Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

night. ‘I amlike a child!’27 Tamara is disconsolate that Anka has surfaced again from his past;nevertheless he phones Anka from Berlin and they agree to meet again.28 They driveover to Erfurt. ‘Her marriage is a mess,’ Goebbels describes, ‘her husband does notunderstand this dainty creature at all and insults her. She has a boy [Christian] andloves me as much as ever. A woman of class. All others pale before her.’ Returning toBerlin he carefully records that ‘not a breath of an attestation of love’ has passedbetween them— ‘But for me it’s as though this precious woman belongs to me, mealone.’29 A few few days later she phones him twice, weeping, in the middle of theGOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 133night, saying she wants to come to Berlin; divorcing Mumme, he suggests, is her onlyescape. She arrives at his apartment but receives only coffee and sympathy as sherehearses her entire tragic life once more for him.30‘I have kissed her,’ he writes afterwards, ‘and a lucky star has crossed from her tome.’ After Anka departs, Tamara phones. ‘Poor Tamara!’, he writes, and: ‘PoorAnka!’—and many a reader of his diary may agree.He spends another day with his goddess in Weimar soon after. ‘I love her, she lovesme, neither of us says it but we both know it.’31 At Easter however there is an awkwardscene when her husband shows up. Goebbels capitulates. ‘I’m off. Curtly andformally took leave of them both… I’m shutting off my heart. For good!Ê Great taskswait upon me… Before me stands a nation! Germany!’32A few days later, great task or no, he phones her Weimar number. Dr Mummeanswers and Dr Goebbels hangs up. ‘God only helps those,’ he writes on a bouquet offlowers for her, ‘who help themselves. Farewell. ULEX.’33He is not blind to the fairer sex. There is a Dora, a ‘hysterical lover’ who puts aletter through his door threatening to poison herself (‘Doesn’t know me too good,’he comments callously. ‘I’ve already yielded far too much to this hussy. Let her do itif she really must. I can’t say anything but no.’34) ‘Since I have set eyes again on Anka,’he sighs, justifying his sexual inactivity, ‘all female beauty pales.’35 It is therefore nosurprise to see him shortly alighting from a train at Weimar on the way home fromWiesbaden, embracing Anka on the platform and sharing a compartment for a fewminutes until the next halt at Weissenfels. An icy hand may well have clutched at hisheart as she chatters away, because she now hints at leaving Mumme for Goebbels inBerlin. The ardent suitor takes refuge in the language of a cheap novel: ‘Farewell,farewell!’ he writes in the diary. ‘She waves until we are out of sight of each other.’36He spends the next days in a guilty panic. No word comes from Weimar.37 Will shereally leave her Georg? And what then?Dr Goebbels appraises the alternatives: there is ‘a pretty Miss Böhm’ at Schweinfurt;there is Willi Hess’s little sister (‘a darling thing, unfortunately not good looking’; hewill find the same trouble with a Miss Bettge on Borkum island too—‘Pity she’s not134 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHprettier.’38) He has to speak at Weimar late in May, and diffidently phones the Mummehousehold. A voice tells him that Madam is away.39 Back in Berlin the next day hebumps into Dora, who has not poisoned herself after all: few girls do nowadays.‘Anka is to blame for all this,’ he writes helplessly. ‘She’s brought me to the pointwhere women are just playthings. The revenge of a creature spurned.’40For ten days that July he vacations on Borkum island pursuing women, though onlyfrom a safe distance. That ‘crazy [Christine] Pohlmann’ writes to him and he decidesto write her off as well.41 Two days later he has an attractive female in his sights andthe usual Goebbels romance develops: he worships her, from afar; returning to Berlinon August 2 he has still not spoken to her. ‘I leave here a girl I love,’ he agonizes inhis diary. ‘But I don’t even know her name.’42She is soon forgotten in Berlin. He is overhauling his gau, appointing ReinholdMuchow his chief of organisation on July 1, 1928.43 He has resumed work on ‘Michael,’rewriting, dictating, proof-reading, and dictating it for Eher to publish that autumn.He goes on a chaotic gau outing down Brandenburg’s waterways, a wasted day wereit not for one beautiful girl. ‘Without a word,’ he romanticizes again, ‘we are in love.Neither of us betrays this by the slightest sign, but it is so.’44 Chemicals are brewingwithin the crippled, now thirty-year old Dr Joseph Goebbels which he still does notcare to test. ‘I’ll go to pot altogether,’ he fears, ‘if I can’t get together with women.’They are out there, besieging him, but he is searching for a woman that he does notknow. Two days later at Bayreuth, as the curtain goes up on the last act of ‘Tristan’ hefinds a stunning beauty next to him: ‘We partake of a little feast of love, without aword between us—just two glances, two sighs. And then she’s gone. I look for her! Icome back downstairs as though in a trance. Tristan and this woman… The wholeevening I am at my wit’s end.’45Matrimony is claiming all his friends. Even Karlheinz Kölsch, ‘Pille,’ his closestfriend and rival from those Freiburg days, gets married that August. Tipsy and reekingof liquor he throws his arms around the little gauleiter and kisses him; Goebbelsrecoils, fearful that they might be seen. ‘Ghastly,’ he exclaims in his diary. ‘Kölschalways was an arsehole.’ Together they pen a postcard to Anka at Weimar.46GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 135So it goes on: his roving eye feasts on every female, spinster or spoken for, andravishes or rejects them all—the arrestingly beautiful wife of Dr Robert Ley (‘aterrible tramp’), and a pompous editor’s wife with whom he falls deeply in love for,probably, hours at a time.47 To complicate matters the banker Karl Müller phonesone day that he’s bringing his family to hear him speak, and it turns out that hisdaughter is the nameless one from Borkum;