment in Berlin, for many years with his mother, and after she died in 1954, alone. He never married, and his great passion was clearly his diaries and memoirs, in which he reflected on his vociferous reading and the events around him. (Incidentally, Fritzsche's claim that autobiography is a response to violence and revolution in the twentieth century [pp. 152 and 212] seems a bit far-fetched).

In analyzing his subject/object,Fritzsche takes a few liberties with Göll's life and status. Göll's name was actually Franz von Göll; his father was the illegitimate, but acknowledged, son of a minor nobleman. Fritzsche, however, feels that leaving Göll his “von” would be misleading for American audiences, who associate noblemen with wealth and privilege. Instead, Fritzsche insists Göll was “near the bottom of the social heap,” a conclusion that is not entirely convincing. While Göll had a number of menial jobs in his life, he was also at one point a department head at the prestigious Springer scientific publishing house, and at the time of his death there were 100,000 Deutsche Mark (€50,000) in his bank account. In the 1980s Göll also bought an expensive TV set. Perhaps demonstating the power of the medium, after this purchase he was far less assiduous about writing his diaries than he had been until then. As for Göll's personality, Fritzsche describes him as a “degenerate diarist” (p. 38) and a “borderline schizophrenic” (p. 36) who was a loner all his life.

As Fritzsche reminds us on numerous occasions, Göll was an autodictat who had little formal education. As a result, his reflections on the vast amount of reading he did throughout his life are often unsophisticated and unscientific. This allows Fritzsche to correct Göll's conclusions, and, not incidentally, demonstrate his own erudition on any number of topics.

Perhaps with an American audience in mind, the bulk of the book is devoted to Göll's views on the Nazis during and after they were in power. Göll wrote his diaries for sixty-eight years, but the last forty years of his life (after 1945) are covered in a scant forty pages. Except for a brief period when Göll saw in Hitler the much-needed Führer who would lead Germany out of the morass of the Weimar Republic, Göll opposed the Nazis. The book even contains a photo of Göll and a friend mocking (Fritzsche prefers the word “vamping”) Hitler and Goering, with Göll sporting a fake Hitlerian mustache. Fritzsche attributes Göll's rejection of the Nazis to his self-proclaimed status as a weakling, so that the Nazi idea of a master race did not appeal to him.

Despite Göll's rejection of the Nazis and Nazism, Fritzsche insists that some of Göll's views after 1945 demonstrate the Nazis' lingering influence, although the evidence for this conclusion is not entirely convincing. Surely, anticommunism is not the same as Nazism and anti-immigrant views are not the monopoly of the Nazis, either. Similarly, Göll's support of the state of Israel is hardly proof that he accepted the Nazis' racist view about the separation of Jews and Germans.

There are many references to Alltagsgeschichte in Göll's diaries, including the consequences of the hyperinflation in the 1920s and the black market after World War II, but Fritzsche's heart is clearly not in analyzing these sections of the diaries. His primary interest is in Göll's intellectual-ethical makeup, and in these parts of the book Martin Walser's Moralkeule is sometimes in full swing. Göll had a lifelong interest in science, and Fritzsche, psychoanalyzing his subject, writes that this was Göll's way of escaping Germany's moral guilt. Not illogically, Göll blames the Allies for bombing Berlin in World War II (miraculously, Göll's apartment was not damaged), thereby slipping into, according to Fritzsche, an inappropriate role as victim. Similarly, Fritzsche complains that after World War II Göll was more concerned about his mother's “minor ailments” (p. 192) (she suffered from a variety of malnutrition-related ailments and had to have several toes amputated), rather than be concerned about the far worse sufferings he and his fellow Germans inflicted on others.

Fritzsche is certainly right that he has rescued Franz von Göll from obscurity. Another question is whether Göll is not a rather too-slender peg on which to hang Fritzsche's heavy-laden philosophical and moral reflections.