B006OAL1QM EBOK (5 page)

Rheydt Gymnasium, 1916:
left,
acting in
Die Quitzows
by Wildenbruch;
right,
with members of the Sixth Form.

With Else and Alma, who wears a hat.

One of his earliest writings was a short novel called
Michael,
which he wrote in 1921 shortly after his graduation, but which was rejected by such publishers as Ullstein and Mosse to whom it was submitted until in 1929 Eher Verlag, the Nazi publishing house, found it good policy to print it.
⁹
Later the Eher Verlag let it run through a few small editions. It is an extraordinary novel from the literary point of view, yet without doubt it reveals to a considerable extent the attitude of Goebbels himself during the period he was a student.

When
Michael
was eventually published, Goebbels wrote a florid dedication to his college friend Richard Flisges, who had died six years earlier:

1918

Your wounded arm still in a sling, the grey helmet on your head and your chest covered with medals—that's how you faced those staid citizens to pass matriculation. They failed you because you didn't know some figures or other. They said you weren't mature yet.

OUR ANSWER WAS: REVOLUTION!

1920

We were both about to suffer spiritual breakdown and capitulate. But we helped each other up again and hardly faltered.

MY ANSWER WAS: SPITE!

1923

You challenged fate. Do or die! But the time was not yet and you must needs be victimised.

YOUR ANSWER WAS: DEATH!

1927

I stood at your grave. In gleaming sunlight a quiet green hillock. It spelled Mortality.

MY ANSWER WAS: RESURRECTION!

Flisges is to some extent a mysterious influence in Goebbels' life. He was a sick man who had been badly wounded in the war and decorated for his bravery. Yet he emerged from the struggle an anarchist unable to find a satisfactory way of life for himself. As the dedication to
Michael
shows, he failed his university matriculation in 1918. He turned to Marx and Engels, to Communism, to pacifism, to any form of criticism of the liberal Government of post-war Germany which could act as a conductor for his hatred and frustration. He introduced Goebbels not only to the theoreticians of Communism but to the works of Walther Rathenau, the German statesman and philosopher.
¹⁰

Through Flisges Goebbels discovered Dostoevsky. It is clear that both these young men read and discussed books which seemed to them to offer some kind of analysis or solution to their spiritual and social problems. Their late adolescence was spent in the difficult, destructive atmosphere of post-war Germany, a cruel time for any young intellectuals to try to achieve a balanced view either of society or of their personal conduct. Goebbels was still attracted by certain elements in Christianity, and Dostoevsky's emotional mysticism fed what was left of his religious imagination. Soon, in addition to
Michael,
Goebbels was to write a play in verse called
The Wanderer
.
¹¹
It is about Christ. It was never published.

Goebbels, therefore, in company with his friend passed through a phase of nihilism which left a destructive adolescent element in his nature which he never outgrew. In later life he would frequently act with the petulant cruelty of a very young man determined to avenge himself on a society that seemed to him insufficiently perfect for his taste. He thought of himself as a mature revolutionary. Only too often he seems to be avenging the humiliations of the early days when his numerous articles for the
Berliner Tageblatt
were being rejected by its Jewish editor, Theodor Wolff, and Richard Flisges was pressing him to read the works of the Jewish writers, Marx and Rathenau.

Flisges, still uncertain of his proper place in society, became a labourer and was killed in a mining accident in July 1923. By that time contact between him and Goebbels seems to have been virtually severed. But the young nihilist still remained in Goebbels' thoughts, a martyr to the wickedness of the German social system. Fusing himself and Flisges into a composite romantic figure, a Byronic warrior, Goebbels wrote his brief novel
Michael
while still a young man under the direct influence of this friendship.

Michael
is barely thirty thousand words in length, and is therefore in effect a long short-story. Goebbels writes in the first person, and uses his favourite literary form, the diary. He had kept a personal diary from the age of twelve, and it is evident from the style of his writing that in adolescence he grew to be the kind of person who fancied himself on paper, writing in a narcissistic and highfalutin style like a youth making heroic faces at himself in a mirror or striking handsome attitudes. To keep a diary which is a record of things done, people met, places visited or even more intimate experiences is one thing, but to pour out for one's private reading self-conscious phrases, long chains of coy exclamations and lush emotionalisms all paragraphed like blank verse is quite another. Goebbels fingered his literary emotions like a miser stroking his gold.

Michael
is the diary of a hero who combines the occupations of a soldier, a worker, a poet, a lover, a patriot and a revolutionary. Here is the opening:

No longer is the stallion neighing under my thighs; no longer am I hunched over a gun or tramping through the muddy clay of neglected trenches.

How long it is since I walked the vast Russian plain or the shell-ridden French countryside!

A thing of the past!

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of war and destruction. Peace!

The very word is like balm on a wound still trembling and bleeding. I seem to grasp the blessing of that word with my hands.

When I look out of the window I see German land: towns, villages, fields, woods…

Homeland! Germany!

Michael leaves the death-wishes of war behind him and becomes a student “anxious to grasp life with every fibre of my being”. He is in rooms; he is his own master. He meets an old school friend who asks him what he is reading at the University. He reflects:

May 12

What indeed?

All and nothing. I'm too lazy and, may be, too stupid for exact science.

I want to be a man. With a profile of my own.

A personality! On the road to a new Germany!

May 17

I've been wondering a long time what it is that makes me drink life so copiously.

It's because I stand on the hard soil of my homeland with both my feet. The smell of the soil is around me. And in my veins the peasant-blood is welling up healthily.

Armed with the friendship of Flisges, Goebbels could afford these dreams of feudalism and chivalry in the person of Michael. He was now no longer crippled, no longer the son of an urban clerk, no longer rejected for the Army; he was fused with the body and spirit of his friend writing a fictitious diary alongside his own, personal one.

Michael meets a girl at the University called Hertha Holk with whom he becomes intimate. They go for long walks and indulge in deep talk. To her he proclaims his ardent patriotism—"For a young German, these days, there's really only one thing to be done: to stand up for the Fatherland!” Apart from her he grumbles (and he is here surely quoting his own diary) about how short he is of money— “money is muck, but muck isn't money!” With her he claims to enjoy the delights of music and the delights of love:

A thousand insects humming. The grass is indescribably green. I kiss Hertha Holk on her soft yearning mouth. We are both very much ashamed.

Quiet, quiet summer afternoon …
In her street we part from one another …
I carry my happiness like a sweet, sweet load.

Night! …

I walk back to the town and pluck some roses from the garden walls.
More and more red roses.
I stand at Hertha Holk's window …
I put a bunch of red roses on her window-sill.
I am happy, happy as I walk home.
Blessed hour!

“Hertha Holk,” he says (he always uses the affectation of quoting full names), “gives me joy and strength alternately. I cannot thank her enough.” She inspires him to write.

Meanwhile, another figure emerges, a further image from the misted mirror of Goebbels' relationship with Flisges. This is Ivan Wienurovsky, a nebulous Russian student who lends Michael Dostoevsky's novel
The Idiot
. This book affects him deeply:

The spirit of Dostoevsky hovers over that quiet and dreamy land. When Russia awakens the world will witness a nationalistic miracle.

A nationalistic miracle? Yes, that's it! That's what political miracles are like. The International is merely a dogma, but the miracles of a nation are never caused by the intellect, they're a matter of the blood. But they've got the will power of that one man Lenin. Without Lenin no Bolshevism.

Once again, it's men who make history. Even when it happens to be bad.

Talking to Hertha a little later he says:

I think and act as I have to think and act. In us is a demon leading us to our destiny. There's nothing one can do about it.

Out of the Goebbels-image within the character of Michael comes the desire to write, inspired by both Hertha and Ivan and by the spirit of Dostoevsky. He chooses for his subject Jesus Christ:

I talk to Christ. I had thought to have vanquished Him, but I had mistaken Him for His false priests.

Christ is hard and inexorable.

He whips the Jewish money-changers out of His temple.

A declaration of war on Money.

Yet, if one said that today, they would put one into a gaol or madhouse.

We are all sick.

Hypocrisy is the characteristic of a decaying bourgeois epoch.

The ruling class is tired and has no courage for new adventure.

The Intellect has poisoned our people.

Then he adds:

Hertha Holk looks at me and shakes her head.

Like Dostoevsky he becomes possessed, “given to phantasma”, suffering in “creative loneliness”. Then term is over. Hertha returns to her home, and Michael goes to one of the Frisian islands off the northern coast to write his Messianic play. “I lie on the downs and wait for a word from God's mouth.” Here he receives a letter from Hertha which gives us Goebbels' own picture of how he liked to think women would regard him:

… sometimes I doubt your love, and then I would cry my eyes out. Forgive me! Sometimes I lie awake all night, homesick for your fierce pride … I know you'll find your way, for you are strong. But you should take life as it is. One can't change much anyway. You should save yourself all those detours. I know you'll answer me that the detours may be the best part of the road. But then the straight road will never lead you astray.

Your Hertha Holk

“A genuine woman,” he writes, “loves the eagle.” Then suddenly comes a violent outburst:

No Jews here at all, and that is truly a blessing. Jews make me physically sick, the mere sight of them does this. I cannot even hate the Jew. I can merely despise him. He has raped our people, soiled our ideals, weakened the strength of the nation, corrupted morals. He is the poisonous eczema on the body of our sick nation. That has nothing to do with religion. Either he destroys us, or we destroy him….

Christ cannot have been a Jew. I do not have to look for any scientific proof of that. It just is so!

Intrusive, violent and indecent as this passage is, one cannot be sure whether it is not a final interpolation when Goebbels was preparing his novel for the press seven or eight years later. Only a sight of the original manuscript could show how much he thought fit to add to his book when he had become a professional agitator for the Nazi party and one of the most violent of their anti-Jewish element. Here the outburst only serves to introduce the assertion that Christ could not have been a Jew.

The men and women of the island inspire him (“I'd like to be a priest on this island, to explain the Sermon on the Mount to these simple people”). He calls them “strong and proud”. The women are healthy and beautiful, “the eternal sea reflected in their eyes”.

The revolutionary in him is stirred. In his talks with Hertha he had already expressed his hatred of the cowardly, property-loving bourgeoisie, the affront of old age to the wilful freedom of youth. Now he writes:

One class has fulfilled its historic mission and is about to yield to another. The bourgeoisie has to yield to the working class… Whatever is about to fall should be pushed. We are all soldiers of the revolution. We want the workers' victory over filthy lucre. That is socialism.

So he is a Socialist, a patriot, the admirer of a mythical master-race, and of a Christ who was anti-Jewish. Ivan writes to him and tells him he must come to Munich, because it is the most interesting town in Germany. Then Hertha writes to say she has rented rooms for him in Schwabing, the Latin quarter of Munich, where they are to spend the winter term.