Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

‘itmight be called platonic; if only physical, it is frivolous, ugly, un-beautiful. It is thenoble union of these two factors that creates the ideal love.’57At Würzburg his studying begins in earnest. He ploughs through ‘Crime and Punishment,’he regularly attends the seminars on ancient and modern history, and on34 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHGerman literature. The Armistice of November 1918 makes little mark on him. Hisfather writes pleading with him to come home if things get too dangerous inWürzburg.58 Goebbels notices the returning troops, the popular sense of dismay, theestablishment of enemy zones of occupation; he sees Anka weeping, he hears of communistmobs rampaging in Bavaria.A few days ago [he writes to Fritz Prang on November 13, 1918] we had a bigmeeting here in the Auditorium Maximum…Ê and one of the older students,wounded in the war, had this to say: ‘Just now the blind and raw mobs seem tohave the upper hand. But maybe the time will come again when they will feel theneed for an intelligent lead, and then it will be for us to step in with all ourstrength.’‘Don’t you also feel,’ he asks his friend, ‘that the time will come again when peoplewill yearn for intellectual and spiritual values rather than brute mob appeal?’More letters go to Anka. He writes her the kind of letter that romantic femaleslong to receive.59 In her replies she frets about his frailty, and swears undying love. ‘Ihope you’ve gone to bed long ago,’ she writes in one, ‘and are dreaming that I ampressing the trend’rest kiss upon your forehead to dispel your gloomy thoughts forall eternity.’60 For the first time in his life he misses the carol service on ChristmasEve; he spends the hours in Anka’s room, and watches entranced as she kneels at herbedside to say her prayers. He sleeps in her chaste embrace—but that is all.61By the time they both leave Würzburg on January 22, 1919, the Belgians haveoccupied Rheydt. An Allied iron curtain has descended across the Rhineland. Sickand hungry, Goebbels writes her at four-thirty A.M. on a deserted platform, waitingfor the slow train to Cologne.62 At the Honnef checkpoint a friendly young Tommywearing a soupbowl helmet waves him through. At Cologne he has to wait all night—‘the whole station milling with Englishmen, B lacks, and Frenchmen.’63 Anka writesto him in Rheydt that she misses Freiburg; her sisters, shown Goebbels’ photographs,prefer his head to the full figure, she candidly writes.64 He looks desperately ill: he issuffering from chronic headaches, for which the university’s professor of medicineGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 35has found no cure.65 A ten P.M. curfew is in force. The Belgian censors will not passletters written in German script; gradually his handwriting deterioriates. Without afrontier permit, travel to Recklinghausen is impossible. Anka’s mother wants theirrelationship ended anyway; upon her return home, her mother has dragged her offto church to confess her sins. Anka tells Goebbels she has prayed for him. He sets upher three latest photos in his room, including one on a sunlit Castle Hill.66THE post-revolutionary government ordered elections for January 26, 1919. On theelection eve he heard his old teacher Dr. Bartels speak for the Democratic Party. ‘Iwas strengthened,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘in my opposition to the Democrats.’ All hisformer schoolmates would vote for the Catholic Centre or the more rightwing GermanNationalist party; already, Goebbels inclined toward the latter— ‘There arestill Germans in the German Fatherland, thank God.’ He envied those living outsidethe occupied territories like Anka in Recklinghausen. ‘God grant,’ he wrote her, hisletters displaying political fervour for the first time, ‘that our Fatherland will oncemore become the way we knew it as children.’67 In the election, despite pressurefrom their father (the local returning officer), Joseph and his brother Konrad bothvoted for the German Nationalists.68 ‘Grim times,’ he predicted a few days later, ‘lieahead for us Germans.’69 A talk with organised workers at Rheydt has convinced himthat they might have a real case against their capitalist oppressors.70That May of 1919 Anka returns to Freiburg. Kölsch is down there too. Goebbelshurries to join them. A French Negro soldier lets him through the checkpoint atLudwigshafen. Anka seems cooler, and confesses one morning that she has slept withKölsch. Goebbels forgives her and kisses away the tears of contrition welling in hereyes. For an instant of happiness she is willing to accept an eternity of perdition, hewill write in July 1924; a truly divine female, but not one for him to marry, hedecides.71 They would destroy eachother. He finds her love soothing, yet invigorating.Anka has a Russian grandfather which explains, he decides, why her love is soboundless and overwhelming. Each time he sees her again over the years that follow,his knees will knock and his face will flush just like the first time.7236 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHOne afternoon in 1919 there is a knock at his door in Freiburg and Richard Flisgeswalks in, rain dripping from his demob. trenchcoat. An ex-lieutenant, he is backfrom the wars, decorated and embittered, his arm in a sling.73 He has failed the universityentrance examination and will now turn into a pacifist and agitator againstthe established order of things. Goebbels listens eagerly to this rootless, ill-educated,disillusioned soldier. He has always had a respect for the lower orders. Writing toWilly Zilles in 1915 he has discounted the poet Horace’s theme of odi profanum vulguset arceo (‘I hate the vulgar mob and keep them at a distance’) preferring instead theromantic poet Wilhelm Raabe’s motif: Hab’ acht auf die Gassen! (‘Pay heed to thestreet!’)74 Flisges introduces him to the socialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engelsand Walther Rathenau and implants further trace-elements of the anti-bourgeoisclass struggle in Goebbels. Thus, while Goebbels attends the seminars on Goetheand on the era of Sturm und Drang he begins to think more about the social andpolitical issues scarring the defeated Germany. In the evenings he argues about God;he is beginning to have serious doubts about his religious beliefs.He and Anka leave Freiburg early in August 1919., He has to borrow one hundredmarks from a friend, and pawns