Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death

twelve pages.62 Meanwhile hemethodically built up the infrastructure of the gau. Having a brand new limousine, abright-blue open seven-seater landau built by Opel, helped; its licence tag was IA-53398—Goebbels claimed that a German idealist living in Argentina had just donatedit to the gau remarking, ‘Were it not for you we should never come back toGermany.’63 The big car gave the crippled gauleiter power, authority, and mobility.Taking his burly escort with him he used it to tour the sections in red-hot areas likePrenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, Alexander Platz and Kreuzberg.64 Muchow was doingfine work on the factory floor, establishing cells in big plants like Knorr Brake atLichterfelde. Too late the marxists woke up to this danger. Goebbels’s schools ofspeaking and politics were also improving. Once he even let Gregor Strasser addressa course.65 Standards here were often higher than in the Reichstag, where listening tolong boring speakers was like being a fine pianist and having to hear some lout grindingaway on a magnificent grand piano, as he put it.66Seeking to placate his impatient followers he offered his own interpretation ofHitler’s new law-abiding approach to power in Angriff on February 18. There were,he conceded, times when the genuine revolutionary had to refrain from actual roughand-tumble: ‘Be prepared: that is everything,’ he argued. ‘Anybody can go aroundgetting locked up or banned or coshed. But to unleash volcanic emotions, to awakenoutbursts of anger, to set the masses in motion, to organize hatred and despair—todo all these things with ice cold calculation and, so to speak, by legal means—theseare what distinguishes the true revolutionary from the rowdy.’ The revolutionarymust bide his time, even if the movement seemed to be drifting placidly along bourgeoispaths.67Great though his conceit about his own oratory was, Goebbels conceded that Hitler’swas better. Hitler, constrained by no considerations of loyalty, would claim that148 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICHhe, unlike Goebbels, knew how to preserve the golden mean between reason andrhetoric.68 In fact their styles were different. Hitler’s speeches were predictable andrepetitious; Goebbels’ were more analytical, executed with a thrilling elocution andclarity. Albert Krebs later stated that his Nazis in Hamburg often debated which wasbetter; those who opted for Goebbels sometimes indicated that he would make abetter Party leader too.69 They were in equal demand all over Germany. ‘We lead realgipsy lives,’ Hitler had commiserated with him a few days after Weimar.70On character, however, Goebbels found serious fault with Hitler at this time, atendency to let things slide. He felt that Hitler should get his other men boning upalready on their later duties. (‘My task,’ he already knew in 1929, ‘is to be Propagandaand Public Enlightenment.’)71 Only Alfred Rosenberg towered above the‘beerhall’ niveau of Hitler’s Munich cronies.Goebbels feared too that Munich’s flirtation with the bourgeois and reactionaryrightwingers like the Stahlhelm and the D.N.V.P. would compromise their own revolutionaryidentity. Stahlhelm in particular had begun agitating for a public referendumon the new Young Plan for reparations payments. Uneasily Goebbels decided, ‘I trustin the Chief’s sound political instinct, which has not let us down so far.’72 He fearedhowever that Hitler was the victim of over optimism. ‘I’m afraid,’ he wrote, referringto the failed beerhall putsch, ‘of a re-run of the Ninth of November 1923.’73 Hewrote to Hitler, and discussed his worries with Horst Wessel; Hitler did not reply.‘Sometimes I despair of Hitler,’ he wrote. ‘Why is he keeping silent?’74 EventuallyHitler came to Berlin and took him out to Sanssouci park in Potsdam together withGöring and Hess and set his mind at rest. He promised to write to the Stalhelmrejecting the idea of a referendum; but a month would pass before he did so.75BACK in Berlin after Weimar, Goebbels is subjected to a scene by Tamara. He feelssorry for her, but she has lost the submissive quality he valued before in her. Whatelse is he looking for? It is not sex. Later the ‘sweet chatterbox’ Jutta Lehmann, stillone week shy of eighteen, turns up and keeps him ‘tempestuous’ company—stür-GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 149misch, evidently another diary buzzword—until eleven P.M. ‘How Jutta will weep,’he notes, almost sadistically, ‘when the time comes for us to part!’76His fickleness upsets a lot of more loyal females. Mrs Schweitzer throws the bookat him and Goebbels has to ask his cartoonist to put his jealous shrew of a wife in herplace.77 He is addicted to the company of teenage girls, and prefers them perhaps tobare anything but their intellects. When Kütemeyer’s widow turns out to have opinionsof her own he shrieks in his diary, ‘For God’s sake let’s keep women out ofpolitics.’78 In fact, he hates most if not all of the human race except for Jutta andAnka, both of whom know how to mother him.79 The other ladies at HQ have littlepatience with all this. Josephine von Behr, an ex-girlfriend, writes him a shamelessletter; under pain of dismissal, he forces this ‘vain and silly goose’ to retract it.80He yearns for Anka, the forbidden passion of his life. On February 25, 1929 hetakes a sheet of Reichstag notepaper and tries to set up a another rendezvous: ‘Itwould be glorious if you could come to Berlin for a few days. On Friday March 8there is an important and sensational session in the Reichstag .Ê .Ê . and on Sunday thetenth my new drama [‘Blood Seed’] is being premiered at the Wallner Theatre. It’ssold out already.’ He signs off as ULEX, just as in the old days.81MARCH 9, 1929. Anka phones. She’s coming this afternoon for two days’ visit… Inthe afternoon worked at home. Frightful news: communists have stabbed twoS.A. men to death in Schleswig-Holstein [Hermann Schmidt and Otto Streib].The first stormcones! Blood seed, from which the new Reich shall grow.At Veterans’ Building in the evening [to hear General von Epp]. Around 3,500people…Ê Afterwards the police wade ruthlessly into our people. Forty arrests…Tomorrow dress rehearsal of ‘Blood Seed’ at the Wallner. I’m all worked up.Anka arrives looking the picture of a cultured lady. He shows her over the Reichstag,then takes her to a patriotic movie starring Emil Jannings with a powerful plot abouta man