B006OAL1QM EBOK (7 page)

Goebbels was determined never to become a teacher. Everyone tried to persuade him to take up what seemed an obvious profession for so highly qualified a young man living penniless at home. He did not in fact mind how many occasional jobs he undertook for money, but he refused to bind himself to a fixed career by becoming a schoolmaster. His ambitions were larger and loftier, and he kept both Alma and Else busy copying out the manuscripts of his verse-plays, poems, novels and articles, because his handwriting, neat and meticulous though it always appeared at first glance, was notoriously illegible. But he had no success with this work. Everything he wrote was rejected by publishers and editors, including his story
Michael
. He lived at home and helped towards keeping himself by accepting such small opportunities for tutoring and book-keeping as came his way. Meanwhile he continued to write furiously.

It was Else who eventually secured him what appeared to be a more settled job when she found him to be on the point of suicide. Her family knew one of the deputy managers at the Cologne branch of the Dresdener Bank, and through him Goebbels was offered a minor clerical job. This he disliked heartily, and he gave little satisfaction to his employers. Nevertheless he stayed at the bank eight or nine months. Then it was Prang who came to the rescue; he found Goebbels a job calling out the position of shares at the Cologne Stock Exchange. The first professional use to which Goebbels put his beautiful voice was not making idealistic political speeches, as he would subsequently have had us believe, but shouting out the latest price for I. G. Farben, Krupp and the Vereinigte Stahlwerke. He had no contact whatsoever with the Ruhr Resistance movement against the French occupying forces, and it was his friend Prang, not himself, who secured the low Party number from the Nazis in the days when it was easy enough to get one. Later when a three- or four-figure number became proof of one's early allegiance to the Party, these numbers were only obtainable on the black market. Goebbels subsequently liked it to be thought that he was already a member of the Nazi Party in 1922, after having heard Hitler in Munich (like Michael in the novel) and having immediately signed up, receiving the party badge with the number 8762. However, it seems unlikely that he ever heard Hitler speak in 1922; it can be taken as certain he never sent the legendary letter to Hitler when he was imprisoned in Landsberg gaol, and he certainly undertook no propaganda work at all during 1923 when he was working in the bank and on the Stock Exchange. He did not in fact meet Hitler until late in 1925.

It was now that the seeds of Goebbels' radicalism and violent anti- Semitism were being sown. Up to this time there had been little or no anti-Jewish feeling in him. His favourite professor had been a Jew; the family lawyer, Dr. Joseph, was a Jew of some cultural inclinations, and Goebbels liked talking with him; furthermore, Else herself was the daughter of a Jewess. As manuscript after manuscript came back from the publishing houses Goebbels became convinced that unless you were a Jew, “one of the boys” as he put it to Else, you could get nowhere in literature, the theatre, films or journalism. Else watched his anti-Semitism grow. The Jews, he felt, controlled the culture of Germany, and so rejected his magnificent writing out of hand. The celebrated Ullstein house was among the publishers that had rejected
Michael
.

In December 1922 Goebbels wrote Else a Christmas letter in which he laments in the purplest prose, reminiscent of
Michael,
the ruins of his young life and the hopeless position of being a rejected genius in a materialistic world. By this time the mark had so fallen in value that no one knew from day to day whether the millions of marks in their possession would in fact carry them through the week:

About to write you a few lines for Christmas. I know well enough that I can give you no lesson in Scripture nor any glad tidings …

The world has turned itself into a mad-house, and even some of the best are prepared to join the obscene dance round the golden calf. Worst of all, they will not admit it; they just try to explain it. New times, so they say, demand new men, and one should adjust oneself to new circumstances …

I cannot join them. I can see no peace, either in this world or in my own soul … Wherever spiritual values used to reign and Love was triumphant, now there is a deal of common worldliness. People call it keeping up with the times. Great Fate, how can I stand up to thee? I can no longer be thy faithful servant. They have all left thee, they have forsaken thy banner and have gone out into the world. And now it is my turn. I too must go. How then can I speak of peace at such a time? I must forsake my home and flee into the world.

Ein Tor zu tausend Wiisten, stumm und kalt—
Wer verlor, was Du verlorst, macht nirgends halt.
Flieg, Vogel, schnarr Dein Lied im Wüstenvogelton,
Versteck, Du Narr, Dein blutend Herz in Eis und Hohn.
Die Krähen schrein und ziehen schwirren Flugs zur Stadt.
Bald wird es schnein; weh dem, der keine Heimat hat.
*

My dear, is this poem of desperate loneliness to be my only “message of cheer” for you this year? Is there no solace in this world of chaos and madness? Why then do I suffer so? Because I expected too much of this world?

What is it that makes me suffer so immeasurably? It is not that I have to go into the other world. It is because my own world has come to an end, and I myself have had to smash it.

But why did I do this? Was I forced to do so? Yes, I had to smash it, for however beautiful and heavenly it was, it was only a mere sham in the shallow lowlands of Olympus. It is only up there in the uplands that we can find the realm of the spirit, the realm of peace, the realm of love. Down here it all makes so little sense….

And even if out there in the world the money-changers sneer and mock at real love, should not our love, my dearest girl, should not our great and abiding love still adorn our lives?

That is my only hope, and it is that hope that gives me even now the strength to walk out into the world with courage and with resolution.

I beg you solemnly, my dear, to help me keep and cherish this love of ours—a love so great that I would willingly sacrifice everything to it, if only for the reward of cherishing it with you in these blessed hours of the spirit and of peace and love.

Else watched Goebbels become moody and cynical. He began to talk again of suicide. These bouts of extreme depression alternated with the gaiety inspired by the company of his close friends. Alma says that she had never met anyone who laughed so heartily at the slightest provocation. Like so much in Goebbels' character it is difficult to say where moodiness ended and conscious posing began.

Else spent an increasing amount of time with Goebbels. She was quick, amusing, intelligent, feminine and very good-looking. Like the rest of his friends she called Goebbels Ulex, but she also had her own special name for him—Stropp. They would see each other home, going backwards and forwards through the night, walking and talking and making love, passing from his house to hers and then back again. When Goebbels was working in Cologne, only thirty miles from Rheydt, they wrote each other interminably long love-letters even though they were seeing each other at least once or twice a week. She confesses that she considered herself engaged to her lover from about 1922, that is before Goebbels left Rheydt to work in Cologne. When they went away together for short holidays to the sea, it was normally Else who had to pay the bills. Goebbels had no money whereas she had her teacher's salary and her family was comfortably off. They were to remain on terms of close friendship for almost five years.

Else considered that one day she would marry this bright, uncertain, moody man with the fine eyes, hands and voice. She even recalls discussing with Alma whether a man with a deformed foot would be a proper father for her future children; they decided this disability would not be congenital, since it was largely due to an operation sustained in childhood. His body was so slender that when she saw him from behind she thought he looked like a boy of twelve.

In spite of her extreme love for him, Else was always aware of the difficulties of the situation. Goebbels was all pride and no money. Sometimes he borrowed money from her. She had also to endure his moods. At one moment he was carefree and exuberant, a charming and witty companion. Then as suddenly he would change and become possessed by his suicidal depression. It was at these periods that they quarrelled. The engagement was broken and reassembled countless times with agonised protestations and reams of letters. Goebbels' mannered attitude to love and his innate vanity emerge in this letter to Else dated 5th June 1923, and written during the period he was working in Cologne:

My dear child,

You mustn't be angry about my not writing in ink; during my holidays my ink-pot has dried out and I think you will prefer having this sort of letter to having none at all …

Now I have moved in again with all my belongings, and being within my own four walls, I feel quite well. Your roses have found a spot right in front of your picture, and they smell beautiful, one even nicer than the other. At the bank nothing seems to have changed, and the only thing I was really interested in didn't happen. There will be no money before the 15th. That means you will have to wait another week.

Today, after office hours, I took a stroll through the town and I saw quite a few pretty things. What a pity that the damn trains aren't working and that we can't look at it all together. And as for the money? Well, we'll get it somehow. (Have you got any? No?? Me neither!)

It is high time for the two of us to be joined together. Whenever I am away from you I yearn for you and can find no rest either in work or at play. It seems to me as if we hadn't met for weeks and weeks, and yet I can count the hours with the fingers of my hands since we had to part. Why have we two, so much in love with one another, been born into so wretched a time? … Often I feel ashamed of being so distraught and depressed …

Cannot and should not a person these days be excused for occasional weakness and indecision? … Why must so many give me up as hopeless and consider me as lazy and unreasonable and un-modern? And yet I feel my laziness and unreasonableness and my being old-fashioned is the best thing about me …

I am firmly convinced that the time will come for me to use my real strength. I just want to preserve it and my heart and my conscience for a better cause. It isn't the industrial tycoons or the bank managers who will bring about the new millennium. It will be done by the few who have remained loyal to themselves and who haven't soiled their life with the so-called treasure of the world that has lost its gods. I am waiting for a new epoch to do what I cannot do today. And should that new epoch come too late for me, very well, it is quite commendable to be a mere pathfinder of a new and great epoch …

Good gracious, the clock is striking twelve and I have promised you to go to bed early, haven't I? If I could stay up longer I could fill another ten pages. But then, you want it this way. Hence—goodnight. Your ULEX.

If it was Flisges who first gave a nihilistic twist to Goebbels' early idealism, it was Prang who first introduced him to serious politics. His views, broadly speaking, were left-wing, and when his job at the bank terminated, he began the long search for permanent employment which eventually brought him into politics.

On 23rd January 1924 he sent a letter of application for work to the
Berliner Tageblatt,
enclosing a lengthy note on his career so far as it had gone. He claimed to have been working in his brother's business, which did not in fact exist. He asked for a salary of 250 marks a month, and a job on the editorial staff. He was unsuccessful. He also had ambitions in the theatre. Joachim von Ostau
¹⁵
recollects how a friend of his, a stage producer in the Rhineland, told him much later when Goebbels was famous that at this early period a young man had come to see him in his office, neady but shabbily dressed, with burning eyes and a hollow face, and limping as if he had a club-foot, to ask for a job as assistant producer, or, indeed, for any job connected with the stage. He said that he was trying to write plays himself and that he was eager to become a producer, or at least help in stage production, that his name was Goebbels and that he had had no previous stage experience. What a chance lost, admitted the producer to Ostau. Here would have been the very man to produce crowd scenes with genius! Once again, Goebbels was deflected from his obvious ambitions and left free to give his talents to political agitation. Else recollects the bitterness of his disappointment when he failed to gain any foothold in the theatre.

It was during 1924 that Goebbels began his political career. Prang, as we have seen, had been an early convert to Nazism. Although his family was wealthy and utterly opposed to their son becoming involved in this kind of violent political activity, Prang persisted. He visited Munich to hear Hider speak; he brought home copies of the Nazi pamphlets and journals and gave them to Goebbels who read them with growing excitement. Then one day he took him with some other friends to a meeting organised by a Socialist group; Prang and the rest dared Goebbels to get up on the platform and speak in the debate. He did so, Prang remembers, looking slight and shabby in a jacket too big for him. The audience booed him. When order was a little restored he began to speak.

“Meine lieben Deutschen Volksgenossen,”
he said.

This was right-wing with a vengeance; there were shouts and sneers and laughter. Goebbels stood there plainly unable to do anything. Someone shouted at him, “You capitalist exploiter!” Then his anger was roused. What had he got in his pocket to justify such an insult? Suddenly an instinct asserted itself. Somehow he seemed to know what it was he must do to defeat a cheap heckler. He shouted back at the audience.