I am,’ he recalls later, perhaps rationalizing his own failure to hold on to her. They
have entered that cruel phase on an overlong affair when each partner derives more
pleasure from making the other suffer.
When he next sees her it will be Whitsun. He reads from ‘The Seed’ to her, but
she, the wealthy miller’s daughter, is alienated by its leftwing political message. The
rift widens. She begins to see his close friend Theo Geitmann.6 Chagrined, he returns
the bracelet. He offers her formal engagement (‘If you don’t feel strong enough
to say yes,’ he writes, ‘then we must each go our separate ways’); she turns him
down.7 After one unsatisfactory night with him on the chaiselongue and her in bed
he pencils a four-page letter of farewell in which he calls out her name appealingly
twenty-four times, a romantic torrent of pleas to return to his embrace. ‘Is it over
really?Ê .Ê . I have known only you, you were the whole world to me, the most beautiful
world that could ever be conceived, and I have lost it—lost it through my own
fault.’ Perhaps this last night has been a turning point for them both. ‘Do you think
you’ll ever find another who can love you so?’ he asks, and conjures up the spirit of
unfaithful Tristan (‘Dying,’ declares Wagner’s murdered heroine Isolde, ‘still I kiss
44 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
him!’) ‘I rest my fortune in your lenient woman’s hand,’ concludes Goebbels. ‘Cast
the first stone if you must. May it then dash me to pieces, and may you never come to
regret it.’ Satisfied by this literary effort, he leaves the letter unsent.8
Spending the autumn break at home he reads Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Brothers
Karamazov,’ and suffers a nervous collapse. He pens a testament, dated October 1,
1920, in which he allocates his books, his alarm clock, his inkwell and other pathetic
chattels to his friends: they are to sell off clothing to repay his debts—to his father,
Director Cohnen’s wife, a Bonn jeweller and the Albertus Magnus charity. He wills
his poetry and novella to Flisges and his mother (in that order). ‘Miss Anka Stalherm
is to be urged to burn my letters.Ê .Ê . May she be happy and not brood upon my
death.’ The final sentences hint unmistakeably at suicide: ‘I depart gladly from a life
which has become just hell for me.’9 He folds this into a small envelope, but takes no
further action.
‘Jealousy,’ he will write later, reviewing this period, ‘is the death of love.’ Pocketing
his pride he sends more letters to Anka, now back with her family at
Recklinghausen: his brother Hans also pleads with her; neither receives a reply.
That autumn of 1920, learning that she is in Munich, he borrows money from his
brothers and sends his trusty friend Flisges to find out more. Flisges writes that Anka
has been seen escorted by a gentleman in a flashy waistcoat ‘with many gold knobs
and pins.’10 Distraught, Goebbels hurries from Heidelberg to Munich, to Anka’s address
in Amalien Strasse; while he waits outside, Flisges stomps upstairs. But she has
left for Freiburg the day before, ‘with her fiancé.’11 She has fallen for Georg Mumme,
a young, stodgy law student five years older, and with better financial prospects, than
the crippled æsthete Goebbels.12 In a daze, Goebbels writes to her a vile letter which
gives him brief satisfaction. ‘Chin up!’, Flisges maturely advises him. ‘Don’t lose
your head.’ Goebbels writes to Anka in remorse. Her reply is the last for several
years. She is ‘very unhappy,’ she confesses, as she knows that he is the first and last
man who has ever loved her with such intensity. ‘I will always be your true Anka,’ is
her final empty salutation.13 Goebbels responds that he regrets nothing that he has
said or written her: ‘I had to do it, a devil in me drove me to it.’14
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 45
To the interloper Mumme—whom she shortly marries—he writes what he calls a
‘rather categorical’ letter. In the new year he will ask her to return all his poems and
love letters. ‘Anka, thou murderess!’ he reproaches her memory, and eight years
later her betrayal will still fester in his mind. ‘Anka walked out on me,’ he will write.
‘And my entire relationship to women has suffered ever since.’15
HE had hoped to study for his degree under the distinguished Friedrich Gundolf,
professor of literary history at Heidelberg. Gundolf (Gundolfinger) had written the
definitive biography of Goethe. When Goebbels arrived at the university for the
summer term of 1920 however Gundolf directed him to Professor Max Baron von
Waldberg, a fellow Jew who had authored many a work on the history of literature.
Waldberg assigned as his doctoral topic the obscure playwright Wilhelm von Schütz
(1776–1847). In his competent dissertation Goebbels made perhaps over-frequent
use of the first-person (as in, ‘As far as I can see.Ê .Ê .’) and carefully praised the opinions
of Gundolf and Waldberg.16 Later he would have the university’s records doctored
to imply that his dissertation was more concerned with the political undercurrents
of the Early Romantic Period; and when in 1943 the university ceremonially
renewed his degree they tactfully omitted Waldberg’s name from the festivities.
Universities, like lawyers, have never been ashamed to aspire to what even the Gods
do not: namely to alter that which has already happened, in accord with the spirit of
the age.
He did not ignore the other sex entirely during these last months of his formal
studies. He would later refer cryptically to perhaps a score of females— ‘Miss
Schucking’ was one, ‘a young Swedish girl’ another, ‘the beautiful Belgian’ and ‘the
beautiful violinist’ two more. Since Mumme had now threatened legal sanctions if he
did not stop pestering Anka Stalherm,17 Goebbels took his revenge by rewriting
‘Michael’ to make the heroine suffer as much despair as he.
Back at Heidelberg after Christmas 1920 Professor Waldberg told him to study
another term before submitting his dissertation. Goebbels returned to Rheydt in
March 1921 to draft and redraft the masterpiece while Flisges kept him company. An
46 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
unwary comrade loaned him his fiancée, Maria Kamerbeek, to type the dissertation.
He dedicated the completed 215-page opus to his parents. Waldberg was impressed
and offered a few suggestions for improvement (‘But it’s already typed,’ wailed
Goebbels in his notes and submitted it unchanged.) He attended the oral examination
in the prescribed top hat on November 18, 1921. The four professors included
Waldberg himself. At that evening’s seminar party Waldberg addressed him with a
knowing wink as Herr Doktor.
Thus he had made it. He now had the coveted title which opened doors to class,
wealth, and authority18. He shared his triumph with his rowdy friend Richard Flisges;
they caroused all night long, then travelled tipsily north to Bonn still wearing their
top hats. Their friends, also sporting top hats, were waiting on the platform. Then on
to Rheydt: the humble house in Dahlener Strasse was bedecked in flowers as the
Prodigal Son returned, haggard but well sp
oken, educated, and Latin in his looks. If
there had been a fatted calf to kill, old Fritz Goebbels, eyes awash at this visual proof
that he was pulling his family through into a better future, would surely have done
so.
1 Fritz Göbbels’ correspondence with JG is in BA files NL.118/112 and /113.
2 Fragment of a Drama, ‘Kampf der Arbeiterklasse,’ winter 1919/20 (Genoud papers;
Reuth, 45).
3 ‘Die Saat. Ein Drama in drei Akten, von Joseph Goebbels.’ The cast includes: the worker,
his wife, their son; first, second, third workmen; the French lieutenant; a French sentry.
‘The setting is somewhere in Germany.’—Handwritten MS in BA file NL.118/107.
4 JG to Anka, Mar 4, 1920 (BA: NL.118/110); speaking the Plattdeutsch dialect of Rheydt
he would have found it easy to learn Dutch.
5 JG, ‘Sursum corda!’ in Westdeutsche Landeszeitung, Nr.55, Mar 7, 1922 (on film in Mönchen-
Gladbach city library; courtesy of Reuth).
6 See JG’s correspondence with Geitmann and others in BA file NL.118/112.
7 JG to Anka, Jun 29, 1920 (BA: NL.118/126).
8 The four sheets show no folds.—JG to Anka, undated (BA: NL.118/118).
9 JG, ‘Mein Testament,’ Rheydt Oct 1, 1920. Not witnessed; inked on a small page evidently
a flyleaf torn from a book (BA file NL.118/118; a similar version in /113).
10 Flisges to JG, Oct 31, 1920 (BA: NL.118/112)
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 47
11 JG memoirs 1924.
12 Dr Georg Mumme, born Brunswick Oct 31, 1892, joined NSDAP Feb 1, 1930 (No.
190,196), later headed the Gau legal section of Thuringia and the legal department of the
Reichsleitung (NSDAP headquarters) in Munich; died in Düsseldorf in 1970 (BDC files).
13 Anka to JG, Nov 24, 1920 (BA: NL.118/126); diary, Aug 7, 1924.
14 JG to Anka, Nov 27, 1920 (ibid.)
15 Diary, Apr 3, 1929.
16 JG, ‘Wilhelm von Schütz als Dramatiker. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Dramas der
Romantischen Schule,’ Ph.D. thesis, 215 pp., Ruprecht-Karls university, Heidelberg, 1921.
17 Diary, Jan 20, 1929: ‘I tell [Anka] of the terrible pain I felt at our separation when ...
[Mumme] was so lousy to me and turned up with a lawyer... But I believe she was probably
not to blame for it.’
18 A copy of the diploma dated Apr 21, 1922 is in BA file NL.118/128.
48 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
3: ‘A Wandering Scholar, I’
JOSEPH Goebbels cherished that Doctor’s title. He asked to be called ‘Herr Doctor’
and used it even when just initialling—‘Dr G.’ But for the next four years
he remained perforce a nihilist doing nothing. To the quiet despair of his parents he
squandered the pittance that he did earn from his meagre writings or tutoring. Germany
meanwhile slithered into economic chaos. The marching resumed: the Poles
into Silesia; new parties in Germany; Mussolini on Rome. On January 11, 1923 the
French marched into the Ruhr. President Friedrich Ebert called for a campaign of
passive resistance, and the French put the twenty-nine year old Albert Leo Schlageter
before a firing squad for sabotage.1 Later that year a young malcontent called Adolf
Hitler, 34, staged a coup d’état in Munich, was double-crossed by the Bavarian politicians,
and imprisoned at Landsberg. Berlin undertook to pay reparations at the rate
of 2·5 billion marks a year. Economic ruin faced Germany.
Goebbels neither noticed, nor protested, nor cared. His head was in the clouds.
He even cast plans with Flisges to emigrate to India. But since that would cost money
too, he lay on his bed at home and drank in Oswald Spengler’s writings on the decline
of the west instead. The truth about his middle twenties was therefore unedifying,
and in later years he would skirt around it in ever-widening circles. Later he allowed
legends to circulate about his heroic undercover activity and early commitment to
the Nazi party. Clad in what looked like infantry battledress, he was heard beginning
one speech in Frankfurt in the winter of 1924–25 with the words, ‘Those of us who
have our injuries from the war…’2 He later claimed to have attended his first Party
meeting during his months at Munich university. (Reworking his drama ‘Michael’3
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 49
he would elaborate: he had heard an unnamed speaker of extraordinary magnetism
speak— ‘Among utter strangers… workers, soldiers, officers, students. But then all
of a sudden, the flow of his speech is unleashed. It’s like a light shining above him…Ê the
audience is aglow. Hope shines on grey faces… A miracle. Among the ruins is someone
who has shown us the flag.’) He had applied there and then to join the Party, he
claimed. In 1927 the Goebbels legend would maintain that he had actually advised
Hitler in 1919 when the Party programme was drafted. All of this was quite untrue.
He would also suggest that in 1923 Hitler had commanded him to infiltrate into the
occupied Ruhr, where under an assumed name he had led a resistance cell not far
from the martyr Schlageter himself, until the French had deported him. ‘If we had
been too refined,’ he would brag in 1943, ‘none of us would have survived the year
1923.’ Goebbels too was behind the ‘letter’ which would circulate in later years,
which he had allegedly sent to Hitler in Landsberg jail (‘Like a meteor you soared
aloft before our astonished gaze.Ê .Ê . Your address to the court in Munich was the
greatest speech in Germany since Bismarck.’)
These legends endured even in the obituaries printed by his enemies.4 ‘I am not a
little astonished,’ wrote his fellow Nazi Karl Kaufmann in June 1927, ‘that Dr Goebbels
portrays things so differently. The rumour I have heard in Berlin, that Dr Goebbels
was already advising Adolf Hitler in Munich on the programme of the N.S.D.A.P. in
1919, is also totally untrue.’ Dr Goebbels had neither joined the passive resistance in
1923 nor taken any active part in it, said Kaufmann: Goebbels was not even an early
Party member.5 True he would somehow wangle a low number, 8762, for himself
but he did not in fact join until early 1925.
Fortunately Goebbels utilized idle hours in July 1924 to write up his early life.
Hitler is mentioned only once, in a passing reference to 1923: ‘Bavaria. Hitler.’
He was rootless, restless, and now friendless too: Richard Flisges had left to work
in the mines. Challenged by the Albertus Magnus Society to give due account of his
progress, Goebbels replied grandly on January 10, 1922, that he was looking out for
a position in the press or theatre. After carrying half a dozen of his pieces, the
Westdeutsche Landeszeitung published no more although he heard that they had attracted
50 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
much attention. He worked briefly as the newspaper’s art critic but was made redundant
just before his birthday in 1922.6 A few days later he delivered a public
lecture on Oswald Spengler and other contemporary literature; he praised Spengler’s
critical remarks about the Jews, which had gone to the root of the matter and ‘must
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 8
