Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

makes no response.‘My creativity is zero,’ he writes. ‘Why? Am I a failure?’Else visits her family’s friends in the banking world and finds a clerical job for himat the Dresdner Bank in Cologne. He does not rejoice—indeed his mood seems todarken. In a sombre letter to Else at Christmas he lays bare his tortured soul at suchlength that we must ask where true emotion ends and conscious posturing begins.He is not keen about working in a bank. ‘Even if out there in the world the moneychangerssneer and mock at real love,’ he writes to Else, ‘should not our love, mydearest girl, should not our great and abiding love still adorn our lives?’ And so hisletters ramble on, half sermons, half diatribes, acres of blank verse and poetry scatteredat the feet of his admiring if tiny audience.52 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHElse firmly considers herself engaged to him, and even discusses with Alma whetherhis deformed foot might be congenital and affect their children? Goebbels has aquarrel with her about his deformity: whereupon she mentions a minor drawback ofher own—she is half Jewish. This has not dawned on him until now. The magic goesout of his life, to be replaced by a nagging scepticism about her.Starting at the bank on January 2, 1923, he sees at first hand the unpalatable side ofcapitalism, and reacts with repugnance to the ‘sacred speculation’ by the rich andaffluential. The country’s banks, he finds, are nearly all Jewish. He begins to ponderupon the relationship between das Judentum (the Jewish community) and the MoneyProblem. The more he looks around the more he perceives the Jews—young OttoKlemperer whom he hears conducting a Gustav Mahler symphony turns out to be aJew; so does Mahler. He studies Houston Stewart Chamberlain, he finds himselftroubled by the Jewishness of Else and there are more rows with her sisters.He cannot ignore the contrasts. He himself has to set out from Rheydt each morningat five-thirty and gets home at seven or eight each night, while his pay packetshrinks in value through the galloping inflation that has set in. ‘Cologne is ad nauseam,’he writes. ‘Pay cheque worthless.’ (On March 27 he sends the Albertus Magnus societya ten thousand mark banknote; it is worth less than one gold mark.) From hisgrim lodgings in No.77 Siebengebirgsallee in a southern suburb he writes endlessletters to his ‘little rosebud’ Else.My Dear Child, Your roses have found a spot right in front of yourpicture…Ê There will be no money before the fifteenth. That means you will haveto wait another week. To-day, after banking hours, I took a stroll through thetown… As for money, we’ll get that somehow.He yearns for her. ‘Why have we two, so much in love, been born into so wretcheda time?’ And yet: ‘I am firmly convinced that the time will come for me to use myreal strength.’ To those who accuse him of being lazy he will answer: ‘I just want touse my strength and my heart and my conscience for a better cause.’ Germany shouldGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 53not look to the tycoons and the bankers for the new millenium, he writes, but tothose who have remained true to themselves, ‘and haven’t soiled their life.’LYING in a deckchair on Baltrum island one July afternoon in 1923 trying to avoidElse’s tedious sister Gertrud, he received the shattering news that Richard Flisgeshad been crushed to death down the mines at Schliersee.18 He would dramatise hisgrief, wallowing for months in self-pity; and he rewrote the ending of ‘Michael’ tosend his hero down the mines to his death despite a premonition of doom from hislandlady. He has Michael die on January 30: that date is a kind of premonition too.Upon his return from Baltrum, the bank fires him. Keeping the tuth from his parents,he continued to commute to Cologne, but barely troubled to scan the newspapersfor vacancies although he assured Else that he did.19 During his six weeks awaythe mark’s value had dwindled to almost nothing. The U.S. dollar bought three millionmarks on August 1 and 142 million eight weeks later. Else’s savings shrank. Hewrote to his father pleading illness—a nervous disease which must be congenital, hesaid—and his father begged him to come home and even sent the fare.20 Fritz Prangfound him a new job as a caller on the floor of Cologne’s stock exchange. He wrotean essay about Flisges which the local newspaper published at Christmas.21Trapped in his lodgings, Goebbels’s brain fevered on. He brought forth a newdrama, ‘Prometheus,’ and in September another play, ‘The Wanderer,’ in which aTraveller guides an often despairing Poet across the heights and sloughs surroundingthe German people.22 He witnessed from afar the collapse of passive resistance; helived sometimes in an alcoholic haze, because one guilder would buy fifty beers. Thewords Judentum, Qual (anguish), and Verzweiflung (despair) whirled kaleidoscopicallyaround his jottings. ‘Politics,’ he noted. ‘I don’t know whether to weep or laugh at it.’Else had given him a notebook and on October 17, 1923 he resumed his famousdiary.23 ‘I can’t stand the anguish any longer,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve got to set down all thebitterness that burdens my heart.’ For Goebbels, writing the diary became somethingof a fetish, an advance programming of his brain for great things to come. Hewas aware of a messianic sense of mission. ‘On guard, friend!’ he would admonish54 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHthe diary on July 7, 1924: ‘Make your sacrifice! Fulfil your mission!’ And a few dayslater: ‘Who am I, why am I here, what is my task and what my purport? Am I awastrel, or an emissary who is waiting for God’s Word?’ And he added: ‘Again andagain one shining light escapes the depths of my despair: my belief in my own purity,and my conviction that some day my hour will come.’‘WHERE are you now, my dear deceased?’ he appealed on the first anniversary ofFlisge’s death. ‘Why don’t you give me some portent of where we must go and whatwe must do to obtain deliverance.Ê .Ê . Leave me not in despair!’24 Friendless and jobless,he