Goebbels: A Biography

by Peter Longerich

  The election campaign exhausted him: “The low points of the election campaign are horribly dry and dusty. But behind it all stands the great idea of a völkisch Europe in which a völkisch Germany will take a prominent place.”81 On the eve of the election he gave a talk “to an invited audience about our aims and the Semitic danger.” He spoke freely for the first time: “Good success. Our idea is catching on, because it’s a world idea.”82

  In the elections for the Reichstag the National Socialists—who featured in individual constituencies not only as a part of the Völkisch-Social Bloc but also under other groupings—succeeded in gaining thirty-two seats in all throughout the Reich, and 6.6 percent of the vote. In the Rheydt local elections they did rather less well, with 528 votes, or 2.7 percent of the vote. The Catholic Center Party dominated the town as ever, with 30.3 percent, while the bourgeois parties, the German People’s Party (DVP) and the German-Nationalist People’s Party (DNVP), scored 17.5 and 14.6 percent of the vote, respectively. At least the Völkisch-Social Bloc now had one representative on the Town Council.83

  Political activism restored a sense of purpose to Goebbels’s life. He felt “pure joy” that he had found “faith and a new aim.” But really he saw himself as an intellectual, a cultural politician. He continued to commit himself wholeheartedly to the plan of a völkisch-oriented Rhenish cultural magazine.84 For a while it seemed as if such a project might be realized with the help of the Schiller Community, a völkisch cultural organization headquartered in Vienna that was extending its activities to the Rhineland. “Reawakening of German intellectual life in the spirit of Schiller” and “Excising of all Jewish-international subversion”—such a program was music to Goebbels’s ears.85 But it was the music of the future, and meanwhile he was profoundly dissatisfied with the dull everyday reality of party work. “I’ve had it up to here with this drudgery for the völkisch cause. I must get back to involvement in principles and intellectual matters.”86 What is more, he was uncomfortable with many of his fellow party members, consisting as they did to a large extent of “a wild rabble of ex-convicts, loudmouths, idiots, and informers.”87 “Squabbling” was the order of the day in the local group.88

  In the middle of May 1924, about two weeks after the elections, he drew up a sobering balance sheet. His “reckless support for the völkisch idea” had “ended his last chance of breaking into the press or the theater,” and furthermore he had “burned his bridges” with the Center Party people in Rheydt. On the other hand, there were seeds of hope: “Out of the despair and depressing skepticism of the last few years has arisen once again my belief in the nation and in the German spirit. Now I am strong and waiting with more yearning than ever for salvation.” Could this ardent search be turned to literary account? “I should write about my intellectual journey from [Ernst] Toller to Hitler. Some of that is already present in ‘Michael Voormann.’ […] I want to be my own salvation. If a book or a play contributes to my salvation, it will have done its job. After that it can molder away in my desk drawer.”89

  His political activism on the radical right wing soon exacted its price: In June he was set upon by a gang. He suspected the “damned Semites” were behind the attack. He thought he had been fighting for his life against some six or eight men, although he clearly emerged unscathed.90 He received threatening letters (whose senders quickly turned out to be harmless), there were house searches, and he was sure he would soon be arrested.91 In the end he hardly dared venture out onto the streets.92

  THE QUEST FOR ORIENTATION

  At the end of June he took part in a political conference in Elberfeld that brought together like-minded people from all over the occupied territory. Goebbels was deeply disappointed by the leaders of the völkisch movement in the occupied zone: “All you Jews and French and Belgian gentlemen need have no fear. You’re safe from them. I have rarely been at a meeting where so much ranting and railing went on as yesterday. And most of it directed at their own comrades.”

  In the non-occupied areas, he recorded, a struggle had broken out, one that he had long expected, between the two organizations competing for the leadership of the radical right, namely “between the völkisch Freedom Party and the National Socialist Worker’s Party.” As he soberly observed, the two did not “belong together at all. The former want Prussian Protestantism (they call it the German Church), the latter a Greater Germany settlement—possibly with a Catholic element. Munich and Berlin are locked in combat. You could also say Hitler and Ludendorff.” His allegiance was unambivalent: “I belong much more with Munich than with Berlin. If only Hitler were free!”

  He was concerned that the actually existing völkisch movement had failed to produce a “competent, hard-working, and noble leader.” A few days later he formulated his longings more dramatically: “Germany yearns for the One, the Man, as the earth longs for rain in summer.” And then there followed a really fervent cry: “O Lord, give your German people a miracle! A miracle!! A man!!! Bismarck, arise!”93

  The call for a leader, a political Messiah, so exaltedly expressed here by Goebbels, was a commonplace of right-wing thinking in those postwar years. The image evoked by Goebbels of the rescuer as a new Bismarck was widespread; hopes were likewise pinned on the return of a Frederick the Great or an Arminius (Hermann). In literature, the press, the youth movement, the Protestant church but also in the humanities, countless voices were raised to express the hope, and even the certainty, that this great personality, “the One,” would appear and lead the nation out of defeat and back to honor and self-esteem. Such nationalistic visions of rescue had a high proportion of religious and pseudo-religious content: The future leader would be God-sent and equipped with extraordinary abilities.94

  We can assume that at the time Goebbels—albeit full of doubts—related the call for a great man above all to himself: “Am I a wastrel or someone sent by God to await His word? Amid all the profound despair there is always one shining light: belief in my own purity and that my great hour must come one day.”95

  His growing involvement in politics led him for a while to engage intensively with the writings of leading socialist thinkers. First he read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. He was impressed by the description of the condition of the workers in England but found the style “dry” and “terribly heartless.”96 A few weeks later he moved on to Rosa Luxemburg’s Letters from Prison. At first he felt entirely sympathetic to “Rosa,” as he called her in his diary, but as he read on he became increasingly critical, which by his own admission may have had something to do with his “somewhat one-sided” anti-Semitic attitude.97 Then he read From Kiel to Kapp, the memoirs of the renegade social democrat turned right-winger Gustav Noske, which provoked a fit of hatred toward the “Jewish riff-raff.”98

  Finally he turned to August Bebel’s memoirs. Bebel had “appealing features” and an “upright, straight character,” but Goebbels was bothered that he was “half-educated.”99 “Bebel’s socialism,” Goebbels summed up when he had finished the book, was “a healthy reaction in response to the liberalism that was all-powerful at the time” and initially “thoroughly patriotic in attitude,” but later it was “contaminated by Jewishness.”100 The humble workers’ leader Bebel was, as Goebbels saw it, a tool of the internationally minded Jewish left-intellectuals, hopelessly in thrall to their “phrase-mongering.”101 That Goebbels identified himself with the more “socialist” side of National Socialist policy in the next few years had less to do with the socioeconomic restructuring of society than with creating a racially homogeneous “national community.”

  A tight-knit group of politically like-minded people was formed in Rheydt, mockingly known to him as the “league of the resolute.” Meetings were held to exchange ideas on subjects transcending day-to-day politics; Goebbels’s house was frequently the venue.102 His radical politics meant that ties with old friends were lost. He gradually distanced himself from “the German small-town type” that he saw personified in these “awful windy beggars” who
were distinguished by a “lazy, vapid bonhomie,” “swine dressed up as gentlemen,” “the next bourgeois generation.”103

  The relationship with Else, which had undergone a severe crisis in April 1924, had been restored. The stigma of her “Jewish blood” now no longer seemed to worry him so much: “Many a sweet lovers’ tryst with Else,” he wrote in May.104 It may be that for him it was mainly a comfortable arrangement: “Else is a nice, good child. A bit boring. But a loyal, industrious handmaiden. You can rely on her, and she’ll do you any kind of favor.”105 In July he wrote that he was “incurably ego-centered as far as women are concerned. Do I give? No, I take; as much as I can. […] I’m sometimes ashamed of myself. If I could marry you, Else, it would solve a lot of problems.” But he couldn’t marry Else, precisely for “racial” reasons.106

  Else aside, the image of Anka haunted him as much as ever. He often confided to his diary that his great love, of whom he felt cheated, appeared to him in his dreams. His unfulfilled longing for Anka was highly detrimental to his relationship with the opposite sex: “I’m only half a man for women today. I lack what is best and most consoling: esteem, distance, respect.”107 He concluded: “Why is Eros my tormentor, why can’t he be my joy and my strength? Anka, you wicked, lovely woman!”108

  CRAMPED QUARTERS AND VÖLKISCH EUPHORIA

  Goebbels lapsed once more into depression. In the summer of 1924 he felt he “lacked the courage to face life” and simply “never left this dump.”109 And there was “no stimulus, no enthusiasm, no belief. Waiting! Waiting! If only I knew what for. I delude myself by sending my Michael to one publisher after another. Nobody wants it. Surprising?”110

  In August he noted: “Lots of drunken evenings.”111 A few days before this he described an anxiety dream: “A Bulgarian throws a knife at me. The knife’s point hits me in the head. I am bleeding. I am losing strength. Fear. Horror. I can feel death approaching. Then I wake up. The man’s name was Bolgorovkov.”112

  A review of his circumstances left little room for optimism: “My ideal: to be able to write and live off it. But no one’s going to pay me for my rubbish.”113 He wrote the “memory pages,” short autobiographical sketches, as an adjunct to the diaries begun in October 1923.114 As he was leafing through old correspondence with Anka he had a new idea for a project: an epistolary novel about a love affair.115

  The memory of Anka and the pain of losing her became almost overwhelming. Else had gone off to the Black Forest by herself: He had no money to go with her.116 He sketched out a wistful letter to Anka lamenting their parting.117 “All the people I love and will ever love in my life will have to accept less love from me because of what I lavished on Anka Stalherm,” he wrote.118 On the other hand, he longed increasingly for Else: “I have a yearning for her white body.”119 There was something connecting the two women for him. In both of them he rediscovered his mother. He wrote about Anka: “There was something maternal in her love,”120 and of Else he said that she was “my young mother and lover. I sometimes think of her as a mother.”121 “Mother is good to me,” he wrote on the same day. “I have her to thank for nearly everything I am.” He branded his father “uniquely lacking in style,” a “pub strategist,”122 a “moaner”: He was “peevish, but the soul of goodness at heart,”123 a “beer-drinking pedant.” Earlier, at the beginning of the year, he characterized his father as a pedant and a tyrant: “I can’t understand why my mother married the old skinflint.”124

  He participated ever more apathetically in the activities of the völkisch group in Rheydt: “I’m only suited to wide-ranging politics, just as I can only take the wider view in my work. Day-to-day work repels me.”125 By contrast, his friend Fritz Prang took part enthusiastically. Goebbels regarded him as a busybody fantasist, an “idealistic ideologue” with too little sense of practical politics who saddled him “week after week with every kind of lout” in his house.126 All the same, Goebbels was persuaded to accompany him to Weimar127 to attend a conference from August 15 to 17, 1924, of German-völkisch supporters and National Socialists, where a fragile alliance was struck. It was known as the National Socialist Freedom Movement of Greater Germany.128

  Plans for the journey seemed about to collapse, since Prang initially failed to raise the money. In any case, Goebbels had “lost interest” in the party congress, but when the money came through after all, he set off on the afternoon of August 15.129 The trip was to make a profound impression on him.

  After a tiring overnight journey, he arrived in Weimar the next morning. It was his first visit to the city of German Classicism. The next few days passed in almost unbroken high spirits: He felt he was among his peers, among people whom he regarded as belonging without doubt “to a certain elite.” He saw himself in the company of the initiated, in a festive mood, standing out clearly from the run of the population: “It gladdens my heart! Oh, this blessed youth of ours! We enthusiasts! We fanatics! Glow, sacred flame!”

  The supporters of the “movement” held their congress in the National Theater, where he found himself facing Erich Ludendorff: “He scrutinized me closely. Very thoroughly. He seemed not displeased.” In Weimar he also had his first sighting of other prominent right-extremist figures: Albrecht von Graefe, leader of the German-völkisch Freedom Party, whom Goebbels saw as a “born aristocrat” and who reminded him of a “thoroughbred racehorse”; Gregor Strasser (“the affable pharmacist from Bavaria”); Gottfried Feder (“fraternity student”); Wilhelm Kube, who attracted his attention with a “loud and pompous” speech; Ernst Graf zu Reventlow, the “clever, sarcastic Count, the world politician of the movement”; and Julius Streicher, the “fanatic with pursed lips” who seemed to him “somewhat pathological.” He talked for a whole hour to Theodor Fritsch, the leading anti-Semitic publicist of Germany, whom he thought of as a “nice old uncle.”

  For two days Goebbels was swept away by the bustle of the party rally. He was entertained by the parades and the solemn appeals, the emotional addresses, and the communal singing of patriotic songs. He dropped in at the pubs the National Socialists had taken over.130 But he also found time to visit the houses of Goethe and Schiller. Visiting the Schiller house, full of elevated patriotic emotion, he had a strange experience: Standing before a portrait of Schiller, he thought he could see physical similarities between himself and the writer. As he was inclined to identify himself strongly with Schiller and tended in his imagination to fuse himself with whatever was greater, more significant, and unattainable, such an observation was not surprising in itself. In the same way, he had recently been prompted after reading Richard Wagner’s autobiography to contemplate the similarities between himself and the composer.131 However, what is notable is that, as he recalled, a lady standing next to him also noticed the similarities and reacted “with amazement and with something like horror.” Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch has pointed out, in connection with this scene, that for Goebbels his self-loving reflection in the portrait of the great man only had value when it was confirmed by a third person. Goebbels wanted to be as great as Schiller, but above all he wanted to experience this elevation in the eyes of others.132

  He returned to Rheydt with his “whole heart full of unforgettable impressions.”133 In his mind the relics of German Classicism merged with the völkisch mood of national awakening: “The national question is connected to all the questions of spirit and religion. I’m starting to think in a völkisch way. This has nothing to do with politics anymore. This is a matter of a worldview. I’m beginning to find firm ground beneath my feet.”134

  THE VÖLKISCH JOURNALIST

  Still very much under the influence of his Weimar experiences, Goebbels, together with Fritz Prang, founded in Mönchengladbach on August 21, 1924, a local group of the National Socialist Freedom Movement of Greater Germany, which was banned in the occupied zone. Allegedly, twenty members promptly appeared, after Goebbels had spent “one and a half hours explaining the basic problems of the völkisch worldview.” Prang remarked appreciatively afterward
that he was “a born speaker.”135

  Goebbels now regularly gave talks in his local area. On September 3 he addressed a middle-class audience in Wickrath, on the 10th in Mönchengladbach, on the 17th again in Wickrath, this time an audience of farming people, on September 18 workers in Mönchengladbach, on the 25th in Rheydt, on the 27th in Neuss.136 “It isn’t nearly so hard to speak off the cuff as I would have thought,” he wrote, “but you’ve got to practice beforehand, as with everything. And I practice on these small meetings of supporters.”137

  In the foreground of his political work was the project of a nationalistic journal that was to appear in Elberfeld. The plan, first mentioned in his diary in July,138 slowly took shape, replacing the earlier idea of a cultural-political magazine for the occupied Rhineland. It was agreed with the publisher, Friedrich Wiegershaus, leader of the Freedom Movement in the North Rhineland district, that it would contain “every week a cultural-political essay, a political review of the week, a glossary, and one or two smaller items. […] Payment initially to consist only of idealism and ingratitude.” The paper was titled Völkische Freiheit (Völkisch Freedom).139

  The first edition of the weekly appeared at the beginning of September.140 Goebbels proudly reported that he had co-written as much as three quarters of the third issue himself.141 It was true that the paper was, as he had to admit, “still an insignificant little rag,” but he felt “young and bold” enough to make a success of it.142