Goebbels: A Biography (7 page)

Everything combined to paint a dismal picture: the narrow confines of the house, the lack of recognition, his dissatisfaction over his relationship with Else, his hopelessness concerning his failure as an artist as well as the prevailing conditions of life in postwar Germany, together with his doubts about religion, his despairing search for “redemption,” his depression, and his loneliness.

On February 10 his diary refers to a new project: a “novel in diary form,” to which he gave the provisional title “Quiet Flames.”
⁵⁰
These reflections eventually produced the diary-style novel “Michel Voormann,” a reworking of the autobiographical material he had already written up in 1919. He started at the end of February and completed the work in a week. He worked so intensively that, contrary to his usual practice, he made only brief entries in his diary during this time.
⁵¹

The figure of Michael Voormann is autobiographically based, as in the 1919 novel, but now also bears some of the characteristics of Goebbels’s late friend Richard Flisges.
⁵²
Michael returns from the war; takes up studying, though with no great aspirations; falls in love
with a fellow student, clearly based on Anka; writes a play about Jesus Christ; loses his lover; and finds “redemption” in hard work in the mines, where an accident eventually costs him his life. His legacy, so the message runs, is to have lived out an exemplary synthesis between working with the hands and with the head, between the working class and the bourgeoisie; his self-sacrificial death; his personal redemption—all of it a precondition for collective salvation, for the emergence of a new and better world.
⁵³
The key statement of the work is “when I redeem myself, I am also the redeemer of mankind.”
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This perspective seems to counterbalance the tragedy of the hero’s individual death.

When Goebbels finished the manuscript on March 10, he was tired and apathetic: “I don’t feel like doing anything at all.”

In this phase of acute exhaustion early in 1924, Goebbels turned back to the latest political developments. In Munich the trial of the participants in the failed putsch of November 9 had begun. It was the ringleader who particularly aroused his interest, as shown by the first relevant diary entry, on March 13: “I am thinking about Hitler and the National Socialist movement and will obviously have to go on doing so for some time. Socialism and Christ. Ethical foundations. Away from paralyzing materialism. Back to devotion and to God!” The idea that the National Socialists were primarily seekers after God shows how deeply preoccupied he was with religious questions and how far these questions had superimposed themselves on his grasp of politics.

For all his enthusiasm, he had his reservations: “But the Munich people want a fight, not reconciliation, perhaps because they feel that in a general settlement they would lose out. But I haven’t given up on it yet.” In the next few days his thoughts were very much taken up with Hitler and his “movement.”
⁵⁵
At first his doubts had the upper hand: “The objective may be right, but I am not convinced about the methods. And the Christianity of these people has practically nothing to do with Christ himself.” But he also noted, “What is liberating about Hitler is the way he commits himself as a truly upright and
honest personality. That is so rare in a world dominated by party interests.”
⁵⁶

In the end it was not so much the content of Hitler’s mind that led to Goebbels’s decision to join him as his charisma—all the more alluring for Goebbels because he identified a great many correspondences between Hitler and the protagonist of his autobiographical novel:

Hitler is an enthusiastic idealist. A man who will bring new belief to the Germans. I’m reading his speech, letting myself be carried away by him and up to the stars. The route runs from the brain to the heart. I keep on coming across the basic motif of “Michael Voormann”: “As a Christian, I am not obliged to let myself be cheated.” […] Nationalist and socialist consciousness. Away from materialism. New fervor, complete devotion to the one great thing, the Fatherland, Germany. We always ask about the way. But here is a will. He’ll find a way, all right.
⁵⁷

What he admired about Hitler was not just his “will,” “fervor,” “devotion,” and “belief”; it was also his “wonderful élan,” “verve,” “enthusiasm,” and “German soul.” Goebbels at last “once more heard notes coming from the heart.”
⁵⁸
Even if what first drew him was Hitler’s personality, while he either misunderstood Nazi ideas or thought them to be secondary—nonetheless, Goebbels’s embracing of National Socialism was certainly not just due to chance or the emotional pull of the Munich firebrand.

Goebbels’s nationalistic outlook had become ever more firmly entrenched in the preceding years, not least because of the conduct of the Belgian and French occupation. The emotional invocation of “mankind” that he had so ardently represented as recently as the “Michael” manuscript was gradually giving way to his unconditional identification with a threatened nation. The process was not the product of rational political insight but above all of the yearning for salvation and for fusion with a greater whole. “Fatherland! Germany!” he wrote in his diary in April 1924. “I love you like a mother and a lover!”
⁵⁹

Furthermore, Goebbels subscribed to resentful anti-Semitic notions
that served as a kind of negative pole to his nationalistic ideas, vague as these were. He lamented the general cultural decline but had little time for democracy and modern tendencies in art and culture. However, neither could he stomach the current social inequities, and he even expressed some sympathy with communism. His enthusiasm for Hitler as a political “Führer” corresponded to messianic sentiments common on the right (we shall return to this theme). His political worldview therefore already bore many of the hallmarks of the “New Right” after the Great War. Accordingly, it is highly improbable that if a political leader of the left had happened to cross his path in the spring of 1924 he would have attached himself so enthusiastically to him and to his ideas. In his burgeoning enthusiasm for National Socialism, Goebbels was not alone in the lower-middle-class milieu to which he belonged. Referring to the Reichstag elections scheduled for May 4, he remarked: “All the young people I know are going to vote National Socialist.”
⁶⁰
His maxim of a few months earlier, that it “does not matter what we believe in, as long as we believe,” cannot therefore be read as proof that Goebbels was a thoroughgoing relativist or opportunist at this time.

While his interest in Hitler was growing stronger, his attitude to Else was becoming more critical: She was a “mood-killer”; she had “no style, no class, no system.” She was a “human dumpling”; he could not hold a conversation with her, and no doubt she felt the same about him.
⁶¹
“Else is good, but I don’t love her anymore. She is a good friend, nothing more,” he wrote. They would “just have to split up.”
⁶²
Then he felt sorry for her; after all, the “curse of Jewish blood” lay upon her.
⁶³

After an argument with Else he hoped finally to be “free of all racial attachments. How often the Jewish part of Else’s nature has pained and depressed me.” He thought that Else’s sister Trude was “a typical Jewish girl who combines in herself in concentrated form all the physical and mental characteristics of her mother’s race.” It was clear to him, at least: “A bastardized race becomes sterile and must go under. I can’t have a hand in that!!!”
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Once again, though, he wavered: “And yet I love her more than I thought. But I’m becoming more firmly convinced all the time that we must not stay together.” Surely making a “radical break was the only cure,” but he could not bring himself to do so.
⁶⁵

During these months he made various efforts to reenter the world of work. In February 1924 he applied to the newspaper publisher Rudolf Mosse in Berlin. He claimed to “have studied modern theater and press history” and said he was “looking for an appropriate position, suited to my knowledge and abilities, in my actual field of newspapers and publishing.”
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He was obviously not put off by his knowledge that the Mosse publishing house was anathema to the right as a “Jewish” concern. Then he applied—equally unsuccessfully—for a teaching position at a commercial college in Düsseldorf.
⁶⁷
There are indications of further applications in the following months.
⁶⁸

Meanwhile, with his old schoolfriend Fritz Prang he was working on a plan to start a “monthly Rhineland journal for German art and cultural politics” in Düsseldorf: “Then I’ll be able to fulfill my greatest desire; freedom of speech and expression without any constraints.”
⁶⁹
The project quickly took shape in his mind: It should be a publication taking a “pro–Greater Germany, anti-international line”: “So, something National Socialist, but avoiding all demagoguery and rabble-rousing patriotism. About the sense of national community. Out of the morass of party politics.”
⁷⁰

Early in April he began to be active in politics, on behalf of the National Socialists he had so recently learned to admire. Thanks to the complete edition of the diaries, we now know precisely when his activism began: April 4, 1924.
⁷¹
On this day he wrote, “We have founded a local National Socialist group.” Since the NSDAP had been banned in November 1923, the group, involving about a dozen mostly young people from Rheydt, was an illegal organization. The first thing on the agenda was an internal discussion of aims, and one topic predominated, as Goebbels noted of the founding meeting: “We basically talked about anti-Semitism. […] The anti-Semitic idea is a world idea. It brings together Germans and Russians. For the coming millennium, as Michael Voormann says.”
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Goebbels now preoccupied himself intensively with “the Jewish question,” which he held to be “the burning question of the hour.”
⁷³
He read Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic tract
The International Jew
, which he found illuminating, although he was not prepared to follow the author’s train of thought all the way. As ever, he placed great importance on informing himself of the facts and maintaining his critical point of view: “Lenin, Trotsky, [Georgy] Chicherin are Jews. You can
sometimes make such stupid judgments about political events if you aren’t in command of the material facts.” However, it had escaped his attention that Lenin was not a Jew.
⁷⁴

His reading of Ford led him to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” It is true that he came to the correct conclusion that this all-too-seductive “proof” of the alleged Jewish plan of world domination must be an anti-Semitic forgery—but all the same, he accepted the “inner” authenticity of the protocols.
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Finally, he summed up his intense preoccupation with “the Jewish question” as follows: “I am on the
völkisch
side: I hate the Jew with my instincts and my reason. He is deeply hateful and repulsive to me.”
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And somewhat later he wrote: “Every ‘anti-’ aimed at the Jews is a plus for the national community.”
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Unlike with other
völkisch
-oriented people, his anti-Semitism does not seem to have been an integral part of a fully developed racist ideology. His animus against the Jews followed a quite straightforward pattern: The less clear his concept of the desired “national community,” the clearer his opposition to all things Jewish. “The Jews” simply stood for all the “subversive,” culturally destructive, international forces that prevented the coming together of “the people,”
das Volk
. In his nebulous worldview there was now at least one fixed, negative point.

In the elections at the beginning of May—the Rheydters were voting for their local council as well as for the Reichstag—the National Socialists appeared in a list under the umbrella heading
Völkisch
-Social Bloc (VSB).
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The members of the illegal local group distributed leaflets and put up posters at night.
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On April 28 they organized a big election meeting. A lawyer called Borries particularly addressed himself to “the Jewish question,” although in Goebbels’s opinion “pretty half-heartedly.” There was a relatively large bloc of communists in the hall, but Goebbels, who was conducting the meeting, saw the event through to the end without incident.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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