Goebbels: A Biography
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Goebbels also used Der Angriff in various ways to publicize his own views, diverging as they did from the official Party line. This applied, for example, to his interpretation of the “Russian question,” which held that “Bolshevism” was in the process of a development in which it “purges itself of its Jewish wreckers and begins to pursue nationalist policies beyond party dogma.”109 But he soon dropped this line of argument. In the autumn of 1930 he planned to bring up, in two editorials, the demand for a stronger “socialist” emphasis in the National Socialist program but abandoned the project after the leadership plainly signaled that this was not the direction it had in mind.
One characteristic of Der Angriff was its—even by National Socialist standards—strikingly vulgar anti-Semitism. On the death of the Jewish left-liberal publicist Maximilian Harden, for example, the paper said on November 3 that he had been “executed by inflammation of the lungs.” With him, “there departed from this world one of the lowest, most vile of individuals, who brought Germany to the brink of the abyss.”110 In its anti-Semitic hate campaign, Der Angriff did not even shrink from invoking, in all seriousness, the medieval motif of “Jewish ritual murder.”111
There was one person above all who was the prime target for anti-Semitic abuse: the lawyer Dr. Bernhard Weiss, appointed deputy commissioner of police in March 1927.112 In 1927–28 there was only one issue of Der Angriff that failed to attack him. In 1928 and 1929, moreover, Goebbels published two anti-Weiss books. In 1929–30 the attacks on Weiss subsided, but they can still be found in more than half of the editions of the paper.113
Goebbels—far from the first to do so114—dubbed Weiss “Isidor.” The supposedly Jewish first name was meant to insinuate that Weiss had changed his name, that for him to use the Germanic “Bernhard” was an affront. In numerous articles and caricatures, “Isidor Weiss” became the anti-Jewish stereotype personified: His appearance was caricatured as “typically Jewish,” and he was represented as cowardly, underhanded, overbearing, a ridiculous figure. The object of this distorted image of “Isidor Weiss” was to pillory the alleged predominance of “the Jews” in the Weimar “system.” Under the steady barrage of this smear campaign, the person of Weiss became a type and the name “Isidor Weiss” a byword. This confirmed the motto with which Goebbels prefaced his Isidor book: “Isidor: not a person or an individual in the legal sense. Isidor is a type, a mentality, a face, or rather a phizog.”
On September 26, to wild applause from his supporters, Goebbels proclaimed in Hasenheide Park in Neukölln: “We are fighting against men, yes, but in them we are fighting the system. We don’t speak like the bourgeois parties of the corruption in Berlin or the Bolshevism of Berlin City Hall. No! All we say is: Isidor Weiss! That’s enough!”115
Thus Dr. Bernhard Weiss was turned into a caricature. Again and again Weiss was made to serve in Nazi propaganda as a figure, a template “proving” the validity of the anti-Semitic stereotype. Weiss tried to defend himself against his derisive nickname with a flood of complaints, which police headquarters handed on to the state prosecutors. Goebbels came under considerable pressure as a result, and charges against him were upheld, but the publicity generated by all this court activity only made the “Isidor Weiss” stereotype even better known. Thus Goebbels was able to declare disingenuously at an appeal hearing on June 2, 1931, that “the first name Isidor was so familiar to Berliners and was used so often that many people didn’t even know Dr. Weiss’s real name” and that consequently “no insult can be implied in the use of this name.”116
Once the “Isidor” sobriquet had been put into circulation, the slightest hint was enough to keep the “Isidor” campaign alive. For example, Der Angriff printed the deputy commissioner’s real name in quotation marks, and a list of personnel using full names singled Weiss out for the honor of referring to him only by his first name. References to “I. Weiss” or allusions to names in general in connection with the person of the deputy commissioner fulfilled the same purpose. Even where Der Angriff used the “respectful” title “Police Commissioner Dr. Bernhard Weiss,” it was all part of the same name game. In this game Goebbels was always devising new variations, and Weiss’s attempts to defend himself only helped to spread them further. Goebbels asked hypocritically in an editorial in Der Angriff in April 1928 why Weiss was so eager to take action against him. “Is it because ‘Isidor’ is another word for Jew? Does this mean there is something inferior about being Jewish?”117 In the end, taking legal steps against this campaign proved ineffectual.118 After one court had established that a caricature donkey did indeed represent Weiss, Der Angriff printed the cartoon again, this time announcing that according to legal opinion the drawing referred to the deputy police commissioner, Dr. Bernhard Weiss.119
From Goebbels’s point of view, this relentless personification of anti-Semitism was the ideal way to denigrate the authority of the Weimar state while also diverting attention from the extreme vagueness of the NSDAP’s policy ideas. This was especially true of the Berlin Gauleiter’s own ideas: For him, the image of the Jewish enemy represented the counterpart of his very rudimentary notions of “national community” and “socialism.” For him, “the Jews” stood for the establishment, for democracy, general moral degeneracy, and cultural decline.
LIVING UNDER THE BAN
The Berlin NSDAP, banned in Prussia from the beginning of May 1927, continued an illegal existence, partly in the disguised form of leisure organizations.120 Time and again Berlin National Socialists provoked incidents. Young Nazis skulked around on the Kurfürstendamm, looking to jostle and molest passersby they took to be Jewish. A local paper was already voicing its fear that “the brutal activities of National Socialists on the Kurfürstendamm were becoming these youngsters’ normal entertainment.”121 In its first issue, Der Angriff reported the trial of eighteen young National Socialists who in May, “out of justified rage at the unreasonable ban on their meeting,” had descended on the Kurfürstendamm. If “Jews behaving arrogantly really had been beaten up there,” then the perpetrators were Germans “who had learned at first hand what it means to live under Jewish oppression.”122 When the prison sentences were handed down, Goebbels raged at the verdicts: “There are no judges left in Berlin,” he concluded.123 In an editorial in November he criticized a similar verdict,124 and in his book Kampf um Berlin (Struggle for Berlin), published in 1931, he observed laconically that “the inevitable result of such bans was the constant recurrence of political excesses on the streets. Many a West Berlin Jew found himself getting slapped in these outbursts.” Admittedly, some of the people who had been assaulted had no personal responsibility for the suppression of the NSDAP, but “the masses do not understand these finer nuances. They grab anyone they can get ahold of.”125
The Berlin police authorities were not intimidated by such “spontaneous” outbreaks of violence on the part of the National Socialists: They did their best to enforce the ban. On August 22 the Berlin police stopped a train bringing Berlin National Socialists back to the capital from the Nuremberg party rally and arrested 450 men for illegal activities: They were found to possess provisional membership cards.126 Der Angriff then predicted “mass arrests of NSDAP voters and supporters,” and in an editorial in the same issue Goebbels proclaimed that the flag confiscated by the police from the arrested comrades was now a fetish, a “sacred cloth.”127
During the summer of 1927, Goebbels continued to make public appearances in Berlin: As long as the Party did not openly organize an event, the police were powerless to intervene.128 However, at the end of August—Goebbels had just returned from several weeks of vacation in Bavaria129—the Berlin chief commissioner of police pronounced that Goebbels was prohibited from public speaking for more than two months.130 It was not until November 8 that he gave his next speech, to a meeting of three thousand people in Neukölln.131 On January 13 he “called the political police to account” in Friedrichshain. Two weeks later the Party succeeded (though not under its own name) i
n attracting an audience of ten thousand on one evening in two large halls, again in Friedrichshain.132 In March the NSDAP, still prohibited, staged its “Second Brandenburg Day” in Bernau, near Berlin. Under the noses of the police, who turned out in strength, Goebbels organized a parade in the market square that was followed by an address to the men.133
In the early months of 1928, a veritable avalanche of court cases bore down upon Goebbels, who had already been fined in November 1927 for inciting violence.134 At the end of February 1928 he was sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment for the brutal treatment of a heckler by the SA at the May 4 meeting: This was the incident that earned the Party its ban. In the “Stucke trial,” as it was called, the court accepted the state prosecutor’s case, perceiving a link between the violent behavior of the SA and one or two relevant “tips” that Goebbels had issued earlier for such situations.135 “Shameless Terror Tactics Against the N.S.D.A.P.,” ran the headline in Der Angriff, while Goebbels announced in an article that he regarded prison sentences as “honors and distinctions” in his battle against the “system.”136
Goebbels did not have to serve his sentence, as he benefited from an amnesty brought in by the Reichstag in July 1928. On March 24 he complained that he had six court cases pending against him: “4 for insulting Isidor, one for high treason, and one for bodily harm.” On March 29 a Munich court sentenced him to a fine of 1,500 Reichsmarks, once again for an insult to Bernhard Weiss.137
Moreover, in March the case concerning the shooting incident in Lichterfelde came up in court.138 To avoid giving evidence, Goebbels planned to go away for the Easter vacation but was remanded and obliged to appear in court. Eventually, relatively stiff sentences, of between two and thirty months’ imprisonment, were imposed on five National Socialists.139 In late April, in another trial, he was again sentenced to three weeks in jail for an “Isidor” insult, but thanks to the amnesty law of July 1928, he did not have to serve this sentence either.140
The NSDAP had now been prohibited for almost a year, and the law had begun seriously to crack down on Goebbels, threatening him with prison. Within the Party his position was by no means unassailable. It seemed that the tactics he had introduced on arriving in Berlin at the end of 1926—especially the use of provocation to draw attention to the NSDAP at all costs—had led to a dead end.
DIGRESSIONS INTO AUTHORSHIP
Once Goebbels started full-time political activity in 1925, the time available for reading literature rapidly diminished. His main reading matter now consisted of the New Right canon, on which he usually wrote commentaries ranging from benign to enthusiastic. To mention only the best-known titles, these works included Moeller van den Bruck’s Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich), which he had difficulty finishing;141 Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (Storms of Steel);142 Margherita Sarfatti’s biography of Mussolini;143 Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century);144 Ernst Röhm’s memoir Geschichte eines Hochverräters (The Story of a Traitor);145 Franz Schauwecker’s Aufbruch der Nation (The Awakening of the Nation);146 and Alfred Rosenberg’s Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts (Myth of the 20th Century).147
Despite all the political turbulence, Goebbels certainly had not given up on his own literary ambitions. Thus he used the period of prohibition to slip once again into his writer persona. In June 1927 he had completed a revised version of his play “The Wanderer.”148 The drama premiered in early November in a “national socialist experimental theater” instituted by the Gau.149 The piece consisted of eleven “pictures,” displayed to the “wanderer” by the “writer,” denouncing the failings of the prevailing “system”: social misery, exploitation, the stock market (embodied by a Jew, naturally), the alleged mendacity of Marxist party leaders, the rigidity of the “reactionaries.” The whole thing climaxed in a final picture solemnly proclaiming the birth of the “Third Reich.” The play was an “artless mixture of medieval, Expressionist, and Naturalistic elements,” commented a later reviewer who was somewhat puzzled by it.150
Goebbels noted with regret that although Hitler was in Berlin during December, he did not choose to attend the performance.151 Among the reviews, there were two that particularly annoyed Goebbels: A “mean”152 writeup appeared in the Nationalsozialistische Briefe, dismissing the play as “unsatisfactory” and “in the deepest sense untrue to life.”153 The Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, published by Otto Strasser, printed what Goebbels called a “miserable” review.154 In fact, the review by Herbert Blank, one of Otto Strasser’s lieutenants, commented that there was much to be said against the play, but he preferred to withhold his criticism in view of its positive reception by “like-minded Berlin friends.”155 Goebbels complained to Hess—and to some effect: He recorded with satisfaction soon afterward that Strasser had been “raked over the coals.”156
His meager success did not prevent Goebbels from continuing to pursue his literary plans. It was obvious that he wanted to be perceived by the public as a literary man and an intellectual, not just a rabid agitator. In the summer of 1928 he set to work revising his old novel manuscript, “Michael,” written in 1924. The book was finally published at the end of 1928,157 but the literary outpourings of a Nazi Gauleiter passed almost unnoticed.158
Goebbels maintained the basic structure of the book: Michael is a novel in diary form whose hero, a young war veteran, has autobiographical features as well as some characteristics of his late friend Richard Flisges. Goebbels extended the idea of merging the two characters by inventing for Michael a friend called Richard, who obtains his Ph.D. at Heidelberg and subsequently works “in a large publishing house.”
The novel begins with the return of this “double” Michael from the front. In spring 1919 Michael begins his studies in Heidelberg but is dissatisfied. He falls in love with Hertha Holk, who is unmistakably based on Anka. Michael writes a play about Jesus Christ, studies for another semester in Munich, and loses his beloved Hertha there. He wrestles with his Christian belief, which he finally abandons. He falls more and more under the influence of Ivan Vienurovsky, a revolutionary-minded Russian student of philosophy. Finally he decides to take a job as a miner. Rejected at first by the other workers, he gradually gains their approval, shakes off the influence of Ivan’s thinking, and finds his long-sought “salvation” in teamwork. The novel ends with the death of the hero underground. The diary form allows Goebbels, in emotionally charged confessional passages only tenuously related to the plot, to set out his “principled” views on religion, ideology, politics, and literature. Not surprisingly, Michael’s diary entries borrow frequently from Goebbels’s own diary.
In his 1928 reworking, Goebbels retained the plot and narrative structure but made some changes and additions that had the effect of turning the political and ideological content of the novel on its head. The changes demonstrate two things: First, they show how far Goebbels’s ideological standpoint had shifted over the previous few years; and second, they reveal his great skill in making small, calculated alterations to reverse the original message of the work. The revised Michael is very much the product of a deeply cynical and highly skilled manipulator of texts.
Goebbels now inserted some biting anti-Semitic passages into the text, whose original version contained hardly any anti-Jewish jibes. He described the Jews as “this abscess on the body of our sick national character,” which will “destroy us if we do not neutralize it.”159 “I spend a lot of time sitting in cafés,” we read in the older version.160 “Over a cigarette you can have all sorts of superficial thoughts. You see people. Munich is inconceivable without its cafés.”161 In the book version, Goebbels began the passage in the same conversational tone of the flâneur but then gave this short section a completely different turn: “I spend a lot of time sitting in cafés. I get to know people from all over the world. It teaches you to love everything German all the more. This has become so rare in our own fatherland. It’s hard to imagine Munich without its snobbish Jews.”162
Throughout the published novel, Goebbels replaces the “love of humanity” pathos of the earlier “Michael” with his new völkisch ideal. So the sentence “By redeeming myself, I redeem humanity” now becomes “By redeeming myself, I redeem my Volk.”165 By the same token, “love of humanity” becomes “dedication to the Volk.”166 In the original text he had called for an alliance with Russia. There we read, in a speech ascribed to Ivan (but lifted from his diary): “Within the great problem of Europe lies the old, holy Russia. Russia is the past and the future, but not the present. […] The solution of the great puzzle that is Europe is burgeoning in the soil of Russia. […] Ex oriente Lux!”167 This now became: “The great problem of Europe shares a border with the old, new Russia. Russia is the past and perhaps also the future, but not the present […]. The solution of its great puzzle is burgeoning in the soil of Russia.” Needless to say, he had also deleted the “Ex oriente Lux.”168