In November and December 1938 Goebbels was working intensively on a book with the provisional title “Adolf Hitler—A Man Who Is Making History”: an attempt to bring him closer to Hitler again and regain his favor.62 He had the manuscript finished by the end of the year, but in January he learned from Amann, whose Eher Verlag was supposed to publish it, that it could not come out for the time being.63 Goebbels does not indicate the reasons, but the negative reply clearly suggests that Hitler judged the time was not right for another fulsome homage from the pen of his propaganda minister. Goebbels immediately plunged into another book project, to which he gave the working title “The Better Society,” but he seems to have given up on the project fairly soon. Neither of these two works has ever appeared.64
Goebbels also busied himself with preparations for the “supplementary elections” to the Reichstag, carried out on December 4 in the Sudeten territories now incorporated into the Reich.65 He himself took part in the election campaign, appearing at various mass meetings.66 At 98.9 percent, the election results returned what had by now become the anticipated success rate.67
In December he developed progressive symptoms of illness: He had severe stomach pains and suspected a tumor.68 But hospital checks revealed no physical condition, and the diagnosis read “serious nervous disorders.”69 The recurrence of mood swings also point to the psychological nature of his problem: “The glorious weather,” he noted, “makes me increasingly melancholy”; three days later, though, it was the “gray autumn” that plunged him into a melancholy mood.70 By the middle of the month the pain had become so bad that when Professor Sauerbruch was called in he sent him straight to the Charité Hospital. Sauerbruch wanted to operate at once, but Goebbels postponed the intervention. Eventually he was taken back to Schwanenwerder. On the evening of Christmas Day he lay in his bed in the Gentleman’s House with his family celebrating in the main house next door; they paid him a visit, but still he felt abandoned and neglected.71
At the end of December he started getting up for a few hours, which cost him considerable effort. “What else can I do?” he wrote. “Everything has become so absurd. I can’t see any way out.”72 When he had to cancel his “Volk Christmas” talk, he feared that this would fuel “the most dreadful rumors.”73 So he gave the customary New Year’s speech on the radio on the evening of December 31—with which he was quite pleased—before taking to his bed again.74
During this time Magda subjected him to icy silence,75 but also to new “interrogations” and recriminations.76 An invitation from Hitler to spend a few days on the Obersalzberg did represent a glimmer of light, however.77 He was there from January 5 to 15.78 On the day after his arrival there was a four-hour discussion with Hitler about his marital crisis, but no clear resolution emerged.79 Goebbels sent for a few colleagues from Berlin and got through a certain amount of work, but in the end a kind of “tropical frenzy” came over him, he suffered from sleeplessness, was full of “burning agitation,” and was finally “close to a nervous breakdown.”80 But there was some cheering news: Although Amann rejected his book project, as already noted, the head of the Party publishing house did offer him a “very generous contract” for weekly commentaries in the Völkischer Beobachter.81
When Goebbels returned to Berlin, he felt “nothing but grief and bitterness.”82 Most of all he suffered from the lack of opportunity to unburden his personal sorrows to Hitler, who had come back to the capital at the same time.83 After Hitler’s harsh intervention in his private life, Goebbels was more dependent on his emotional support than ever.
He only “partly” reached an understanding with Magda.84 In the end the Goebbels couple signed a contract drawn up by Magda and approved by Hitler. Hitler also wrote a detailed letter to Magda, in which he stood surety for the agreement.85 In the next few weeks, Goebbels occasionally put in an appearance with Magda at Hitler’s court or in public,86 but he loathed such social events more than ever.87
REAL ESTATE
Goebbels’s troubled relations with Magda came at a time when the couple were in the throes of bringing their Berlin accommodation up to the highest standards, befitting their status. Since spring 1937 they had pursued a plan to replace their Berlin “official accommodation” in Hermann-Göring-Strasse with something a good deal more spacious, but initially this project fell through because, as has already been mentioned, Hitler did not approve of the plans.88
In February 1938 new plans were drawn up, once more presented to Hitler, and approved. During the rebuilding operations,89 Goebbels set himself up in a small apartment and thus had a retreat in Berlin where he could avoid Magda even after they had moved back into their main residence.90
The Göring-Strasse project encompassed a banqueting hall and other reception rooms on the ground floor and private accommodations for the family on the first and second floors, as well as business rooms, and accommodations in the cellar and attic rooms for domestic staff.91 In February 1939 the cost of the whole project was estimated at 2.5 million Reichsmarks. The building costs amounted to 1.6 million marks, to which was added the expense of the extremely lavish furnishings.92
Later, during the war, Goebbels was to supplement the exquisite decor with purchases made in occupied Paris. He acquired valuable furniture, rugs, and artworks with a total value of 2.3 million marks, all at the expense of the Propaganda Ministry. However, these treasures embellished not only his main residence but also his other properties. An eighteenth-century Gobelin worth 800,000 Reichsmarks hung in Lanke (the Bogensee house), and a rug dating from around 1700, valued at 750,000 marks, graced Schwanenwerder.93
It would take a staff of eighteen, paid out of the Propaganda Ministry budget, to run the residence in Hermann-Göring-Strasse.94 By August he was finally able to move in.95
Because of his private torment, however, the project soon “gave him no real pleasure” anymore.96 Since early January 1938 he had been contemplating acquiring a bigger refuge for himself. He considered buying an estate but soon decided to build something bigger to replace the “block-house” on the Bogensee.97 It appeared from the building plan, produced—under high pressure—by March, that the new “sanctuary” was shaping up to be “very commodious,” although “unfortunately rather dear.”98 It is true that the district governor in Potsdam was unwilling to give building consent, because the plot was located on land belonging to a proposed conservation area. But this was no obstacle: Göring took care of the matter.99
The new building, which Goebbels moved into at the end of 1939,100 consisted of an ample country house with about thirty rooms, a service building with about forty rooms, and a garage complex. The total building costs came to over 2.3 million Reichsmarks.101 Goebbels himself contributed 1.3 million marks to this, with funding borrowed from the Bank der Deutschen Arbeit (German Labor Bank, which belonged to Robert Ley’s German Labor Front empire).102 He was, however, forced to give up his original plan to enclose 840 hectares of land; he had to be content with 210 hectares.103
The project landed him in considerable financial difficulties, causing him a good deal of anxiety.104 But Goebbels found an elegant solution. In November 1940 he sold the house on the Bogensee to the state media holding company Cautio GmbH, although in point of fact he was not the owner, and therefore the property was not his to sell: The city of Berlin had merely granted him the right to use the estate. The Propaganda Ministry paid for the upkeep of the estate, to the tune of 70,000 Reichsmarks per year.105 In 1943 the house became the property of Ufa—which continued to put it at Goebbels’s disposal—officially for the “production of German newsreels.”106 Since he conducted official business in Lanke, the Propaganda Ministry paid out of its budget for him to employ other staff there.107
Schwanenwerder too was caught up in the momentum of Goebbels’s real estate plans. Since the spring Magda and he had been thinking of enlarging the property: In 1938 they had already bought the neighboring plot with the villa that stood on it. Goebbels’s friend Helldorf had put pressu
re on the Jewish vendor to reduce the selling price. Goebbels had thereby acquired his own villa on Schwanenwerder and was no longer dependent on the little Gentleman’s House.108 After starting to build in Lanke in the spring of 1939, he sold the second house on Schwanenwerder but rented it back in spring 1941, so that, in addition to the house for guests, the Goebbels family continued to have two villas on Schwanenwerder at their disposal.109
At the same time he planned, at least from February 1939, to build a house in Munich. The plans for it had already been drawn up, but the project, which he continued to pursue until at least the end of 1940, was eventually shelved—presumably because of financial difficulties.110
AGAINST COMEDIANS AND INTELLECTUALS
Goebbels used his function as the editorial writer for the Völkischer Beobachter first of all to conduct a campaign against the bourgeois “intellectuals” he hated so much, the circles most unsympathetic to the regime, particularly those in the capital. Basically this was the class at which he had directed his anti-Semitic campaign after the November pogrom. He would now, and in the following years, repeatedly target these circles.
By the end of 1937, by order of Hitler, he had already prohibited all political jokes at vaudeville performances and the like.111 Naturally he suspected that this prohibition was being evaded and concentrated his attention particularly on the Berlin Kabarett der Komiker (Comedians’ Cabaret).112 When Hitler remarked to him during a stroll113 at the end of January 1939 that it was necessary to “crack down hard on political jokes, but be all the more generous where erotic material was concerned,” Goebbels struck to close down the Berlin troupe’s current show. He had the artists concerned—including the cabaret star Werner Finck—ejected from the Reich Culture Chamber and publicized this measure (tantamount to a ban on working) in the press.114
He gave his reasons for this step in an editorial for the Völkischer Beobachter entitled “Have We Still Got Humor?” The choice of title—it was also used in an opinion poll for the Berliner Tageblatt in December 1938, to which Finck had given a scurrilous reply115—showed unmistakably that Goebbels was intending to bring down the iron fist and make an example of the comedians. In this piece he represented the “so-called political joke” as a Jewish invention, to which a clear answer had been found: “We have no wish to let useless intellectuals go on trashing our Party, our state, and our public institutions.” We ourselves, continued Goebbels, have plenty of humor, but it tends to be of the “grim” variety.116
After the ban the theater stayed in business until 1944 but confined itself to innocuous material.117 A few weeks after the ban, Goebbels himself attended a performance “to check it out” and to make sure the content was inoffensive.118
The ban seems to have caused something of a stir, for a week later Goebbels returned to the subject, albeit in a rather different form. In the Völkischer Beobachter of February 11 he embarked on a “detailed characterization of the intellectual type” in order to clarify his previous attacks on the “humorists” and on “intellectualism,” since these had led to “misunderstandings and annoyance.” He was on relatively safe ground here, in the sense that just three weeks earlier, in Hitler’s presence, he had vehemently cursed “intellectualism” and had earned the Führer’s approval.119
According to Goebbels’s remarks in the Völkischer Beobachter, an “intellectual [is] a so-called educated person who wants to say that cowardice is cleverness, lack of discrimination is objectivity, arrogance is courage, and indulgence is higher wisdom.” These people represented that “one percent of the electorate who voted ‘no’ to the Führer and the work of National Socialism in every election—even in those which accomplished real historical developments—and will no doubt forever say ‘no.’ ” In all the crises of National Socialism so far, they had failed us miserably.120
With his critique of the intellectuals, Goebbels seemed to have identified on behalf of National Socialism still more enemies within who could be branded as outsiders and against whom the “national community” had to close ranks—in much the same way he had dealt with the “moaners and grumblers,” “reactionaries,” “parsons,” and Jews. Another Goebbels article, called “Heads, Empty Heads,” made it clear121 that he was not in the least interested in a genuine debate with “intellectualism” but only with ruling out any criticism from bourgeois and educated circles on a wide range of topics. His frequent return to the subject suggests that this was not quite as easy as the propaganda minister had imagined.
On March 11 he published an article in the Völkischer Beobachter with the title “Coffee Aunties” that was mostly concerned with the temporary shortage of coffee.122 Goebbels explained the causes of this situation, which had to do with “currency and export policy”: In any case, “a thoroughgoing German rearmament […] was right and proper […] compared to supplying sufficient coffee for Auntie’s coffee-afternoon.” Most annoying for Goebbels, though, were the lines forming outside shops selling coffee, a blot on the urban scene. In fact, he suspected that “a certain kind of person who had never previously drunk coffee now suddenly felt compelled to register their need for coffee.” It was “always the same kind of customer”: “They are reluctant to contribute to Winter Relief, they moan about the national-socialist state and above all the national-socialist movement […], the block warden of their building is a thorn in their flesh, they are convinced supporters of the Confessing Church, they enthuse about political [cabaret] compères and they get their news from foreign radio stations or foreign newspapers.”
Goebbels held that pictures of coffee lines would be used by the foreign press to demonstrate that there were food shortages in Germany. That is why, the minister declared, “we have made sure that these coffee lines disappear from the German city scene.” It is not hard to imagine how this was done: Those lining up will have been politely requested by SA men and Party activists to kindly move on. This example shows that trivial matters were enough to prompt joint action by the propaganda machine and the Party to iron out blemishes in the public image of the Nazi dictatorship. But it was rare for these mechanisms to be so openly exposed as in Goebbels’s “Coffee Aunties” article.
Goebbels sometimes vented his anger at opponents of the regime—particularly if he saw them as “intellectuals”—in face-to-face confrontations, indicating that this was no mere propaganda posture. He frequently summoned opponents of the regime to his office in order to degrade and humiliate them. The first known instance took place in 1938: The writer Ernst Wiechert had informed local Party officials that he would not be contributing to any welfare institutions in the future but instead donating the equivalent sum to the wife of the imprisoned Pastor Martin Niemöller. This cost Wiechert three months in a concentration camp. Goebbels had Wiechert “brought before him” when he was about to be released and told him, according to Wiechert, that if he made the slightest slip again he would find himself back in the camp, but this time “for life and with the aim of destroying him physically.” This threat of “physical destruction” is actually recorded verbatim in Goebbels’s diary entry concerning the encounter.123
In autumn 1939 he personally berated “a certain Petermann,” charged with having distributed leaflets against the regime over several years: “A piece of filth whose impudence is even greater than his stupidity. We’ll see if he’s got any backers. Then execution.”124 And in February he had a student “brought before him” who had “drivelled boastfully about assassinating the Führer.” This “intellectual creature,” wrote Goebbels scornfully, had broken down in tears when confronted with the propaganda minister.125
WAR IN SIGHT
Early in February Hitler told Goebbels that, as the latter recorded, he was going to “go up to the mountain and think about his next foreign policy steps. Perhaps it’ll be Czechoslovakia again. Because that problem is only half solved. But he’s not quite clear about it yet. Maybe the Ukraine, too.”126 Although Goebbels was no better informed about his master’s next fore
ign policy moves, he now proceeded to shift his propaganda effort entirely toward preparing for war. In the following months Goebbels was the most consistently pro-war member of the regime’s highest echelon, both within and outside its circle. Although he himself would have preferred to avoid full-scale war at this point, he did everything in his power to make up for the “failure” of his propaganda during the crisis of autumn 1938.
A first step in this direction was Goebbels’s editorial “War in Sight” in the Völkischer Beobachter of February 25; the title was an allusion to a newspaper article, inspired by Bismarck, of April 1875, which had triggered an international crisis. He tried to pin the responsibility for international tensions on the “string-pullers” in the background who were “well known”: “They are to be found in the circles of international Jewry, international Freemasonry, and international Marxism.” By the next day the article had caused “a great sensation” both at home and abroad. And no wonder: “It’s brilliantly written.”127
His editorials for the Völkischer Beobachter evolved a style quite different from that of his earlier journalistic contributions. In Der Angriff he would write ironically, bitingly, casually, and flippantly. Now, however, his style was serious, statesmanlike, even pompous, meant to indicate that he was viewing current affairs from a certain distance, from a higher vantage point. In his editorials for the weekly Das Reich, which he wrote regularly from 1940 onward, he would develop this elevated attitude even further. Part of this was his penchant for advancing his arguments as eternally valid, irrefutable truths by pointing, for example, to supposed “great historical developments,” which “followed their own laws,” or by referring to the “nature of war”128 or deploying the power of facts or incontestable life experiences. Characteristic were stiff generalizing phrases such as: “Once more we feel the need to hold up to ridicule a certain question of the day,” or: “We were obliged some days ago to deal in this publication with the excesses of the Polish press,” or: “In this connection we have little need to refer back to the facts.”129 The “we” he liked to use in these articles denoted not only the author Goebbels but often also the Nazi leadership or simply the collective of the German “national community.” This manipulative game with the collective pronoun characterizes the leadership’s claim to identity with the nation.
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