B006OAL1QM EBOK (4 page)

A letter of the greatest interest written to Goebbels at this time by his father was published shortly after the last war in a Catholic journal.
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It is dated 7th November, by which time Goebbels was already in Munich. It is plain from this letter, and particularly from the last part of it, that he was developing the tendency to self-dramatisation as ‘the prodigal son’ which was to be characteristic of him throughout his life. He is not content to lose his faith quietly; he must stir up emotion about it, not only in himself but in those who love him. There is a certain nobility in this letter which speaks well for Herr Goebbels and reveals the depth of his affection and response to the son whose future life was to distress and disappoint him so greatly:

Dear Joseph,

My letter of the day before yesterday should have reached you by now. But I wish to revert briefly to your dear lines of the 31st ult.

They contained much to please me but again much to give me a great deal of pain. I do believe, though, that with some goodwill on both sides our former relationship of complete confidence could quickly be restored. Obviously this could not be done unless you are absolutely candid and truthful to your father.

I have at all times been convinced that you have never shown any lack of diligence and perseverance in your studies, and have thus achieved successes that may have been envied by many another undergraduate. And I am particularly pleased that you seem to have kept your moral standards, and what you say about that was indeed balm to a father's heart.

However, then you continue: “But if I should lose my faith …” I take it that I may assume you have not lost it yet, and that you are merely tormented by doubts. In that case it might reassure you to know that no person, particularly no young person, is ever completely spared such doubts; and that, indeed, those who suffer these doubts may be all the better Christians for it. Here, too, there is no victory without a struggle. Hence, to make this a reason for keeping away from the Holy Sacraments is a grievous error; for who would claim at all times to have approached the Table of the Lord with the childlike pure heart of his very first Holy Communion?

I now have to put a few questions to you, for if our relationship is to be restored to its former confidence—and no one could wish that more earnestly than I do—I must have no doubt about your answers to these questions:

(1) Have you written books or do you intend writing anything that would not be compatible with the Catholic religion?

(2) Are you contemplating going in for a profession not suitable for a good Catholic?

Now, if you can answer both questions in the negative, and if your doubts are all of a different nature, I can tell you only one thing: Pray and go on praying, and I, too, shall pray to our Lord to help you work out everything for the best.

If then you should still consider yourself in danger of losing your faith, I should like to take your mind back to the year 1915, when, early in the morning, you knelt next to me at the death-bed of our darling little Elizabeth and when, with me, you prayed for the soul of that little angel, taken away so soon. What then was the one consolation in our grief? It was merely this, that the dear little soul had been properly provided with the last rites of our Holy Church and that we could pray for her
together
.

Whatever you may feel in your heart of hearts, even if it is worse than I can imagine, I am sure that if only you will show some courage you will regain your peace of mind; and if you still feel that you cannot, do come home, my son, and talk it over with us. You can have the fare from me any time you say so….

You write in your letter: “Why don't you tell me that you curse me as the prodigal son who has left his parents and gone into the wilderness?”

And then again you write: “If you think that I can no longer be your son …”

Well, being a Catholic father, I do neither the one thing nor the other. I will just go on praying for you as I have prayed for you so often.

You need not hurry in your answer to this letter, but do keep up the correspondence with us at home. I hear that the parcel post is no longer to be restricted, hence one of these days I am going to send you a food parcel.

With very kind regards, also from your mother and from your sister and your brothers, I remain your loving Father.

It is interesting to see in this letter that Goebbels' desire to show off to himself as well as to his father led him to assume the dramatic role of the Apostate.

In 1920 Goebbels moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he was to graduate the following year. The influence under which he now came was that of the celebrated Jewish Professor of Literature, Friedrich Gundolf, who was the most famous contemporary literary historian in Germany, and author of what is still the best-known biography of Goethe. Gundolf was not only a highly distinguished man academically, he had about him a certain glamour, of which no young student of literature could remain unconscious, for he was closely associated with Stefan George, the most advanced and esoteric poet of early twentieth-century German literature. Gundolf was an important figure in the literary circle that surrounded the famous man, and to be a student working with Gundolf was to share, not too remotely, a sense of being in at the fountainhead of literary fashion and highbrow good taste. No doubt the young provincial student from Rheydt felt that he had arrived, and was inordinately proud of being a student in the Jewish professor's department at the University. He was now twenty-three years old, and his studies at Heidelberg included History, Philology, Art and Literature.

He now started work on the thesis for his doctorate. His subject was an examination of the work of Wilhelm von Schutz, sub-titled ‘A Contribution to the History of the Romantic Drama’. Goebbels was later to withdraw the thesis from the University archives and retitle it ‘The Spiritual and Political Undercurrents of the Early Romantics’.
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That, of course, was when he was Reich Minister and needed to imply that his interests were political during the period of his studies. They were, in fact, largely æsthetic. Politics were still to come.

It is necessary to understand the shaping of Goebbels' extraordinary personality during this important period of his adolescence and early maturity. No one denies his intelligence, but there is evidence in his attitude to the Albertus Magnus Society that he was already developing the selfish opportunism which was to be so significant a part of his nature. Plainly he was already making himself as independent as possible of his family and background. It is difficult now to think of him as a young and poverty-stricken student asking for petty loans and moving every few months during the greater part of his academic career from one place to another. He lived in a succession of hired rooms from which he wrote his numerous requests to the Albertus Magnus Society for money or his reports on his progress—No. 18 Portstrasse, Bonn; the fourth floor of No. 2 Breisacherstrasse, Freiburg; the fourth floor of No.8 Blumenstrasse, Würzburg; back in Freiburg at No.8 Goethestrasse; in rooms with a family called Vigier in the Romanstrasse, Munich. Only in Heidelberg, when he was a young man of twenty-three, do we begin to find evidence that he was discovering his ambitions more completely and evolving a self-consciously assured outlook mixed with considerable vanity.

He had many reasons which would make him feel passionately the need to assert himself. His mother and father were, in effect, working-class people of little education, speaking with a strongly-marked local accent, even though they no doubt rated themselves as lower-middle class. As an adolescent boy and as a student he had in three years left his home town and the Rhineland itself to work briefly in universities as far apart as Munich and Heidelberg. In each of his universities he had been in constant contact with cultured people. His own Rhenish accent became clear and cultivated, though he retained the traces of it in his magnificent voice to the end of his life. But during all this time he was poor, supporting himself on the meagre grants from his family (and particularly from his mother), on the money from his scholarships and on such small sums as he could earn as a tutor and part-time secretary. As we have seen, at most of the universities he was excused the payment of fees, but a young man of his pride, not to say vanity, must have felt bitterly the social stigma of poverty.

He had also to learn to deal with his physical infirmity. He was very slight in build and his shoulders sloped steeply. He was little more than five feet tall and his weight was in the region of a hundred pounds. He walked with an unmistakable limp, but had become adept at disguising it. He had little money for either food or clothes, so he had to develop his social assets through the conscious development of his personality. He had two great advantages which he began to exploit very early in his life—his voice, which could be either caressing or powerful as he willed, and a certain magnetism in his looks.

His face was lean and oval, his nose pronounced and long, and his cheek-bones high. He had a wide, volatile mouth, with a charming smile that he used often. He had dark brown eyes that responded readily to emotion, but could be penetrating in their stare. He had beautiful hands, lean, well-veined and mobile, which he also learned to use as part of his self-expression. Coupled with the natural quickness of his intelligence, these assets in his looks were of great importance to him. Later on, as we shall see, many shrewd observers were to attempt to describe his character. In no sense was he either by appearance or mentality the popular conception of an ‘Aryan’ German. He was more Celtic or Romantic in appearance. He seemed a Latin rather than a Saxon in both temperament and mentality, as Professor Trevor-Roper has said.
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Sir Nevile Henderson compared him to an Irish agitator with a Celtic manner.
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Friedrich Goebbels

Maria Katherina Goebbels

The house in Rheydt where Goebbels was brought up.