Goebbels: A Biography

by Peter Longerich

  In the autumn he made a short guest appearance, based on a trainee contract, as an art critic in the Landeszeitung. Losing this position as soon as he did—allegedly because of an internal reorganization—may also have contributed to the rather condescending way in which he commented on the intellectual debates taking place in this provincial town. On the subject of a lecture at the “Society for Foundational Philosophy,” for instance, he wrote that the discussion that followed the talk had shown once again “how unprofitable, on the whole, such exchanges are, between a speaker the audience hardly knows and an audience the speaker does not know at all.”108

  That autumn he was also offered the chance to give a talk on “Excerpts from Contemporary German Literature.” He used it to settle his score with postwar literature in general (“one pathetic scribbler trying to outdo another”) but dealt particularly harshly with the worst excesses of Expressionism, although he did not condemn the movement as a whole. He devoted some space once more to Spengler, taking strong exception to the prevailing “cultural pessimism” reading of Spengler (by which he himself had initially been infected). Goebbels now tended, he confided to his listeners, to read Spengler’s study of the rise, growth, and decline of the great world cultures as a “source of consolation, strength, and encouragement.” He regarded Spengler’s assessment of Russia as the bearer of high culture in the millennium to come as “the magic word,” confirming his own positive verdict on the events in Russia.109

  Toward the end of the year, Goebbels endeavored to establish a drama group in Rheydt within the framework of the Bühnenvolksbund (Popular Theater League) that existed throughout the country. It was an attempt to “renew the theater in the spirit of the German-Christian people,” founded in opposition to the socialist Freie Volksbühne (Free People’s Theater).110

  In Rheydt, meanwhile, Goebbels had met the young schoolteacher Else Janke.111 What he initially described as a “quiet, platonic love” gradually developed from the summer of 1922 onward into a fully fledged love affair. It can be inferred from what he recalled about 1924 and the surviving correspondence that the relationship was not always harmonious. They argued, for example, because Else “did not want to acknowledge our relationship in public”; and later there was a “falling-out over my foot complaint.” She told him her mother was Jewish, a revelation recorded in his words as: “She has confessed her parentage to me. Since then, the first enchantment ruined.”112

  This passage indicates Goebbels’s growing anti-Semitism. Up to this point he had not been particularly interested in “the Jewish question.” In February 1919, in connection with a critical appreciation of Heinrich Heine in a history of German literature, he had written to Anka: “You know I don’t particularly like this exaggerated anti-Semitism. […] I can’t say that the Jews are my best friends, but I believe you cannot rid the world of them through cursing and polemics or even through pogroms, and even if you could, it would be demeaning and beneath human dignity.”113 The formulation “exaggerated anti-Semitism” of course carried the implication that a “normal” anti-Jewish attitude was justified. Occasional remarks suggest that Goebbels was prone to a casual, everyday anti-Semitism, but that “the Jewish question” did not occupy a central position in his worldview.114 Yet now, early in 1923, as the crisis of the German Reich deepened, he was among the many who blamed “the Jews” for the impending catastrophe.115

  UNBEARABLE DRUDGERY

  On January 2, 1923, Goebbels took a job in a bank. Else had strongly urged him to take this step;116 the doctor of philosophy, as he now was, seemed to have few other professional prospects. But his dislike of this new occupation set in quickly and grew steadily. In the meantime, chaos erupted around him. The French army marched into the Ruhr in January, since the German government had ceased to pay reparations. The Reich government called on the German people to pursue passive resistance, which led to the breakdown of public life in the region, one result among many being that the trains were no longer running, which meant that Goebbels could not get to Rheydt. He spent a few “sweet hours” with Else, who constantly tried in her letters to lift him out of his depression,117 but there were always heated arguments as well.118

  Goebbels desperately sought a direction, as he makes clear in his “memory pages,” written in 1924: “My vision clarified by necessity. Loathing for the bank and my job. […] The Jews. I am thinking about the money problem.”119 He went to an opera conducted by Otto Klemperer: “The Jewish question in art. Gundolf. Intellectual clarification. Bavaria. Hitler.” It is doubtful that in 1923, in the light of his “intellectual clarification,” he had already settled on Hitler. Since he only began to gravitate toward National Socialism in the course of 1924, this seems more likely to be a retrospective smoothing out of his biography. During this period he read Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Dostoyevsky once again evoked the strongest emotional response in him. Describing his mood after reading The Idiot, he wrote, “Revolution in me” but also “Pessimism about everything.” On Richard Wagner, he noted: “Turning away from internationalism.” His reading of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) took him back to “the Jewish question.” As an interim result of his quest for a solid ideological standpoint he finally noted: “Communism. Jewry. I am a German communist.”120 We have seen that these notes were written in 1924, and it is altogether likely, and correlates with his somewhat playful literary approach to his biography, that he transposed the politicization he was experiencing at this later date onto the crisis year of 1923.121

  Affected by the crisis and his increasingly depressed mood, he began to detest his bank job more and more.122 In June he succeeded in publishing in the Kölner Tageblatt, a newspaper regarded as liberal, a lengthy article in which he expatiated on the “fiasco of modern German literature.” Goebbels once again used the opportunity to mount a wide-ranging attack on Impressionism and Expressionism as well as various other tendencies of wartime and postwar literature: “The serious talents, struggling tirelessly for the spirit of the new age, are ignored or shouted down.”123

  In the summer he composed something like a confessional account of his life. It was titled “From My Diary,” and it seems to have been meant for Else: a thirty-two-page mixture of remarks about his failed life, aphorisms, and poems. This collection expressed above all his depression, which was particularly marked at this time. Among other things, he raged against the misery caused by passive resistance in the Ruhr and against the financial manipulators (not least in his own bank) who were profiting from the crisis.124 Neither this collection nor his article suggests that he had drawn any firm political conclusions from his negative assessment of the contemporary situation. Else was extremely concerned about him at this time, writing: “Your soul is so sensitive, perhaps too sensitive for this rough time, and so easily crushed and discouraged by this severe distress.”125

  Reporting himself sick, he went off in August 1923 with Else to the coast.126 But the mood of the couple was constantly spoiled by permanent money worries and increasing tensions. On the North Sea island of Baltrum, news reached him of the death of his close friend Richard Flisges in an industrial accident. Goebbels decided to cancel the vacation.127 At the end of the year he published an obituary for his friend in the Rheydter Zeitung.128

  Back in the Rhineland, he received his dismissal notice from the bank. Although various literary projects were taking shape in his mind, he went looking for employment. He found none.129 Finally he relinquished his room in Cologne and, following his parents’ advice, moved back to Rheydt.130 His relationship with Else became less tense, but it was hardly passionate: “Else is my comrade. Eros only now and then.” Occasionally he resorted to alcohol to drown his own personal sorrows as well as consternation over recent political and economic events.131 It was in these circumstances that he began keeping the diary that Else had given him.

  * * *

  *1 Translators’ note: The first two lines of
a poem/song by Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) officially recommended by the Prussian government in 1912 for use in the 7th and 8th grades of its schools.

  *2 Translators’ note: The title of a student drinking song.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child”

  Goebbels’s Path to National Socialism

  Credit 2.1

  Dr. Joseph Goebbels about 1922. The unsuccessful writer and occasional journalist failed to make an impression on the bourgeois intelligentsia. Suffering from depression, he set out on an existential quest for salvation, which he eventually came to believe he had found, not in religion or in cultural revolution but in the politics of the völkisch movement.

  Goebbels’s diaries in the autumn and winter of 1923–24 convey a picture of a man lacking direction, isolated from others, internally conflicted, even despairing, and trying to use the daily entries as a way of bringing his personal crisis under control. The diary was his “best friend,” he wrote. “I can confide everything to it. There’s nobody else I can tell all this.”1

  In his first diary entry, on October 17, 1923, Goebbels addressed Else directly: “My dear, kind love! You raise me up and give me new courage when despair threatens. I just cannot get my mind around how much I owe you.” There follows a kind of snapshot of Rheydt, in those days a town in the occupied Rhineland: “What a miserable experience it is to walk through the town today. There are groups of unemployed people standing on every corner, debating and speculating. It’s a time for laughing and for crying.” It “looked as though things were moving toward the right,” but “it would be completely wrong to see this swing to the right as the non plus ultra of political development.” We were on the verge of great developments in world history, he thought, but not everybody was able to recognize them. It was “the poet who is needed today, not the academic; for while the former has insight, the latter merely sees. The academic only knows how to administer small sedatives for the European sickness, whereas the poet can point out the path that leads to great developments.”

  But where were the poets who were up to the task? “Our so-called writers are nothing but bunglers, intellectual snobs, would-be witty aesthetes and coffee-house heroes. […] No one has found the cry from the heart that expresses the despair of every German.” He wished there was just one person “who could once more bring forth an ‘in tyrannos.’ ” Of all European countries, he confessed, he held “holy Russia” in the “deepest respect.” This positively rhapsodic veneration of Russia was above all the result of his intensive reading of Russian literature, particularly Dostoyevsky, to whom he had recently returned. The present day in Russia, he wrote, “is just the froth on the surface, the real cleansing liquid lies deeper.”

  After further dark thoughts, he drew up “ten commandments” designed to snap him out of his mood of depression:

  1. Be good to everybody, especially to mother, father and Else […].

  2. Do not talk much, think a lot.

  3. Be alone often.

  4. Try to make your peace with life.

  5. Get up at 8 and go to bed at 10.

  6. Read and write the bitterness out of your soul.

  7. Take plenty of long walks, especially alone.

  8. Do not neglect your body.

  9. Try to come to terms with God.

  10. Do not despair.

  LONGING FOR “SALVATION”

  A few days after this entry, Goebbels’s hometown of Rheydt became the scene of a bloody political clash. On October 21 separatist groups who enjoyed the support of the French and Belgian occupying powers staged a coup aimed at bringing about an independent Rhenish state.2 In Aachen, armed separatists successfully stormed the town hall, where they proclaimed a “Free Rhineland.” For a few hours, they also managed to occupy the town hall of nearby Mönchengladbach.3 The next day the unrest spread to Rheydt. Separatists gathered in the town, while armed townsfolk flocked together to avert the putsch.4 Goebbels witnessed a civil war scenario: “The rabble drives through the town in stolen cars proclaiming the Free Rhenish Republic. In Gladbach there are many dead and wounded. In Rheydt people are forming a ‘civil self-defense force’ against the separatists.” The police and the self-defense group were preparing to protect the town hall. Disgusted, Goebbels recorded: “They inspect the weapons, go around showing them off, and imagine heroic scenes of battle. They talk about fatalities as casually as you might mention margarine.”5

  The next day, with the attack warded off, the mob exacted their revenge on the separatists: “They’re taking action like vandals against the autonomists,” noted Goebbels, describing the destruction of furniture and household goods. “No one seems to have any restraint. Vox populi—vox diaboli.” Goebbels saw himself as a neutral observer, as a writer living in troubled times able to put his unique impressions to literary use: “I’m beginning to see all this just as material that is operating upon my inner self. I am the center, and everything revolves around me.”6

  He found his relationship with Else increasingly problematic. At this time he often thought “about the Jewish question,” and he wrote that she, like others, was unable to deny her “Jewish blood”: There was something “powerfully destructive” in her character, especially in the “area of intellect,” although this was not particularly overt, since “her intellect had not yet ripened to fruition.” It was not only in this respect that Else suffered from a comparison with Anka: The latter had been far more generous in her gifts to him than Else: “indiscriminate, without hesitation, just for the pure pleasure of giving.”7

  Else was not prepared to suffer in silence his lack of respect and regard for her; she wrote to tell him that she felt neglected and that his views on the “race question” might be an “obstacle to our future lives together.” For she was “firmly convinced that in this respect your thinking is quite definitely exaggerated, so that you tend to interpret all utterances in that sense.”8 It was her lack of confidence in their future partnership that was substantially responsible for the breakup that soon followed, whereas his diary entries give the impression that he was the one plagued by doubts about whether she was right for him. As so often with Goebbels, however, the break was soon followed by reconciliation.9 He confessed to himself that Else was simply “so dear and so good that I can’t give her up.”10 At the end of the year he wrote, “I love Else and feel myself more deeply connected to her since she gave herself to me.” But then his dreams and his feelings reverted to Anka, who, he was convinced at the time, would always remain the greatest love of his life.11

  In this period Goebbels was once more racked by a profound crisis of faith. In his diary he lamented the loss of “that tremendous corpus of belief that once determined my actions and thinking”; since he had lost his faith he was “sarcastic, ironic, skeptical, prone to relativism” and had forfeited “a huge part of my momentum and my drive.”

  However, there were two things he still believed in: “the ultimate victory of the truth and myself.” He swore to himself that he would hold on to this belief at all costs: He would draw from it “all my strength and all my goodness.” And then this noteworthy sentence: “It doesn’t matter what we believe in, as long as we believe.” He would go on at other points to find a variety of ways of expressing this idea, such as “Every thought is right, you just have to argue it convincingly,” or “Every time has its idea, and in every time the idea is right.”12 There is no doubt that Goebbels was urgently seeking an ideology to which he could commit himself, but it would be wrong to take such maxims to mean that in this phase of his life he was ready to subscribe to any idea. His intellectual shift toward right-wing radicalism had already gone too far for that—possibly further than he himself was aware.

  In any case, he told himself in October 1923, he would “soon have to part company with my God.”13 He wrestled constantly with his religion in these months, but he always returned to the conviction that Christian belief would not fail to bring him the �
��redemption” for which he so desperately longed.14

  At the beginning of November, during his temporary break with Else, he started working on the drama “Prometheus,” material that had preoccupied him for years and that he was now determined to master.15 He worked at the writing so frenetically16 that by November 12 he had finished the play “apart from the last act.”17 He handed the completed manuscript over to Else on November 18.18 Only fragments of the text have survived, but its subject matter is quite clear: Prometheus, whose origins are half-titanic (that is, divine) and half-human, rebels against the gods of Olympus.19

  Immersed in his work on “Prometheus,” he merely noted from the sidelines the Munich putsch staged by the National Socialists, writing laconically and without great sympathy: “Putsch by nationalists in Munich. Once again Ludendorff just happened to go missing.”20 He was as skeptical as ever about any shift to the right in politics.21 But only a few days after the putsch, he made some caustic anti-Semitic remarks in his diary in connection with two one-act plays by Curt Goetz he had seen in Rheydt. His verdict on the evening ran: “All in all Jewish claptrap, sneering about the downfall,” and then went on to generalize: “The Jews are the poison that is destroying the body of Europe.” Would he have been prepared to moderate his declamatory pronouncement on Jewish cultural subversion if he had known that the Curt Goetz whose plays had so inflamed him was not a Jew?