Authors: Heinrich Fraenkel,Roger Manvell
Meanwhile, his relationship with Hertha becomes deeper and more complicated. His vanity seems to demand that his love should be complex. She is his “torment and delivery”. “On my evil days I can hardly do without her … I make Hertha Holk suffer a great deal.” They spend the Christmas holidays in the mountains together. “I thank her for being my solace and my strength … We hurt one another in petty squabbles … Oh you mountains! You towering mountains! … Our life is a chain of crime and punishment, with an inscrutable fate guiding us.” As the New Year is born Hertha says to him: “You are to be a man who will make his mark for the Fatherland.”
The remaining winter months are a torment as he works laboriously at his verse-drama. The influence of Ivan is strong. Michael refers to him as his “demon”. Hertha hates and distrusts Ivan; she “cannot understand my torment”; indeed she makes it worse. Behind the personal relationships, the talk about revolutionary politics goes on continuously:
Our people have been forced under a yoke. The world's master-race
(Herrenvolk)
is reduced to slave labour, from high up to low down and from low down to high up.
But we won't get there by speeches and resolutions. We need a holy thunderstorm.
Long live the Republic—that's what they are shouting on the street. What's the Republic to us? Long live Germany!
Later he says, rather humourlessly, “I want to be a sign-post. I want to serve the Fatherland.”
Again, one cannot be certain how much Goebbels saw fit to insert into his youthful novel in order to make it reflect more exactly his later thoughts at the time of its publication in 1929. Although the whole trend of the book seems to be a mixture of the mystical and the nihilistic together with a foretaste of desire for the Nietzschean hero which anticipates Goebbels' future public attitude to Hitler, the passages of anti-Semitism and those referring to a Messianic speaker to be quoted later read much more decisively and fiercely than the rest. They are, for instance, very different from the vaguely demoniac dialogue Goebbels composed between Michael and Ivan.
“Ivan Wienurovsky, you want to rob me of my fatherland. You are making me a beggar.”
“Merely growing pains. I want to educate you, to give you courage.”
"I despair.”
"That's what the world is like.”
"You are a devil.”
"The devil is merely a fallen angel.”
"I hate you!”
"No matter. I shan't let go of you, Michael!”
"So you want me to be your slave?”
"Yes, I do.”
I get up and slap his face.
But in March he receives a letter from Hertha in which she says, “I suffer because of you. Why cannot we understand one another? I love you beyond measure. That's why I suffer so much. If you despair I must despair with you and I shall have nothing to hold on to …”
When April comes he is back in the mountains, but on his return he finds another letter from Hertha in which she says she is leaving him. In despair he goes to her house, but she has gone and no one knows where she is to be found.
But ten days later comes the great revelation. On 27th April he goes by chance to a political meeting where he hears a speech delivered by an unnamed Speaker of extraordinary magnetism and power:
… I sit in a hall I have never been in before. Among utter strangers. Poor and threadbare people most of them. Workers, soldiers, officers, students. I hardly notice how the man up there begins to speak, slowly, hesitatingly at first.
But then all of a sudden, the flow of his speech is unleashed. It's like a light shining above him. I listen. I am captivated. Honour! Work! The flag! Are there still such things in this people from whom God has taken His blessing hand?
The audience is aglow. Hope shines on grey faces. Someone clenches his fist. Someone wipes the sweat off his brow. An old officer sobs like a child.
I am getting hot and cold. I don't know what's happening to me. I seem to hear guns booming. A few soldiers get up and shout “Hurrah”, and no one even notices it.
And the man up there speaks on, and whatever was budding in me falls into shape.
A miracle!
Among the ruins is someone who shows us the flag.
Those around me are no longer strangers. They are brothers. I go up to the rostrum and look in the man's face.
No orator he! A prophet!
Sweat is pouring down his face. A pair of eyes glow in the pale face. His fists are clenched.
And like the Last Judgment word after word is thundering on, and phrase after phrase.
I know not what I do. I seem demented.
I shout “Hurrah”. And no one seems astonished.
He on the rostrum glances at me for a moment. Those blue eyes sear me like a flame. That is an order!
I feel as if I were newly born.
I know now whither my path leads me. The path of maturity. I seem to be intoxicated.
All I remember is the man's hand clasping mine. A vow for life.
And my eyes meet two great blue stars.
So overcome is he by this transcendent experience that he decides to leave Munich without a word to anyone. He goes to Heidelberg where he is idle, reading books and papers, or sitting doing nothing “for hours, listlessly and aimlessly”. That the great unnamed Speaker should have had this particular effect on him is, to say the least of it, strange. It seems as if Goebbels felt that Michael's intellectual nihilism had been knocked out by this initial dynamic contact with the Messiah. However, if it is true that it was in June 1922 that Goebbels first heard Hitler speak (that is, at about the same time that he was writing his novel), it may actually have had this devastating effect upon him. On the other hand this passage and the one describing how he hears the same Speaker for a second time may well have been later interpolations.
Michael, however, is at a loss as to what he should do. He decides:
Life can only be maintained when one is ready to die for it. The working class has a mission in Germany. To save Germany is a mission of world-wide importance. For if Germany perishes the lights go out in the world.
Then the character of Michael takes on its other facet, that of Richard Flisges. He leaves the University to become a miner; he goes to live with a miner's family in a bare room with a bed, a chair and a table. He has only two books with him, the Bible and
Faust
. He lives now by the sweat of his brow. He is proud and lonely. He is still in love with Hertha—"I have loved Hertha Holk, and I will probably love her for ever. But she isn't the comrade to understand one fully.” Later he transfers to a mine in Bavaria, where once more he hears the unnamed Speaker:
That evening I sit in a big hall with a thousand others and see him again, hear him who awakened me.
Now he stands in the midst of a loyal congregation. He seems to have grown in stature. There is so much strength in him, and a sea of light gleams from those big blue eyes.
I sit among all those others, and it seems as if he were speaking to me quite personally.
About the blessing of work! Whatever I merely felt or guessed, he puts it into words. My confession and my Faith: here they gain shape.
I feel his strength filling my soul. Here is young Germany, and those who work in the smithy of the new Reich. Anvil still, but hammer before long.
Here is my place.
Around me are people I never saw and I feel like a child as tears well up in my eyes.
In October he learns that Ivan, now back in Petersburg, has been the victim of political assassination.
The last entry in Michael's short diary is that for 29th January. His landlady implores him not to go down the mine the next day. She had dreamed he had been killed by a stone. He laughs it off. But like Flisges, he is killed in an accident and the book concludes with a letter written by a miner to Hertha Holk telling her that Michael died with a smile and that in his copy of Nietzsche's
Zarathustra
he had marked the passage: “Many die too late and some too early. Strangely still sounds the lesson: Die at the right time!”
Michael
was first published in 1929, some seven years after it was first written. Goebbels was then Gauleiter of Berlin, a Deputy of the Reichstag and Head of Propaganda for the Nazi Party. He would therefore have had every inducement to add sections to his early novel to imply that he had seen the light in his youth and proclaimed the coming of his Messiah. As we shall see, it was Hitler's blue eyes that impressed him when he first met his future Leader, as it was the blue eyes of the great Speaker that impressed Michael in the novel.
It is well-known that morality in Germany during the years following the defeat in 1918 declined in the direction of anarchy. Young girls even of good and respectable families felt it unfashionable to remain virgin, and sexual licence spread throughout the capital and the larger cities and freed itself from the control of the Catholic and Protestant churches and of the stricter traditions of the bourgeois German families. Though there was some attempt by the middle nineteen-twenties to re-establish the previous codes of respectable behaviour among the middle classes in Germany, the period during which Joseph Goebbels grew to manhood was the period of the greatest moral licence as well as of the greatest economic instability—for the mark which was still nominally worth a shilling in 1918 had utterly collapsed by 1923. If we are to believe the evidence in his diaries of 1925-26 Goebbels was as proud by then of his prowess as a lover as he was obsessed by his poverty.
The first record there is of a serious love-affair in Goebbels' life is his association with the girl called Anka Stahlhern.
12
It was not a happy love affair, and it seems to be reflected fairly faithfully in the account of the relations between Michael and Hertha given in Goebbels' novel. The love affair may well have lasted from about 1918 to as late as 1922. Prang recollects her to have been blonde, vivacious and good- looking; she was of good family and taller in stature than Goebbels. Anka's family was opposed to this infatuation and eventually succeeded in breaking it off, though it is evident from a certain number of letters that survive in a collection of private family papers that Goebbels and Anka made each other very unhappy.
13
This particular group of surviving letters (from the period 1918-20) also show Goebbels' gradual disillusionment with the Catholic Church. There is also a letter among the family papers in which one of Anka's aunts complains bitterly of Goebbels' behaviour to her niece, who has been seen leaving his rooms in the small hours. She is indignant that such a relationship should exist between her niece and a poor undergraduate quite unable to support a wife.
There is further evidence of a certain crisis at this time resulting from Goebbels' adolescent emotionalism in the survival of a ‘Last Will and Testament’ dated 1st October 1920.
14
. It was written at a time when he had quarrelled with Anka and “wanted to leave this life which had become Hell for him”, and it appointed his brother Hans “the administrator of his literary estate”
(literarischer Nachlassverwalter)
following his suicide. This grand term, suitable perhaps for an established writer whose works are valuable properties, was chosen by Goebbels to describe his mass of unpublished drafts of plays, poems and other miscellaneous writing, of which, although it had been rejected, he was inordinately proud. The survival of this document in the family papers would have been no more than a curiosity had it not become the basis for a prolonged legal dispute over Goebbels' copyrights. Hans on his death-bed was prevailed upon by his nurse to let her keep the papers intact after Goebbels had ordered his brother to destroy them during the last weeks of the war.
Anka was to reappear later in Goebbels' career; she came to him for a job during his first year as Minister. Goebbels helped her by getting her work on the editorial staff of
Die Dame,
but he was angry when he heard that she was in the habit of producing a copy of the Jewish poet Heine's love poems that he had once given her and boasting about the florid inscription that the Minister had written in his youth! He was, of course, much more embarrassed by that time to be revealed as a former admirer of Heine, whose work he had been instrumental in suppressing and burning, than as an admirer of a pretty girl. Anka died a few years after the war.
After the failure of his love-affair with Anka, Goebbels lost no time in forming a close friendship with another girl, Else. Fritz Prang, who claims that Goebbels' pose as a young philanderer was largely due to his desire to assert himself and show off, was himself friendly with a young school-teacher in Rheydt called Alma, and it was through her that Goebbels first met Else. He was back now living in Rheydt. His formal education was finished and the need for congenial work was uppermost in his mind in order that he might keep himself while he tried out all his vague plans for becoming a man of letters or a man of the theatre. Else, like Alma, was a school-teacher in Rheydt, though her family lived in Duisburg. She taught little Maria needlework and physical training. She became a friend of the Goebbels family and was therefore a constant visitor to their house where she came to know Joseph extremely well. She gradually fell in love with the brilliant, energetic, rootless young man; she recollects that the first thing that struck her about him was his very beautiful and expressive eyes; he was “all eyes”, she says. Fritz, Alma, Joseph and Else formed for a period a happy group of young people, always going about together, sailing, walking (for Goebbels made light now of his limp), sitting in the cafes flirting and philosophising or enjoying the luxury of visiting the Prangs' wealthy home. Prang was becoming interested in politics; he joined the Nazi Party as early as 1922. But at this stage Goebbels had no thought other than for literature and journalism. One thing he impressed upon Else—his absolute belief in his own genius as a writer. Flisges, too, was a member of this group, adding his own politic nihilism and love of Dostoevsky to the discussions. Else recollects him to have been very handsome with the temperament of an idealist and a dreamer.