Narcissus and Echo

Peter Longerich: Goebbels: A Biography

National Review, August 10, 2015

When the established order collapses, those who live among the ruins often take comfort from the hope that someone will turn up to tell them what comes next. With a dysfunctional and humiliated Germany struggling to come to terms with a military defeat that it still did not understand, there was nothing very remarkable about the views of the young, down-at-heel Ph.D. who, in early 1922, complained in an article for his hometown newspaper that “salvation cannot come from Berlin,” the shamed and shameful symbol of old Reich and new Weimar.

But all was not lost: “Sometimes it looks as though a new sun is about to rise in the south.” Joseph Goebbels was referring to Munich, then a bastion of the nationalist far right, a lair of fantasists, the furious, the lost, and the dangerously sane, including the nascent Nazi party, a movement that included all those and more poison still. And it was there that this believer in search of a creed, a lapsed Catholic who lost Christ but not his sense of the divine, was to discover what he was looking for. “Germany,” he wrote in July 1924, “yearns for the One.” In Hitler, Goebbels found him.

At the core of this new biography of Hitler’s propaganda chief by the London-based German historian Peter Longerich, well known for his studies of the Holocaust and of Himmler, is the relationship between Goebbels and Hitler, a bizarre entanglement that was a blend of evangelist/Messiah and weirdly intense bromance: “Those large blue eyes. Like stars. He is pleased to see me. I’m very happy.” Adding a further twist to this dance was Goebbels’s future wife, Magda, who caught Hitler’s eye at a time when she was already Joseph’s girl. Magda was ambitious, happy to flirt and enjoy long tête-à-têtes with the future Führer, but in the end she opted for Goebbels, news that Hitler took in good grace with, Goebbels noted in Harlequin prose, “tears in his big astonished eyes.” Hitler was a witness at their wedding, a compliment Goebbels returned for the Führer’s bunker nuptials a decade and a half later. But Hitler did not retreat too far. He remained close to Magda, and in some respects used the Goebbels household as a proxy for the domesticity he was unwilling or unable to secure for himself. Longerich does not reveal what Eva Braun thought about this arrangement.

Hitler was a frequent visitor, “Uncle Adolf” to the couple’s children, and, when the Goebbels marriage hit one of its many rough patches, an umpire: not least on the occasion he insisted that Goebbels should break with his lover, the Czech actress Lída Baarová, rather than leave Magda, herself no model of monogamy.

Goebbels submitted yet again to his Führer. Hitler was fond of his propaganda minister, but also manipulated him emotionally and politically, keeping him perpetually on edge as to where he stood in his affections and, for that matter, in the regime’s hierarchy. Why he did the former is not something that Longerich really explains. This is a book in which Hitler is seen mainly in shadow or reflection.

The politics, however, were more straightforward: Hitler did not relish the notion of over-mighty subordinates building empires of their own. All power ultimately had to flow from him. Thus Goebbels was never given quite the dominance over German cultural life that he wanted. And it is surprising to learn how much he was excluded from decisions that counted, particularly when it came to the war and the running of the foreign policy that paved the way to it. Informed that Germany would be supporting Franco’s rebellion in Spain, Goebbels writes, a little plaintively, in his diary: “So we’re getting a bit involved in Spain. Planes etc. Not obvious. Who knows what the point is.” It was only in July 1944 that Goebbels was appointed “Reich Plenipotentiary” for a “total war” that was already lost

But if Goebbels was kept at a distance from some of the key moments in the Third Reich’s trajectory, so, in a way, are Longerich’s readers. This book is not (nor does it purport to be) a general history of Nazi Germany. It will be heavy sledding for those less familiar with this topic. And they will not be helped by a prose style that is dense, dry, and unnecessarily austere. Thus in a passage relating how the Nazis took over the public sphere, Longerich notes that the diarist Victor Klemperer, an acute observer of Hitler’s rule, described the infiltration of Nazi terminology into everyday speech, but he omits the examples that would make that (fascinating) observation live.

The story of Goebbels’s propaganda work is itself only partially told. Longerich is out to chip away at Goebbels’s reputation as the master publicist who bent Germany to his Führer’s will, a reputation that was, he argues, overstated — and still is. He has a point: The Volk was rather less enthusiastic about the coming thousand years, not to speak of the prospect of war, than all those outstretched arms might suggest. That said, there was something about Goebbels’s dark magic that worked. A product of the dislocations of his age, Goebbels was nevertheless intellectually, if not psychologically, detached enough from them to understand how they could be exploited. This was more than a matter of Goebbels’s considerable speechmaking skills (neatly dissected in this book). Longerich offers a useful introduction to Goebbels’s techniques, some of them, interestingly, derived from new American ideas about advertising, as well as to his broader thinking (“the essence of propaganda is to keep it simple and use constant repetition”), some of it subtler and more pragmatic than might be imagined. But the whole picture is never quite filled in.

And, despite the length of this exhaustively researched book (a good bit of it is based on the diaries that Goebbels kept between 1923 and 1945), the same is true of Longerich’s overall depiction of Goebbels, a depiction that is, under the circumstances, oddly one dimensional. Longerich sees Goebbels primarily as a narcissist, forever craving recognition — from his fellows, from the crowd, from (tellingly) his diary, to which he would not infrequently lie, and, above all, from his Führer. In searching for the roots of that narcissism, a fair enough diagnosis, Longerich looks to the failure of the infant Goebbels “to develop independence at the ages of two and three” — a development, Longerich emphasizes, that predated his club foot, and is evidenced by Goebbels’s lifelong “dependence on his mother.”

This explanation is too psychiatrically glib to be altogether satisfying, and (as Longerich would not deny) too limited to tell the whole story. It doesn’t explain the rage, the rhetorical violence that Goebbels could switch off when he wanted but that runs throughout his oratory and his writing, especially, of course, when it came to the Jews. Sneering, jeering, and demonization were followed by the threat and then the promise of annihilation, a “thoroughly justified” slaughter for which he did so much to set the stage. His was an obsessive, unhinged hatred that plunged into paranoid delusion and was no kind of act. Writing in his diary on March 21, 1927, Goebbels reports how “our brave lads pull a Jew down out of a bus.” Brave lads, our brave lads: So boasted this small, lame, ugly Ph.D., an unlikely Übermensch trying to prove to himself that he was on the team, one of the hard men.

The sources of Goebbels’s anti-Semitic fury will never be fully identified. Anti-Semitism already hung in the air during the troubled period after World War I, although Goebbels did not breathe in enough of it to deter him from an early affair with a half-Jewish schoolteacher (although when she disclosed her ancestry, the “first enchantment” was “ruined”). But the infection worsened, sharpened by social resentments that festered in his hardscrabble years. And as Goebbels’s German nationalism deepened, so did the anti-Semitism that served, as Longerich puts it, as its “kind of negative pole.” The Jews were a convenient scapegoat for Germany’s woes and, as eternal outsiders, an obstacle to the construction of the “national community” that was another consistent feature in Goebbels’s generally inchoate political agenda. It was an agenda that eventually degenerated into little more than an echo of the ideas of the Führer, whom Goebbels worshipped (it’s not too strong a word), an echo within which hatred fed on itself.

Millennial cults rarely end well for the faithful. In the months leading up to the fall of Berlin, Goebbels made it clear that he had no wish to outlive the doomed Reich, a decision that was both practical (he had nothing to look forward to) and philosophical. Without Hitler, what was there? Magda was of the same mind. The day after Hitler’s death, the pair murdered their six young children, a decision, Goebbels claimed, with which their offspring would have agreed had “they been [old enough to be] able to express themselves.” The oldest was twelve. This last atrocity behind them, husband and wife committed suicide. The Red Army found the bodies the next day, the parents’ corpses badly charred, the children still lifelike in their pale clothing, final sacrifices to another god that had failed.