me one more parting kiss, and do not weep.’ After she has left the little Castle Hill
boarding house, clutching an armful of roses he has bought her, he returns to that
meadow and lies all evening thinking about her until far into the night. The next day
there is a card from her—she still has his roses in her arms. ‘How I envy those roses,’
he writes back, the flattery flowing freely from his pen.
As the Freiburg term ends he dreams of moving to Munich, but the lack of lodgings
there thwarts him and he returns home. During the summer vacation he exchanges
scores of letters with Anka, sometimes twice a day. His letters to her reveal
a young man still physically frail and lonely; they suggest that he has elected to enter
the Church. Romancing Anka occupies every other waking hour. His catchword is
wahnsinnig—crazy: that is what he is, he confesses, about her. He scrawls that word
in the corner of letters, or leaves it unfinished just as waaa—. He is untroubled by
the wail of rage that comes from Agnes Kölsch: ‘I thought far too highly of you, too
noble and too mature,’ she writes him on August 15, 1918: ‘Fare well, it was not
meant to be.’35 Much ink is expended trying to arrange various trysts, which Goebbels
sometimes prudishly cancels because her worried mother (unimpressed by this parvenu)
and her sisters disapprove.36 Once she gives him a red rose. It graces his desk at
Rheydt beneath a carved Black Forest heart she has given him earlier.37 On August 17
he is completing Act Three of ‘Judas.’ ‘Good night, dear Anka,’ he writes her teasingly.
‘Think of an afternoon at the Waldsee Lake, and how there is one thing’—he
does not specify what—‘that Ulex always finds so terribly difficult.’38 He recalls to
her that first triumphant kiss on Castle Hill. His soldier brother Konrad, home on
32 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
leave, jokes to him that he will probably be able to greet him as a cardinal later on.
Konrad inquires about the carved heart on the wall. ‘A gift from the Archbishop of
Freiburg?’ he asks ironically. ‘From his lady housekeeper,’ replies Joseph with a salacious
wink.39
Joseph beavers away on ‘Judas.’40 Anka incautiously shows it around and in no time
the clergy of Rheydt are asking him angry questions about it.41 On August 27 he is
summoned to his former scripture teacher Father Moller, who draws his attention to
the pernicious nature of such writings. ‘I was so furious I would have torn “Judas”
into a thousand shreds if I had had it with me,’ writes Goebbels. The priest requires
him to undertake to destroy even his own copy of the script. Has all his toil been for
nothing? ‘What shall I do?’ he appeals to Anka. ‘I am in despair.’42 (The play survives
among his papers.) It marks his first break with the Church. He declines the summons
by Unitas to attend their general assembly in Münster to report on the summer
semester at Freiburg. Instead, he carouses with his pals in Düsseldorf. ‘Last
night,’ he tells Anka, ‘we played music. We listened to two Chopin nocturnes, and
Beethoven’s “Pathétique.” I now play a lot of Liszt rhapsodies.Ê .Ê . Afterwards we talked
until one A.M. about freemasons. [Fritz] Prang’s father is in a Lodge.’ 43 In a second
letter that day he asks Anka to plant a tender kiss in one corner of her next letter.44
He reads from Richard Wagner’s diaries, he plays the Master’s music to his pals, and
he commends to Anka one entry which touches, he says, on one bone of contention
existing between them.45 Her mother is dismayed that they are still liaising; once,
Anka asks if his mother is upset too.46
Kölsch has been thrown out of their Catholic fraternity. Goebbels has supported
the ouster, explaining to Anka: ‘My best friend turned out to be a scoundrel.’ When
Anka ironically calls him a Puritan he responds that Unitas has principles.47 By this
time he has learned from her that Kölsch has sexually propositioned her.48 To seal
their friendship, she loyally shows him the letter concerned. Of her solely maternal
interest in him there seems no doubt. ‘Do you know what I should like now?’, she
writes to the pintsized student Goebbels. ‘Just to stroke my fingers through your hair
and clasp you so tight that you look quite desperate.’49
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 33
Her widowed mother’s disapproval grows. He records in dismay that she regards
him as a homo molestissimus and clearly frowns on any notion of them both attending
the same university next term. He stiffly asks Anka to inform him where she will be
studying, ‘so that I can cross that university off my own list.’50
ON September 3, 1918 Konrad Goebbels returns to the western front. He accuses
his younger brother Joseph of not taking any interest in the war and finally extracts
from his a promise to read at least the daily war communiqués. Konrad declares that
he is proud to be fighting for his fatherland. ‘As you will realize,’ Joseph drily informs
Anka, ‘he is Mother’s darling. While I claim that privilege, remarkably, more of my
father.’ But he adds, ‘I believe my mother is the best at understanding me.’51 He
advises Anka to read his version of the Last Supper, where Judas—with whom he
thus identifies—talks about his mother, how he sulks and does not eat, and she just
shakes her head and murmurs, ‘Judas, Judas;’ and how bitterly he weeps thereafter.52
He hopes that Anka’s mother will relent and agree to them studying together at
Munich. His father prefers Bonn or Münster, both nearer to the parental home. ‘The
decision is in your mother’s hands,’ he writes to Anka.53 A friend tells him that she has
boasted to his fiancée about her last evening with Goebbels at Freiburg.54 Goebbels
scolds her for having so rudely dragged in the dust the memory of these, ‘the most
sacred and beautiful hours of my life.’ In the same letter he repents and asks, ‘May I
to-day for the first time press a tender kiss upon your rosebud lips?’55 In her reply,
she mocks his stern morals. She has decided to study that winter at Würzburg. He
therefore chooses Würzburg too, and finds lodgings on the fourth floor of No.8
Blumen Strasse—”A wonderful room right beside the river,’ he describes to Prang.56
Ecstatic that she is so close by, he sends her a note as soon as he settles in, perhaps
justifying his lack of physical ardour. ‘If love is only in the mind,’ he explains, ‘it
might be called platonic; if only physical, it is frivolous, ugly, un-beautiful. It is the
noble union of these two factors that creates the ideal love.’57
At Würzburg his studying begins in earnest. He ploughs through ‘Crime and Punishment,’
he regularly attends the seminars on ancient and modern history, and on
34 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
German literature. The Armistice of November 1918 makes little mark on him. His
father writes pleading with him to come home if things get too dangerous in
Würzburg.58 Goebbels notices the returning troops, the popular sense of dismay, the
establishment of enemy zones of occupation; he sees Anka weeping, he hears of communist
mobs rampaging in Bavaria.
A few days ago [he writes to Fritz Pr
ang on November 13, 1918] we had a big
meeting 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 to
have the upper hand. But maybe the time will come again when they will feel the
need for an intelligent lead, and then it will be for us to step in with all our
strength.’
‘Don’t you also feel,’ he asks his friend, ‘that the time will come again when people
will 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 females
long to receive.59 In her replies she frets about his frailty, and swears undying love. ‘I
hope you’ve gone to bed long ago,’ she writes in one, ‘and are dreaming that I am
pressing the trend’rest kiss upon your forehead to dispel your gloomy thoughts for
all eternity.’60 For the first time in his life he misses the carol service on Christmas
Eve; he spends the hours in Anka’s room, and watches entranced as she kneels at her
bedside to say her prayers. He sleeps in her chaste embrace—but that is all.61
By the time they both leave Würzburg on January 22, 1919, the Belgians have
occupied Rheydt. An Allied iron curtain has descended across the Rhineland. Sick
and hungry, Goebbels writes her at four-thirty A.M. on a deserted platform, waiting
for the slow train to Cologne.62 At the Honnef checkpoint a friendly young Tommy
wearing 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 writes
to 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 is
suffering from chronic headaches, for which the university’s professor of medicine
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 35
has found no cure.65 A ten P.M. curfew is in force. The Belgian censors will not pass
letters written in German script; gradually his handwriting deterioriates. Without a
frontier permit, travel to Recklinghausen is impossible. Anka’s mother wants their
relationship ended anyway; upon her return home, her mother has dragged her off
to church to confess her sins. Anka tells Goebbels she has prayed for him. He sets up
her three latest photos in his room, including one on a sunlit Castle Hill.66
THE post-revolutionary government ordered elections for January 26, 1919. On the
election eve he heard his old teacher Dr. Bartels speak for the Democratic Party. ‘I
was strengthened,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘in my opposition to the Democrats.’ All his
former schoolmates would vote for the Catholic Centre or the more rightwing German
Nationalist party; already, Goebbels inclined toward the latter— ‘There are
still Germans in the German Fatherland, thank God.’ He envied those living outside
the occupied territories like Anka in Recklinghausen. ‘God grant,’ he wrote her, his
letters displaying political fervour for the first time, ‘that our Fatherland will once
more become the way we knew it as children.’67 In the election, despite pressure
from their father (the local returning officer), Joseph and his brother Konrad both
voted for the German Nationalists.68 ‘Grim times,’ he predicted a few days later, ‘lie
ahead for us Germans.’69 A talk with organised workers at Rheydt has convinced him
that they might have a real case against their capitalist oppressors.70
That May of 1919 Anka returns to Freiburg. Kölsch is down there too. Goebbels
hurries to join them. A French Negro soldier lets him through the checkpoint at
Ludwigshafen. Anka seems cooler, and confesses one morning that she has slept with
Kölsch. Goebbels forgives her and kisses away the tears of contrition welling in her
eyes. For an instant of happiness she is willing to accept an eternity of perdition, he
will write in July 1924; a truly divine female, but not one for him to marry, he
decides.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 so
boundless 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.72
36 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
One afternoon in 1919 there is a knock at his door in Freiburg and Richard Flisges
walks in, rain dripping from his demob. trenchcoat. An ex-lieutenant, he is back
from the wars, decorated and embittered, his arm in a sling.73 He has failed the university
entrance examination and will now turn into a pacifist and agitator against
the 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 to
Willy Zilles in 1915 he has discounted the poet Horace’s theme of odi profanum vulgus
et arceo (‘I hate the vulgar mob and keep them at a distance’) preferring instead the
romantic poet Wilhelm Raabe’s motif: Hab’ acht auf die Gassen! (‘Pay heed to the
street!’)74 Flisges introduces him to the socialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
and Walther Rathenau and implants further trace-elements of the anti-bourgeois
class struggle in Goebbels. Thus, while Goebbels attends the seminars on Goethe
and on the era of Sturm und Drang he begins to think more about the social and
political 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 hundred
marks from a friend, and pawns his watch to a waiter to pay for supper. He has to
spend the autumn break at Münster as his identity papers will not get him back into
the occupied Rhineland. Anka phones him every day in the local cafe, but he can
barely afford the obligatory cup of coffee. He begins to write his own life story as a
novel, ‘Michael Voorman,’ in which Anka is identifiable as the heroine Hertha Holk.
He gets home to Rheydt crossing the frontier illegally in an overflowing train at
Düsseldorf. On September 19 he posts to the Albertus Magnus Society a fresh application
for funds.
Later, heading south to Munich with Anka, they pause briefly at Frankfurt where
he visits Goethe’s house. But why tarry in this Jewish city, he asks himself, when
Munich beckons from afar? He borrows 1,200 marks from yet another schoolfriend
and finds lodgings in Munich on the second floor of Papa Vigier’s at No.2 Roman
Strasse, out in Neuhausen. On October 29, his twenty-second birthday, Anka writes
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 37
in his diary, ‘National Holiday!’ He sends two more postcards to the Catholic charity;
the stamp on one is overprinted with the legend People’s Republic of Bavaria.
The charity makes him a final loan of 250 marks. At Munich he studies under the
Swiss art historian, Professor Heinrich Wölfflin; he studies music under Professor
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 6