Goebbels: A Biography

by Peter Longerich

  At the end of the semester, lacking a valid pass, he could not reenter the occupied zone. He then traveled to Münster, where he rented a cheap room. Every day he telephoned Anka, who was living at home with her parents in Recklinghausen. In Münster Goebbels continued his writing efforts. During his stay in Freiburg he had tried to publish a collection of poetry, but the venture failed because of the substantial subsidy the publishers had asked him to contribute in advance.63 Now he tried another genre. In Münster he wrote the autobiographical novel Michael Voormann, referred to earlier in this chapter: “With anguished soul, I am writing my own story.”64

  Historians have only Parts I and III of this three-part work. In Part I the author gives us a stylized version of his childhood and schooldays, while Part III is concerned with the Freiburg period and his relationship with Anka, who appears here as “Hertha Holk” and who, after a long struggle, eventually becomes submissive to him: “She became a part of him.” Thereupon he returns home to write a Christ play. When the work is finished, he again sees Hertha, who confesses that she has been unfaithful to him. He leaves her and burns his play, which he had dedicated to her.65 The whole thing was obviously written to impress Anka: She could think herself lucky not to be playing the role of Hertha, who clearly bears the blame for ending the relationship with Michael and cutting short a promising literary career.

  After finishing Michael Goebbels decided—ignoring the lack of a pass—to go home. He succeeded in bribing a sentry and slipped across the demarcation line. He felt “deadly sick” and tried to recover a little in Rheydt before the start of the new semester.66 Goebbels decided to follow Anka, who was planning to move to Munich in the coming semester. For this purpose he borrowed 1,200 marks from family acquaintances.67 The couple took the train south together. By chance, breaking the journey in Frankfurt, Goebbels was present at the opening of the book fair by Friedrich Ebert. “Miserable impression,” he recalled in 1924.

  Goebbels was impressed by Munich: “Stachusplatz. Marienplatz. Odeons-Platz. Pinakotheks. Schack Gallery. Dürer (Apostles), Böcklin, Spitzweg, and Feuerbach.”68 Six months earlier the Munich Soviet Republic, a socialist uprising, had been bloodily suppressed by the Free Corps. Since that time the city had turned into a center of counterrevolution. Paramilitary units, secret radical right-wing organizations, and nationalist groups were engaging in a wide variety of activities. A certain Adolf Hitler, still a lance corporal in the Reichswehr (army), made a stir for the first time in February 1920, when he addressed some two thousand people at the first rally of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP, German Workers’ Party), a small splinter group. Over the next few months he became something of a local attraction.69

  There is very little about the political turmoil in Goebbels’s “memory pages,” and neither Hitler nor the DAP is mentioned at all. But he does refer to the outrage among the student body in January 1920 when Anton Arco-Valley—the assassin of Kurt Eisner, leader of the Munich revolution of November 1918—was sentenced to death (the very next day the government commuted his sentence to life imprisonment). There was uproar at the University of Munich.70

  As the Munich city council had banned non-Bavarian students from moving to the university, Goebbels did not register with the police—normally a requirement—or with the university. Instead, his friend Richard signed him up for lecture courses in Freiburg. His first “argument” with Anka occurred after she had spent a few days in the mountains with friends, a trip from which for obvious reasons he was excluded.71 In his memoirs he recalled visits to the theater and the opera. Performances included Carmen, The Flying Dutchman, Siegfried, Elektra, and Der Freischütz. He saw the conductor Bruno Walter as well as the Munich premiere of Strauss’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten. At the theaters, apart from classics like Amphitryon, Antigone, and Don Carlos, he mostly saw modern pieces, such as Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn (The Son); works by Strindberg, Ibsen, and Gustav Meyrink; Das Gelübde (The Vow), by Heinrich Lautensack; Hermann Bahr’s Der Unmensch (The Brute); and Gas, by Georg Kaiser. He was quite overwhelmed by it all: “Chaos inside me. Fermentation. Unconscious clarifying [process].” A performance of Tolstoy’s last play, A Light Shines in Darkness, impressed him particularly. Of this time he later wrote, “Socialism. Spreading only slowly. Social sympathy. Expressionism. Not yet pure and clarified.”72

  He discussed with the Munich literature specialist Arthur Kutscher the possibility of a doctoral thesis on the subject of mime but soon rated the prospects of success for this project—about which he corresponded with Kutscher a few weeks later—as “bleak.”73 He was experiencing financial difficulties once more. He was forced to sell his suits and his watch. Anka subsidized him by pawning her gold watch. By this time he was practically living off her, in any case.74 Once again he had doubts about his Catholicism and turned for help to his father, who in a long letter of November 1919 offered Joseph comfort and advice, trying to reassure his distraught son: Crises of faith were quite normal among young people; prayer and the sacraments would see him through it. He reminded Joseph of his sister Elisabeth’s death in 1915, when the whole family had been helped by praying together. He would not cast him out (as the son had feared he might) even if he turned away from the church, but he had to ask him two questions: Did he mean to write anything incompatible with the Catholic religion, and did he intend to take up work to which the same applied? If this were not the case, then everything would fall back into place again. Goebbels was grateful for this understanding reply, which shows, however, how far he had moved away from the petit bourgeois Catholic milieu of his parents.75

  His relationship with Anka suffered several crises, but the two always became reconciled again and then felt “closer to each other than before.” There were marriage plans, which bumped up against what Goebbels contemptuously referred to as “conventionalities.”76 He asked accusingly in a letter to Anka: “Have other people got a right to despise me and pour shame and disgrace on me because I love you to the point of insanity?”77 He was now working on a social drama called The Struggle of the Working Class. But in Munich he was too restless to finish the manuscript.78

  At the end of the semester he went home: His brother Hans, a released prisoner of war, had returned as well. Hans brought with him “hatred and aggressive thoughts.” For his part, Goebbels records: “Avid reading. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, revolution in me. […] Russia.”79 In a letter to Anka he commented on the “sensational news from Berlin”: Elements of the extreme right under Wolfgang Kapp had mounted a coup attempt. The “putsch” failed after a few days, but the ultimate outcome was still unclear. Goebbels was skeptical, believing that it was questionable whether “a right-wing government is good for us at this moment.” He was going to wait and see how things worked out.80 Traveling through the Ruhr, Anka was caught unawares by the Kapp putsch and the workers’ revolt that followed it: “Red revolution in the Ruhr. She’s learning about terror there. I am enthusiastic from afar.” It appears that his enthusiasm concerned the revolutionaries’ terror, not the comparable terrorism the Free Corps deployed to suppress them.

  In this unruly time Goebbels applied for a job as tutor on an estate in Holland as well as one “in East Prussia.” but to no avail.81 Otherwise, his literary work was productive. His new play was a general indictment of the “tainted” and “crumbling” world in which a workers’ revolt would sow “the seed”—the play’s title—for the “generation that is coming of age, strong and beautiful, that of the new man.”82

  In April, a letter to Anka included a lengthy passage about a question “that is still unresolved between us: the question of communism.” It was “rotten and stultifying that a world of so and so many million people is dominated by a single caste, which has the power to lead these millions towards life or death according to its whim. […] This capitalism has learned nothing.” It was responsible for the fact that “people with the most brilliant intellectual gifts sink into poverty and go to ruin.”83

  His re
ading, according to his own report, included intensive engagement with secondary literature on German studies as well as Tolstoy, Goethe, Maeterlinck, Lessing, George, Kālidāsa, Cervantes, Wedekind, Kleist, Hölderlin, and Ibsen. However, there were also Hans Sachs and the Nibelungenlied, the Early New High German writer Johann Baptist Fischer, German-speaking authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Spee von Langenfeld, Abraham a Sancta Clara, Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, Martin Opitz, Friedrich von Logau, and Paul Fleming as well as the Romantic writer Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder. It looked as though he had decided to concentrate on working for his examination.84

  At Whitsun he met Anka again. She “indignantly” rejected his latest work, Die Saat, which had been “enthusiastically” received by his friend Richard.85 Finally he learned from one of Anka’s letters that Theo Geitmann, a friend from Rheydt about whom he had long harbored certain suspicions,86 had been making advances to her: “Theo has been treacherous. Loves her.” Goebbels and Anka met in Karlsruhe, where she also told him about a certain “Herr Mumme.” The break came after he—totally misunderstanding the situation—magnanimously proposed that they should get engaged.87 Surprisingly, there was a reconciliation in Heidelberg, which clearly did not reassure Goebbels. Anka promised once more to be faithful, and they decided to spend the next semester together.

  Goebbels simply refused to recognize that she was taking the relationship much less seriously than he was. He spent the holidays in Rheydt, while she was with her parents in the Ruhr. She did not keep his rival, “Herr Mumme in Recklinghausen,” at bay.88 Goebbels composed a farewell letter to Anka; Without her, he would go to pieces: “Love is killing me. If I had you here now, I would grab you and force you to love me, if only for a moment, and then I would kill you. Yes, you can laugh about this, but you know I’m capable of it.”89

  He did contemplate suicide. He wrote a will on October 1, naming his brother Hans as his “literary custodian” and his father as executor. His clothes were to be sold and the proceeds put toward paying off his debts. His brothers should each choose five of his books for themselves, and the rest should be sold, with the income to go to his sister. He also bequeathed her the rest of his few possessions—for example, his alarm clock and his toiletry articles. “I am taking my leave of this world and from all those who have behaved well or ill towards me,” he wrote. “I am glad to depart from my life, which for me has been nothing but hell.”90 This theatrical announcement was as far as he went.

  For the winter semester he returned to Heidelberg. Contrary to their agreement, he did not find Anka there. His friend Richard tracked her down in Munich, where he spotted her sitting in a café with Mumme. Goebbels went to Munich. He discovered her address but then found that she had left for Freiburg—with her “fiancé,” as he was informed. In a desperate state, he returned to Heidelberg. There was a final exchange of letters.91 On her behalf, Anka’s fiancé, Mumme, wrote to request the return of her letters and presents. Goebbels replied with a “categorical” refusal.92

  GRADUATION WITH A DOCTORATE BUT FAILED AUTHORSHIP

  Back in Heidelberg, Goebbels worked toward his doctorate. His reading matter, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, was not calculated to lift his mood. On the contrary, this grand attempt to situate the decline of Europe within a universal history of the rise and fall of the great cultures induced “pessimism” and “despair” in him. Beset by such dark thoughts, he plunged into work on his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote in four months in Rheydt after the end of his Heidelberg semester.93

  He had originally hoped to write his thesis under the well-known Heidelberg literary historian Friedrich Gundolf. He had reported to Anka that his reception by the great man at the beginning of June had been “extrordinarily kind” and that the professor had given him valuable advice.94 It did not worry Goebbels that Gundolf was a Jew. The literature expert, who belonged to the elite group around the poet Stefan George, was working at the time on the posthumous reputation of a great historical figure, tracing the influence of Julius Caesar in the history of European literature. Perhaps Gundolf’s feeling for historical greatness attracted Goebbels, who in his own mind had already begun his quest for a leader.95 But Gundolf, who had been relieved of teaching and examining duties, directed Goebbels to his colleague, the associate professor Max von Waldberg. That Goebbels did not see this as an affront is attested by his appreciative comments on Gundolf in a public address he delivered months later.96 He followed Gundolf’s advice and attended Waldberg’s seminar, where he gave a presentation and submitted a seminar paper.97

  At Waldberg’s suggestion, Goebbels took the dramatic work of the largely unknown Romantic Wilhelm von Schütz as his dissertation topic. The thesis, over two hundred pages in length and never published, takes the form of an overview of Schütz’s works.98 Most interesting is the preface, which begins with a quotation from Dostoyevsky, and then goes on—almost in a kind of declamation—to compare the Romantic period with “the decade in which we are now living.” Goebbels sees the parallels most strongly in cultural life: “Now as then, a shallow Enlightenment is spreading, finding its aim and its purpose in a trite, uninspired atheism. But it is meeting resistance from a younger generation of God-seekers, mystics, romantics. All these little people, the smallest, are crying out for leaders, but no great man appears who will embrace them all.”

  After submitting his thesis in Heidelberg, Goebbels prepared intensively for the oral examination. He passed in November with a grade of rite superato, which meant that his academic performance was judged no more than average. Nonetheless, he was now Doctor of Philosophy Joseph Goebbels.99 However, for Waldberg, supervising a student who was later to become so prominent brought no returns. Because of his Jewish origins he was obliged to retire in 1933, and in 1935 his license to teach was revoked. When Goebbels was being honored with great pomp at the University of Heidelberg in 1942, on the twentieth anniversary of his doctoral examination, there was no mention of Waldberg, who had died in 1938.100

  Back in Rheydt, Goebbels once again earned his living by private tutoring. Early in 1922, however, he succeeded in placing a series of articles in the local newspaper, the Westdeutsche Landeszeitung. The series, which according to Goebbels caused “a great sensation” and brought him “enemies in the Rheydt press,”101 offered him the opportunity to express his deep hatred of prevailing cultural activities and to give full vent to his feelings about the zeitgeist.

  In his first article Goebbels proclaimed briefly and succinctly that “the German materialism and worship of Mammon that we see before us now in unadulterated form […] are the main cause of the ruination of our German soul.”102 Goebbels then indulged in an all-encompassing critique of modern culture and the prevailing cultural tendencies. The main problem of modern culture was the “lack of a solid, secure sense of style.” What was missing above all was “a great artistic individual who bears this style in himself, […] the young hothead who will take from the troubles of our time his titanic ‘in tyrannos’ and hurl it into the world.”

  The second article, which bore the ambitious title “On the Meaning of Our Time,”103 contained a passage that the contemporary reader could easily decode as an anti-Semitic polemic: “We pay homage to an internationalism that is opposed to our national character and that alien elements have extolled as the only chance of rescue.” His polemic equally targeted enthusiasm about the “Russian spirit” or “the Indian personality.” He was also critical of Spengler’s book: The Decline of the West had only served to reinforce the dominant underlying pessimism, whereas what was needed was, wrote Goebbels with youthful emotion, “books that comforted, raised the spirits, brought to mind those things that were eternal.” In this sense, in his next contribution, “The True National Character,” he put forward his reflections on “the German soul,” which he characterized as “Faustian.”104 The series culminated in a call “for the education of a new public,” a kind of affront to the audience
: “In many ways these nice art lovers are damned similar to our pack of racketeers and war profiteers.”105

  This article series, with its dogmatic judgments and emotionally charged notions of world improvement, demonstrates one thing above all: the tendency to overestimate oneself, to which the unemployed and unsuccessful author Joseph Goebbels had obviously succumbed in the act of writing. Completely carried away by the opportunity to present himself to the educated bourgeoisie of Rheydt and its surroundings, he even included personal elements. Thus in his last article106 he described in detail, with a characteristic mixture of retrospective self-pity and self-love, his mood on a lonely Christmas Eve in Munich in 1919. He did not neglect to make frequent references to his years of suffering as a student: Anyone “who had struggled in the same way” would know what “serious academic youth had accomplished in their silent, heroically self-denying struggle” over the previous five years.107