Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

sank to a low point of mental decline that bordered sometimes on suicide.25As inflation roared out of control his father became increasingly monosyllabic. ‘Whymust so many give me up as beyond hope,’ Goebbels had asked Else in a letter in June1923, ‘and consider me lazy and unreasonable and un-modern?’ Overshadowing theirwhole relationship is her Jewishness, from which there is no escape: in November1923 she writes to him, ‘Our whole row recently about the racial problem keptcoming back to me. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it and saw it really as anobstacle to our future relationship. In fact I think you’re far too obsessed about thewhole thing.’26 So he stayed at home, whiling away the hours in the summer housewhich his parents had built, his powerful thoughts riding on ahead of his frail frame.27He dreamed of launching his own journal in Elberfeld; but where to raise the capital?28 He fancied himself winning the literary prize offered by the Kölnische Zeitungwith ‘Michael’ and travelling the continent as a much-acclaimed scholar.29 ‘But nobodypays me anything for what I write,’ he moaned in August 1924.30He yearned helplessly for Anka and her glittering green eyes, and spent days sortingout the letters they had exchanged.31 ‘Just one day together,’ he wrote in hisnotes, ‘and we would understand each other again.’32 As for the fleshy reality of Elsethe teacher, he could hear her girlish commands to her charges floating up to hisroom from the schoolyard next door. ‘Why does Eros taunt me?’ he complained. Hedaydreamed about a summer honeymoon with Else in Italy and Greece.33 A deep,unremitting despair had seized him. He bemoaned the God that had created him aGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 55crippled weakling. ‘Despair, despair!’ he lamented. ‘I can’t bear to live and see all thisinjustice. I must join the fight for Justice and Freedom! Despair! Help me, O Lord,I am at the end of my strength!!!’34The more the products of his festering intellect were rejected by unseen editors,the more he saw the Jews behind his torment. He wrote at length on January 23,1924 to Mosse’s Berliner Tageblatt, applying for a job as sub-editor and boldly askingfor 250 marks per month. The curriculum vitæ which he appended to this applicationwas more than economic with the truth: he claimed to have studied modern‘theatre and press history’ from November 1921 to 1922 at Bonn and Berlin—infact he had never visited Germany’s capital; more recently, he said, he had privatelystudied economics and had become familiar with ‘broad areas of modern banking’during his nine months at the Dresdner Bank. ‘In consequence of minor nervousproblems caused by overstrain at work and an accident’—he had been suffered injuriesin a mugging a year before—‘I was obliged to give up my employment in Cologne.’35 Theodor Wolff, Mosse’s editor, who turned him down, was Jewish.36 Thediaries for the next years show him in a painful light—introspective to the point ofobsession, scribbling plays, articles, and critiques for a public no larger than himselfand, sometimes, the woman in his life. With dwindling hope but dull obstinacy hekept submitting the little, thirty-thousand word typescript of ‘Michael Voorman’ tonew publishers.37 He felt like a bird with clipped wings. Why even get up in themorning? ‘Nothing awaits me—no joy, no suffering, no duty, no job.’38HE had already tried his hand at public speaking—his notes refer to a November1922 talk in Rheydt, well received in the local press.39 Once in June 1924 he andFritz Prang visited a local communist meeting. Invited to speak, Goebbels was interruptedimmediately: ‘Capitalist swine!’ He rounded on his heckler. ‘Here is my purse,’he challenged. ‘You show me yours. The one who has the most is the capitalist swine!’The miners and textile workers roared with laughter and allowed him to speak on.40In the wake of the Munich putsch the Nazi party had been banned; with Hitlerimprisoned, its former members had splintered into factions like the Völkisch-Sozialer56 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHBlock, a coalition with the former Deutsch-Völkische Freiheitspartei (German FolkishFreedom party) founded by landowner Albert von Graefe.41 The charismatic leaderof the Nazis in northern Germany was Gregor Strasser, a wealthy pharmacist fromLandshut in Bavaria. These rightwing groups had fared well in the election of May 4,1924, attracting 6·5 percent of the votes. On June 29 Goebbels looked in on onepettifogging meeting of Graefe’s party at Elberfeld. He was not impressed. ‘So theseare the leaders of the “folkish” movement in the occupied zone,’ he scoffed in hisdiary. ‘You Jews, and you French and Belgian gentlemen, don’t have much cause forworry.’ He had evidently heard more positive word about the Nazis in Bavaria becausehe added: ‘If only Hitler were free!’ The local folkish chieftain was the politicianFriedrich Wiegerhaus. He was worthy, obliging, and good-natured. ‘This notionof a “folkish” Greater Germany isn’t bad,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘but we lack any capable,hardworking, and high-minded leaders.’42 Germany, he concluded in a typical Goebbelsphrase, was crying out for a leader, like the thirst of parched summer earth for rain.‘One man!!! Bismarck sta up! My brain and heart reel with despair for my fatherland.’43What were his politics at this time? His reading had vested him with some surprisinginspirations. The memoirs of August Bebel (1840-1913), the founder of the SocialDemocratic party, had taught him not to lose heart.44 The real workers, Goebbelsconcluded, were in fact nationalist to the core. The Jews, intellectually head andshoulders above Bebel, had run rings around him. Goebbels for a time even describedhimself as a German communist; but this was more for the Russian origins ofcommunism than for what it said as a creed. He read the diaries kept by HenriAlexandre de Catt as private secretary to Frederick the Great and three times afterwardsquoted the great monarch’s dictum: ‘Life becomes a curse, and dying a duty.’Reading more of Thomas Mann he felt that the great novelist had declined afterwriting ‘Buddenbrooks.’ When he ploughed through Richard Wagner’s autobiographyhe identified painfully with the maestro’s anguished struggle to survive in Paris,and his physical suffering. He saw Wagner as a wage-slave enchained by the ‘filthyJew’ Schlesinger. ‘The philistine today,’ noted Goebbels, ‘will