Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death
Page 9
inevitably bring about a spiritual clarification of the Jewish problem,’ in Goebbels’
view.7 His mother’s suitcase would hold clippings of just a dozen newspaper contributions
by Dr phil Joseph Goebbels.8 Among the literary products of these otherwise
idle years were another drama entitled ‘Heinrich Kämpfert’9 and manuscripts with
titles like ‘Gypsy Blood,’ ‘Those who adore the Sun,’10 and ‘A Wandering Scholar, I.’11
His poems were called, ‘Deep in my Reveries I wandered the Dark Forest,’ ‘Prayer,’
‘The Death Song of the People,’ ‘Sleep Baby, Sleep,’ and ‘At Night.’12 The latter reads:
I awoke one night.
You lay by my side.
The pale moon played on your left hand,
And it was white as snow.
But your right lay on your heart,
And rose and fell,
As your breast did rise and fall.
THE hand, the breast in question belong to Else Janke. One morning he sees a pretty
girl in Rheydt and Herbert Hompesch whispers that she is Else Janke, a schoolteacher
and orphan. She is well built and motherly; he, so slight that, seeing him
from the rear once, she thinks him only twelve years old.13 He will later describe her
variously as ‘a rare mixture of passion and prudence’14 and as ‘a lovely, sweet-tempered
chatterbox.’15 Interestingly he will write: ‘I often think of her as my mother.’16
What strikes her most, she relates years later, are his expressive eyes. She and Fritz
Prang’s girlfriend Alma Kuppe both teach at the Rheydt school attended by Goebbels’
young sister Maria. Else teaches needlework and physical instruction. They make up
a foursome, go sailing, or on excursions together to places like the local Rheydt
Castle.17 He will later recall an evening with her in the summer of 1922: he kisses
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 51
her, she tries to slap him, he makes as if to leave, she detains him, and they walk out
all night long while they talk about their lives. ‘I tell her about Anka,’ he will recall,
adding with a trace of disappointment, ‘She remains demure.’ Rebuffed again!
From Baltrum, a Frisian island resort, she wires him not to come: he borrows
money and disobeys. They stroll each evening along the sand dunes, but again he has
to record, ‘She is demure.’ Up in her room he swears his love for her. ‘I kiss her to my
heart’s content. She resists no longer.’ Inspired by seeing Else nude for the first time
(‘just as God created her’) he will rewrite his long-suffering ‘Michael’ to include a
scene where the eponymous hero struggles to conjure up the Muses on a Frisian
island— ‘I lie on the dunes and wait for a word from God’s mouth.
To his annoyance Else will not admit to their relationship in public. The crippled
Dr Goebbels has much to learn about the mysterious fluids and capillaries that, mixed
together, make up the female brain.
Perhaps he still derives most pleasure from the anticipation, the plotting, and the
romantic language of an affair. His girls are bowled over by the literary style and the
intensity with which he woos them. He sets Else and Alma to copying out his articles
and verses. But his writings are universally rejected by the big Jewish publishers like
Mosse and Ullstein in Berlin. He remarks to Else that you cannot get ahead unless
you are ‘one of the boys.’ Else makes no response.
‘My creativity is zero,’ he writes. ‘Why? Am I a failure?’
Else visits her family’s friends in the banking world and finds a clerical job for him
at the Dresdner Bank in Cologne. He does not rejoice—indeed his mood seems to
darken. In a sombre letter to Else at Christmas he lays bare his tortured soul at such
length that we must ask where true emotion ends and conscious posturing begins.
He is not keen about working in a bank. ‘Even if out there in the world the moneychangers
sneer and mock at real love,’ he writes to Else, ‘should not our love, my
dearest girl, should not our great and abiding love still adorn our lives?’ And so his
letters ramble on, half sermons, half diatribes, acres of blank verse and poetry scattered
at the feet of his admiring if tiny audience.
52 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Else firmly considers herself engaged to him, and even discusses with Alma whether
his deformed foot might be congenital and affect their children? Goebbels has a
quarrel with her about his deformity: whereupon she mentions a minor drawback of
her own—she is half Jewish. This has not dawned on him until now. The magic goes
out of his life, to be replaced by a nagging scepticism about her.
Starting at the bank on January 2, 1923, he sees at first hand the unpalatable side of
capitalism, and reacts with repugnance to the ‘sacred speculation’ by the rich and
affluential. The country’s banks, he finds, are nearly all Jewish. He begins to ponder
upon the relationship between das Judentum (the Jewish community) and the Money
Problem. The more he looks around the more he perceives the Jews—young Otto
Klemperer whom he hears conducting a Gustav Mahler symphony turns out to be a
Jew; so does Mahler. He studies Houston Stewart Chamberlain, he finds himself
troubled by the Jewishness of Else and there are more rows with her sisters.
He cannot ignore the contrasts. He himself has to set out from Rheydt each morning
at five-thirty and gets home at seven or eight each night, while his pay packet
shrinks in value through the galloping inflation that has set in. ‘Cologne is ad nauseam,’
he writes. ‘Pay cheque worthless.’ (On March 27 he sends the Albertus Magnus society
a ten thousand mark banknote; it is worth less than one gold mark.) From his
grim lodgings in No.77 Siebengebirgsallee in a southern suburb he writes endless
letters to his ‘little rosebud’ Else.
My Dear Child, Your roses have found a spot right in front of your
picture…Ê There will be no money before the fifteenth. That means you will have
to wait another week. To-day, after banking hours, I took a stroll through the
town… As for money, we’ll get that somehow.
He yearns for her. ‘Why have we two, so much in love, been born into so wretched
a time?’ And yet: ‘I am firmly convinced that the time will come for me to use my
real strength.’ To those who accuse him of being lazy he will answer: ‘I just want to
use my strength and my heart and my conscience for a better cause.’ Germany should
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 53
not look to the tycoons and the bankers for the new millenium, he writes, but to
those who have remained true to themselves, ‘and haven’t soiled their life.’
LYING in a deckchair on Baltrum island one July afternoon in 1923 trying to avoid
Else’s tedious sister Gertrud, he received the shattering news that Richard Flisges
had been crushed to death down the mines at Schliersee.18 He would dramatise his
grief, wallowing for months in self-pity; and he rewrote the ending of ‘Michael’ to
send his hero down the mines to his death despite a premonition of doom from his
landlady. He has Michael die on January 30: that date is a kind of premonition too.
Upon his return from Baltrum, the bank fires him. Keeping the tuth from his parents,
for vacancies although he assured Else that he did.19 During his six weeks away
the mark’s value had dwindled to almost nothing. The U.S. dollar bought three million
marks on August 1 and 142 million eight weeks later. Else’s savings shrank. He
wrote to his father pleading illness—a nervous disease which must be congenital, he
said—and his father begged him to come home and even sent the fare.20 Fritz Prang
found him a new job as a caller on the floor of Cologne’s stock exchange. He wrote
an essay about Flisges which the local newspaper published at Christmas.21
Trapped in his lodgings, Goebbels’s brain fevered on. He brought forth a new
drama, ‘Prometheus,’ and in September another play, ‘The Wanderer,’ in which a
Traveller guides an often despairing Poet across the heights and sloughs surrounding
the German people.22 He witnessed from afar the collapse of passive resistance; he
lived sometimes in an alcoholic haze, because one guilder would buy fifty beers. The
words Judentum, Qual (anguish), and Verzweiflung (despair) whirled kaleidoscopically
around his jottings. ‘Politics,’ he noted. ‘I don’t know whether to weep or laugh at it.’
Else had given him a notebook and on October 17, 1923 he resumed his famous
diary.23 ‘I can’t stand the anguish any longer,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve got to set down all the
bitterness that burdens my heart.’ For Goebbels, writing the diary became something
of a fetish, an advance programming of his brain for great things to come. He
was aware of a messianic sense of mission. ‘On guard, friend!’ he would admonish
54 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
the diary on July 7, 1924: ‘Make your sacrifice! Fulfil your mission!’ And a few days
later: ‘Who am I, why am I here, what is my task and what my purport? Am I a
wastrel, or an emissary who is waiting for God’s Word?’ And he added: ‘Again and
again one shining light escapes the depths of my despair: my belief in my own purity,
and my conviction that some day my hour will come.’
‘WHERE are you now, my dear deceased?’ he appealed on the first anniversary of
Flisge’s death. ‘Why don’t you give me some portent of where we must go and what
we must do to obtain deliverance.Ê .Ê . Leave me not in despair!’24 Friendless and jobless,
he sank to a low point of mental decline that bordered sometimes on suicide.25
As inflation roared out of control his father became increasingly monosyllabic. ‘Why
must so many give me up as beyond hope,’ Goebbels had asked Else in a letter in June
1923, ‘and consider me lazy and unreasonable and un-modern?’ Overshadowing their
whole relationship is her Jewishness, from which there is no escape: in November
1923 she writes to him, ‘Our whole row recently about the racial problem kept
coming back to me. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it and saw it really as an
obstacle to our future relationship. In fact I think you’re far too obsessed about the
whole thing.’26 So he stayed at home, whiling away the hours in the summer house
which his parents had built, his powerful thoughts riding on ahead of his frail frame.27
He dreamed of launching his own journal in Elberfeld; but where to raise the capital?
28 He fancied himself winning the literary prize offered by the Kölnische Zeitung
with ‘Michael’ and travelling the continent as a much-acclaimed scholar.29 ‘But nobody
pays me anything for what I write,’ he moaned in August 1924.30
He yearned helplessly for Anka and her glittering green eyes, and spent days sorting
out the letters they had exchanged.31 ‘Just one day together,’ he wrote in his
notes, ‘and we would understand each other again.’32 As for the fleshy reality of Else
the teacher, he could hear her girlish commands to her charges floating up to his
room from the schoolyard next door. ‘Why does Eros taunt me?’ he complained. He
daydreamed about a summer honeymoon with Else in Italy and Greece.33 A deep,
unremitting despair had seized him. He bemoaned the God that had created him a
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 55
crippled weakling. ‘Despair, despair!’ he lamented. ‘I can’t bear to live and see all this
injustice. I must join the fight for Justice and Freedom! Despair! Help me, O Lord,
I am at the end of my strength!!!’34
The more the products of his festering intellect were rejected by unseen editors,
the more he saw the Jews behind his torment. He wrote at length on January 23,
1924 to Mosse’s Berliner Tageblatt, applying for a job as sub-editor and boldly asking
for 250 marks per month. The curriculum vitæ which he appended to this application
was more than economic with the truth: he claimed to have studied modern
‘theatre and press history’ from November 1921 to 1922 at Bonn and Berlin—in
fact he had never visited Germany’s capital; more recently, he said, he had privately
studied economics and had become familiar with ‘broad areas of modern banking’
during his nine months at the Dresdner Bank. ‘In consequence of minor nervous
problems caused by overstrain at work and an accident’—he had been suffered injuries
in a mugging a year before—‘I was obliged to give up my employment in Cologne.’
35 Theodor Wolff, Mosse’s editor, who turned him down, was Jewish.36 The
diaries for the next years show him in a painful light—introspective to the point of
obsession, scribbling plays, articles, and critiques for a public no larger than himself
and, sometimes, the woman in his life. With dwindling hope but dull obstinacy he
kept submitting the little, thirty-thousand word typescript of ‘Michael Voorman’ to
new publishers.37 He felt like a bird with clipped wings. Why even get up in the
morning? ‘Nothing awaits me—no joy, no suffering, no duty, no job.’38
HE had already tried his hand at public speaking—his notes refer to a November
1922 talk in Rheydt, well received in the local press.39 Once in June 1924 he and
Fritz Prang visited a local communist meeting. Invited to speak, Goebbels was interrupted
immediately: ‘Capitalist swine!’ He rounded on his heckler. ‘Here is my purse,’
he challenged. ‘You show me yours. The one who has the most is the capitalist swine!’
The miners and textile workers roared with laughter and allowed him to speak on.40
In the wake of the Munich putsch the Nazi party had been banned; with Hitler
imprisoned, its former members had splintered into factions like the Völkisch-Sozialer
56 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
Block, a coalition with the former Deutsch-Völkische Freiheitspartei (German Folkish
Freedom party) founded by landowner Albert von Graefe.41 The charismatic leader
of the Nazis in northern Germany was Gregor Strasser, a wealthy pharmacist from
Landshut in Bavaria. These rightwing groups had fared well in the election of May 4,
1924, attracting 6·5 percent of the votes. On June 29 Goebbels looked in on one
pettifogging meeting of Graefe’s party at Elberfeld. He was not impressed. ‘So these
are the leaders of the “folkish” movement in the occupied zone,’ he scoffed in his