Goebbels: A Biography Read online

  A new literary project, entitled “The Wanderer,” was again completed very quickly, between November 14 and 28.22 The plot chimed with his mood of depression and was a further attempt to achieve “redemption”: “Christ comes back as a wanderer on earth and accompanies the writer visiting suffering mankind. A kind of dance of death.”23 After finishing the manuscript he wrote that in “The Wanderer” he was “trying depict the sick Europe of today. I have shown the only path to salvation and must recognize with pain and bitterness that this path will never be taken.”24 He offered “The Wanderer” to the Cologne Schauspielhaus and “Prometheus” to the Stadttheater in Düsseldorf.25 Neither venue was interested. His efforts to place the dramas in Frankfurt and Duisburg were equally unsuccessful.26

  In mid-December he attended a lecture on Vincent van Gogh, which he found “deeply enjoyable.” He wrote that van Gogh was “one of the most modern men in new art, a God-seeker, a Christ-person.” He perceived similarities to Dostoyevsky and to his own “Wanderer”: “All modern artists—I’m not talking here about half-hearted snobs and epigones—are to a greater or lesser degree teachers, preachers, fanatics, prophets, to a greater or lesser degree insane—like all of us who have active minds.” However: “We younger people are being ignored. Perhaps a later generation will be able to capitalize on our broken hearts. How unutterably heavy is the sorrow of the seers!”27 These lines express his hope that the “redemption” he so fervently sought might arise out of a complete cultural revolution along Christian-socialist lines—and Goebbels was obviously convinced that he was destined to play a prominent role in such an upheaval, as a “prophet” or “seer.” He went even further when he noted during the Christmas period: “I can feel myself driven toward the whole, toward men and mankind. If God gives me a long enough lease of life, I shall be a redeemer. Whether for myself, for one or two, or for a whole people, it’s all the same. I must become mature enough for the mission.”28

  Craving “redemption,” Goebbels now saw himself as the redeemer and no longer just speculated about the godlike nature of the artist29 but boldly stated: “If God has made me in his image, then I am God like him.”30 Quite clearly he thought he felt a “divine spark” within him, and it seems that he flirted with gnostic speculations (according to which man is able to escape the bonds of his corporeal being and move closer to the Godhead). In the ranks of the völkisch (nationalist/racist) movement toward which he was now slowly gravitating, he was by no means alone in this respect.31 There was a reason for his preoccupation over many years with his “Prometheus problem,” as he called it; his preoccupation, that is to say, with a figure who—in his own words—was “half god and half human” and rebelled against the gods in heaven.32 While indulging in such thoughts, he had nonetheless not relinquished his hope of redemption through religion: “I’ll stay calm and await the redeemer,” he wrote on January 5, 1924.

  Completely wrapped up in his metaphysical speculations, he adopted a scornful view of politics. “To practice politics,” he wrote in his diary in January, “is to enchain the spirit, to know when to speak and when to be silent, to lie for the greater good: My God, what a dreadful business.”33 Once more he enjoyed the role of the detached observer disgusted by the times: “Demonstrators are parading through the streets. […] Who is to blame for all this confusion, all this barbarism? Why can’t we settle our differences? Why not all pull together, since the country—in fact, all of Europe—is on its knees?”34

  It is not the political events of the time that his diary entries predominantly reflect in these months but his own artistic and emotional development. Goebbels was preoccupied by religious-philosophical questions and aesthetic matters and with the concerts he attended regularly over the winter of 1923–24.35 And he made extensive notes on his reading: the great Russian authors who inspired him, especially Dostoyevsky, the “great soul of Russia”;36 Tolstoy, whose The Cossacks and War and Peace particularly impressed him;37 and Gogol, although he thought Dead Souls was somewhat “infected by western Europe.”38 Aside from these authors, he mainly read Scandinavian writers: He mentions in particular Selma Lagerlöf’s homespun tales;39 Knut Hamsun, whose novel The Women at the Pump now seemed very dated,40 although Goebbels had clearly read him with profit in earlier years; and Strindberg, to whom his response was mixed.41

  He approved of naturalistic plays like Max Halbe’s Der Strom (The River) and Gerhart Hauptmann’s Biberpelz (The Beaver Coat).42 He had no time for contemporary German literature. Thomas Mann, whose Buddenbrooks he had once admired, now seemed to him a “decadent writer,”43 and he dismissed the novel Königliche Hoheit (Royal Highness) as “cold fish literature.”44 Nebeneinander (Side by Side), a drama by the most important German Expressionist playwright, Georg Kaiser, betokening that author’s transition to the hard-edged “New Objectivity” movement of the postwar era, was comprehensively demolished in the diary.45 However, he liked Hermann Hesse. In Hesse’s novels Unterm Rad (Beneath the Wheel) and Peter Camenzind, both dealing with the difficulties experienced by highly gifted young people in finding their place in the world, he found parallels with his own youth.46

  When it came to pictorial art, he was slightly more receptive to contemporary work. It is true that at exhibitions he tended to fulminate against the dilettantism of modern art, but this did not prevent him from enthusing about a series of Expressionists. He still admired van Gogh, Emil Nolde, and Ernst Barlach.47

  He found the atmosphere in the family home increasingly oppressive. He wanted to get away, he confessed in late December: “If only I knew where to!” At home he was “the reprobate, […] the renegade, the apostate, the outlaw, the atheist, the revolutionary.” He was “the only one who can’t do anything, whose advice is never wanted, whose opinion isn’t worth listening to. It’s driving me crazy!”48

  In February he penned a thumbnail sketch of his parents: His mother was described as “open-hearted and good. She can’t help loving. […] My mother is a delightful spendthrift, with everything, whether it be money or the pure goodness of her heart.” “The old man” was “a tightwad, but he meant well”; he was “a pedant, small-minded and limited,” “a born (dusty) old jurist.” It always came down to the wretched subject of money: “For him, money is the thing-in-itself. Money sometimes makes him into a petty domestic despot. […] He hasn’t got a clue about me. Mother has the right instinct where I’m concerned. Why wouldn’t she have? I owe the best part of me to her!”49

  Everything combined to paint a dismal picture: the narrow confines of the house, the lack of recognition, his dissatisfaction over his relationship with Else, his hopelessness concerning his failure as an artist as well as the prevailing conditions of life in postwar Germany, together with his doubts about religion, his despairing search for “redemption,” his depression, and his loneliness.

  On February 10 his diary refers to a new project: a “novel in diary form,” to which he gave the provisional title “Quiet Flames.”50 These reflections eventually produced the diary-style novel “Michel Voormann,” a reworking of the autobiographical material he had already written up in 1919. He started at the end of February and completed the work in a week. He worked so intensively that, contrary to his usual practice, he made only brief entries in his diary during this time.51

  The figure of Michael Voormann is autobiographically based, as in the 1919 novel, but now also bears some of the characteristics of Goebbels’s late friend Richard Flisges.52 Michael returns from the war; takes up studying, though with no great aspirations; falls in love with a fellow student, clearly based on Anka; writes a play about Jesus Christ; loses his lover; and finds “redemption” in hard work in the mines, where an accident eventually costs him his life. His legacy, so the message runs, is to have lived out an exemplary synthesis between working with the hands and with the head, between the working class and the bourgeoisie; his self-sacrificial death; his personal redemption—all of it a precondition for collective salvation, for the emergence of a
new and better world.53 The key statement of the work is “when I redeem myself, I am also the redeemer of mankind.”54 This perspective seems to counterbalance the tragedy of the hero’s individual death.

  When Goebbels finished the manuscript on March 10, he was tired and apathetic: “I don’t feel like doing anything at all.”

  THE TURN TO POLITICS

  In this phase of acute exhaustion early in 1924, Goebbels turned back to the latest political developments. In Munich the trial of the participants in the failed putsch of November 9 had begun. It was the ringleader who particularly aroused his interest, as shown by the first relevant diary entry, on March 13: “I am thinking about Hitler and the National Socialist movement and will obviously have to go on doing so for some time. Socialism and Christ. Ethical foundations. Away from paralyzing materialism. Back to devotion and to God!” The idea that the National Socialists were primarily seekers after God shows how deeply preoccupied he was with religious questions and how far these questions had superimposed themselves on his grasp of politics.

  For all his enthusiasm, he had his reservations: “But the Munich people want a fight, not reconciliation, perhaps because they feel that in a general settlement they would lose out. But I haven’t given up on it yet.” In the next few days his thoughts were very much taken up with Hitler and his “movement.”55 At first his doubts had the upper hand: “The objective may be right, but I am not convinced about the methods. And the Christianity of these people has practically nothing to do with Christ himself.” But he also noted, “What is liberating about Hitler is the way he commits himself as a truly upright and honest personality. That is so rare in a world dominated by party interests.”56

  In the end it was not so much the content of Hitler’s mind that led to Goebbels’s decision to join him as his charisma—all the more alluring for Goebbels because he identified a great many correspondences between Hitler and the protagonist of his autobiographical novel:

  Hitler is an enthusiastic idealist. A man who will bring new belief to the Germans. I’m reading his speech, letting myself be carried away by him and up to the stars. The route runs from the brain to the heart. I keep on coming across the basic motif of “Michael Voormann”: “As a Christian, I am not obliged to let myself be cheated.” […] Nationalist and socialist consciousness. Away from materialism. New fervor, complete devotion to the one great thing, the Fatherland, Germany. We always ask about the way. But here is a will. He’ll find a way, all right.57

  What he admired about Hitler was not just his “will,” “fervor,” “devotion,” and “belief”; it was also his “wonderful élan,” “verve,” “enthusiasm,” and “German soul.” Goebbels at last “once more heard notes coming from the heart.”58 Even if what first drew him was Hitler’s personality, while he either misunderstood Nazi ideas or thought them to be secondary—nonetheless, Goebbels’s embracing of National Socialism was certainly not just due to chance or the emotional pull of the Munich firebrand.

  Goebbels’s nationalistic outlook had become ever more firmly entrenched in the preceding years, not least because of the conduct of the Belgian and French occupation. The emotional invocation of “mankind” that he had so ardently represented as recently as the “Michael” manuscript was gradually giving way to his unconditional identification with a threatened nation. The process was not the product of rational political insight but above all of the yearning for salvation and for fusion with a greater whole. “Fatherland! Germany!” he wrote in his diary in April 1924. “I love you like a mother and a lover!”59

  Furthermore, Goebbels subscribed to resentful anti-Semitic notions that served as a kind of negative pole to his nationalistic ideas, vague as these were. He lamented the general cultural decline but had little time for democracy and modern tendencies in art and culture. However, neither could he stomach the current social inequities, and he even expressed some sympathy with communism. His enthusiasm for Hitler as a political “Führer” corresponded to messianic sentiments common on the right (we shall return to this theme). His political worldview therefore already bore many of the hallmarks of the “New Right” after the Great War. Accordingly, it is highly improbable that if a political leader of the left had happened to cross his path in the spring of 1924 he would have attached himself so enthusiastically to him and to his ideas. In his burgeoning enthusiasm for National Socialism, Goebbels was not alone in the lower-middle-class milieu to which he belonged. Referring to the Reichstag elections scheduled for May 4, he remarked: “All the young people I know are going to vote National Socialist.”60 His maxim of a few months earlier, that it “does not matter what we believe in, as long as we believe,” cannot therefore be read as proof that Goebbels was a thoroughgoing relativist or opportunist at this time.

  While his interest in Hitler was growing stronger, his attitude to Else was becoming more critical: She was a “mood-killer”; she had “no style, no class, no system.” She was a “human dumpling”; he could not hold a conversation with her, and no doubt she felt the same about him.61 “Else is good, but I don’t love her anymore. She is a good friend, nothing more,” he wrote. They would “just have to split up.”62 Then he felt sorry for her; after all, the “curse of Jewish blood” lay upon her.63

  After an argument with Else he hoped finally to be “free of all racial attachments. How often the Jewish part of Else’s nature has pained and depressed me.” He thought that Else’s sister Trude was “a typical Jewish girl who combines in herself in concentrated form all the physical and mental characteristics of her mother’s race.” It was clear to him, at least: “A bastardized race becomes sterile and must go under. I can’t have a hand in that!!!”64 Once again, though, he wavered: “And yet I love her more than I thought. But I’m becoming more firmly convinced all the time that we must not stay together.” Surely making a “radical break was the only cure,” but he could not bring himself to do so.65

  During these months he made various efforts to reenter the world of work. In February 1924 he applied to the newspaper publisher Rudolf Mosse in Berlin. He claimed to “have studied modern theater and press history” and said he was “looking for an appropriate position, suited to my knowledge and abilities, in my actual field of newspapers and publishing.”66 He was obviously not put off by his knowledge that the Mosse publishing house was anathema to the right as a “Jewish” concern. Then he applied—equally unsuccessfully—for a teaching position at a commercial college in Düsseldorf.67 There are indications of further applications in the following months.68

  Meanwhile, with his old schoolfriend Fritz Prang he was working on a plan to start a “monthly Rhineland journal for German art and cultural politics” in Düsseldorf: “Then I’ll be able to fulfill my greatest desire; freedom of speech and expression without any constraints.”69 The project quickly took shape in his mind: It should be a publication taking a “pro–Greater Germany, anti-international line”: “So, something National Socialist, but avoiding all demagoguery and rabble-rousing patriotism. About the sense of national community. Out of the morass of party politics.”70

  Early in April he began to be active in politics, on behalf of the National Socialists he had so recently learned to admire. Thanks to the complete edition of the diaries, we now know precisely when his activism began: April 4, 1924.71 On this day he wrote, “We have founded a local National Socialist group.” Since the NSDAP had been banned in November 1923, the group, involving about a dozen mostly young people from Rheydt, was an illegal organization. The first thing on the agenda was an internal discussion of aims, and one topic predominated, as Goebbels noted of the founding meeting: “We basically talked about anti-Semitism. […] The anti-Semitic idea is a world idea. It brings together Germans and Russians. For the coming millennium, as Michael Voormann says.”72

  Goebbels now preoccupied himself intensively with “the Jewish question,” which he held to be “the burning question of the hour.”73 He read Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic tract The Internationa
l Jew, which he found illuminating, although he was not prepared to follow the author’s train of thought all the way. As ever, he placed great importance on informing himself of the facts and maintaining his critical point of view: “Lenin, Trotsky, [Georgy] Chicherin are Jews. You can sometimes make such stupid judgments about political events if you aren’t in command of the material facts.” However, it had escaped his attention that Lenin was not a Jew.74

  His reading of Ford led him to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” It is true that he came to the correct conclusion that this all-too-seductive “proof” of the alleged Jewish plan of world domination must be an anti-Semitic forgery—but all the same, he accepted the “inner” authenticity of the protocols.75 Finally, he summed up his intense preoccupation with “the Jewish question” as follows: “I am on the völkisch side: I hate the Jew with my instincts and my reason. He is deeply hateful and repulsive to me.”76 And somewhat later he wrote: “Every ‘anti-’ aimed at the Jews is a plus for the national community.”77 Unlike with other völkisch-oriented people, his anti-Semitism does not seem to have been an integral part of a fully developed racist ideology. His animus against the Jews followed a quite straightforward pattern: The less clear his concept of the desired “national community,” the clearer his opposition to all things Jewish. “The Jews” simply stood for all the “subversive,” culturally destructive, international forces that prevented the coming together of “the people,” das Volk. In his nebulous worldview there was now at least one fixed, negative point.

  In the elections at the beginning of May—the Rheydters were voting for their local council as well as for the Reichstag—the National Socialists appeared in a list under the umbrella heading Völkisch-Social Bloc (VSB).78 The members of the illegal local group distributed leaflets and put up posters at night.79 On April 28 they organized a big election meeting. A lawyer called Borries particularly addressed himself to “the Jewish question,” although in Goebbels’s opinion “pretty half-heartedly.” There was a relatively large bloc of communists in the hall, but Goebbels, who was conducting the meeting, saw the event through to the end without incident.80