Goebbels: A Biography (12 page)

The early days of Goebbels in Berlin have been described more than once.
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Most authors follow the line put out by Goebbels himself in his propaganda publication
Kampf um Berlin
(Struggle for Berlin), first published in 1931: In the book, he claims that he first of all consolidated the chaotic Party organization in the capital and then through a series of provocative acts ensured that Berliners took notice of this
political splinter group. This was, he maintains, the precondition for the conquest of “red Berlin” that followed. He asserts that the banning of the NSDAP in May 1927 should be seen in connection with a series of carefully engineered scandals and therefore, in retrospect, as a sign of success.
Trotz Verbot nicht tot
(despite the ban, still alive) ran the slogan.
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Goebbels’s account of these months in
Kampf um Berlin
is based on a heavily reworked version of his diaries, the original text of which became accessible only with the publication of the new edition of the journal in 2005.
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The unrevised version shows that, contrary to the stylized and self-serving propaganda account in
Kampf um Berlin
, Goebbels’s beginnings in Berlin by no means represented a triumphal progress. The fact was that the Prussian authorities managed very successfully to keep the NSDAP under control through bans and restraints and used the criminal law to maintain considerable pressure on the Gauleiter. Moreover, Goebbels’s policies provoked opposition within the Party, which he could only overcome with solid support from Munich. The rise of the NSDAP did not begin in Berlin in 1927–28 but about a year later and mostly in the provinces.

On November 9, 1926, the day he left Elberfeld for Berlin, Goebbels started a new diary. On the first page he wrote: “With this book I begin the struggle for Berlin—how will it end???”
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Goebbels’s appointment itself had met with disapproval in the Berlin Party organization. “Agitation about the salary” negotiated by Goebbels led the Berlin office to send him the money every month via Munich.
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What Goebbels took charge of was an expanded Gau, “Berlin-Brandenburg,” formed out of the former Gaus “Greater Berlin” and “Potsdam.” Hitler launched Goebbels on his new start with special powers: Goebbels was “responsible solely to him […] for the organizational, propagandistic, and political leadership of the Gau”; the local SA and SS were also to come under his “political leadership,” and their leaders would be selected by the Party leadership following Goebbels’s recommendations.
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Goebbels moved in at first “with good old Steiger”: At this time Hans Steiger was editor of the newspaper
Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger
(Berlin Local Advertiser) and an active member of the NSDAP who took in paying guests, mostly Party comrades, at his house in the Potsdamer Strasse.
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The incumbent business manager of the Berlin NSDAP was Franz Gutsmiedl: “A Bavarian. Good-natured, decent,
not particularly bright, but extremely useful as an executive officer.” However, as the weeks passed, Goebbels’s comments on the “decent Bavarian” deteriorated, until he finally parted from him at the end of the year.
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Goebbels also inherited the deputy Gauleiter Erich Schmiedicke and the treasurer Rudolf Rehm: “They’re hard-working but lack initiative.”
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On the day he arrived, November 9, Goebbels was already giving a speech at a memorial ceremony of the Deutscher Frauenorden (Order of German Women, recognized by the NSDAP that year as the Party’s official women’s organization); he was criticized in the
Berliner Tageblatt
for praising Hermann Fischer and Erwin Kern, the murderers of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, as models of patriotic conviction. Since this cosmopolitan newspaper otherwise largely ignored NSDAP events, Goebbels counted this comment as his “first success.”
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It was no accident that Hitler came to the capital during the days when his new beacon of hope was taking over office. One day after his arrival he took him to meet the Bechsteins. The piano manufacturer Edwin Bechstein and his wife, Helene, were fervent supporters of Hitler, who made use of their home for discreet political meetings. Hitler turned up in Berlin again a few days later and spent an evening with Goebbels.
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The latter lost no time in contacting the Strassers, getting together with them often, and setting great store by Gregor in particular: “Good, honest Gregor. I like him.”
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Goebbels, in a “really combative mood,” plunged straight into the work. He held “consultation after consultation, […] discussion after discussion.” For the lower-middle-class product of Rheydt who had studied predominantly in comfortable university towns, life in the metropolis was a novelty. He shared the contemporary prejudice of provincials against the capital: “Berlin: city of the intelligentsia and of asphalt,”
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a “pillar of iniquity and naked wealth.”
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It took him some years to shake off these reservations about the “asphalt desert” of Berlin.
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Hardly had he arrived before he shot off a round-robin memo to Party comrades in Berlin in a brusque tone that left no doubt who was in charge: “The Gau office is the workplace of the Gau Berlin-Brandenburg and as such not to be confused with a shelter or a waiting room. […] The Gauleiter is available only for business matters.” The local NSDAP branches that had existed so far in Berlin
were disbanded. There was now just one Berlin local branch with sections in the various districts. Goebbels also announced that he had appointed Daluege, the powerful head of the Berlin SA, his deputy Gauleiter.
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At a meeting of the Berlin NSDAP on November 11, he managed to assert himself against the leader of the opposition: “Hauenstein, my snooping polar opposite, was set on terrorizing and breaking up the meeting yesterday evening; his people had to leave the hall, and as many as 50 men left. I’m rid of the eternal troublemakers and negative critics.”
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With that, as far as he was concerned, the internal Party opposition was “finished. For good and all!”
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On November 17, Penitence and Prayer Day (Buss- und Bettag), he held a meeting with “Berlin’s finest” and founded, as he had in his old Gau, an “NS-Freedom League,” whose members pledged to make a certain monthly donation to the Party coffers.
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On November 14 the SA staged a propaganda march in the “red” citadel of Neukölln. Not surprisingly, there were violent clashes with the communists. Goebbels noted: “Parade in Neukölln, 4 seriously injured, 4 slightly injured. But we’re on the march.”
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On November 20, a Sunday, he held his first “Gau day,” an event he staged every month from then on, with the purpose of making the leading Party and SA functionaries commit themselves to his line.
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It was not long before the first conflicts arose between Goebbels and Gregor Strasser. He was “in the final analysis a Bavarian bourgeois, not a revolutionary, not ascetic, not a New Man.”
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Goebbels also fell out with Gregor’s brother Otto. The latter’s whole character displeased him: “There’s a lot about him which is decayed and rotten. He has no feeling for the ascetic.”
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After he received a “stupid, illogical letter” from Gregor, he had a long meeting with him to clear the air, in the course of which he settled on his verdict about the brothers, not deviating from it in the following weeks: “Gregor is good, Otto is a rogue.”
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Goebbels was featured as a speaker in various settings, as for example on November 30 in the Veterans’ Association House, and at the National Socialist Christmas festivities on December 11 (“They all love me”). At the Veterans’ Association on December 17 he gave what he thought was his “best speech in Berlin.”
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He found that in the new environment his rhetoric was gradually changing: “My way of thinking, speaking and writing has moved toward the graphic and
the typical. I never see the particular anymore, just what is typical. I think that’s a tremendous gain in itself.”
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For his public engagements he tried in his outward appearance to demonstrate his distance from “bourgeois” politics: Photographs from his “years of struggle” in Berlin show him mostly wearing a leather jacket or a faded trench coat.

He gradually settled down in Berlin. He developed a friendship with the graphic artist Hans Herbert Schweitzer, who designed National Socialist posters under the pseudonym Mjölnir. Goebbels often visited the Schweitzers and posed for the artist.
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He also had a good relationship with his landlord, Steiger, although he did find the latter “rather too soft.”
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He frequently dropped in on the Bechsteins, because Frau Bechstein was “often like a mother” to him.
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Christmas was spent with his parents in Rheydt, New Year’s with the Schweitzers in Berlin.
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Early in 1927, Goebbels arranged for the Party to move into a new office at Lützowstrasse 44. The old headquarters at Potsdamer Strasse 109, “a kind of dirty vaulted cellar at the rear of a building,” known as “the opium den” and serving as a meeting place for out-of-work Party comrades to loiter in, hardly seemed conducive to the efficiently functioning office that was extremely important to him.
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He also set out to create a band, acquired an “official Party car” (“a lovely six-seater Benz”), and reorganized the SA, which was now brought together under three “standards” for the whole region of the Berlin-Potsdam Gau.
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In addition, he went on speaking at NSDAP events throughout the Reich.
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One of his trips took him to Munich, where he appeared at the “packed Hacker beer cellar.” Afterward he sat with Hitler late into the night: “I think he likes me. I am full of enthusiasm for him.”

The next day Rudolf Hess introduced him to Elsa Bruckmann; she and her husband, the publisher Hugo Bruckmann, were two of the most important financial backers of the NSDAP and its Führer in Munich. And during his stay in Munich, to his enormous pleasure Hitler gave him “the first copy of volume two of
Mein Kampf.”
On the journey back to Berlin he read “Hitler’s book with feverish excitement. Genuine Hitler. Just as he is! Sometimes I feel like shouting for joy. He really is a fellow!”
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It is hardly conceivable that Goebbels failed to notice in his reading that Hitler’s views differed a good deal from the principles he himself had upheld only a short while before. For example, Hitler
quite unmistakably declared the acquisition of
Lebensraum
(living space) at the cost of the Soviet Union to be the central aim of National Socialist policy
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while carefully avoiding even the most general claim to a socialist direction.

But for Goebbels, questions of content were unimportant; for him
Mein Kampf
was not primarily a political program but the prophecy and revelation of the master—and therefore beyond criticism and discussion.

“What drives an ideological movement,” Goebbels asserted in a speech to the national Party rally in August 1927, was in essence “not a matter of knowledge but of faith.” Besides Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings and Karl Marx’s
Kapital
, he cited as an example above all the Sermon on the Mount.
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“Christ did not offer proofs in his Sermon on the Mount,” wrote Goebbels in an article around this time. “He simply made assertions. Self-evident truths don’t have to be proven.”
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It could not have been clearer: Goebbels had no intention of conducting Party propaganda in terms of argument. The only thing that mattered was a successful impact on the masses: “Berlin needs sensations like a fish needs water. This city lives off them, and any political propaganda that fails to recognize this is bound to miss its target.”
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The focus of his activity for the moment was the propaganda generated by posters and meetings.
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The impact of leaflets depended on massive print runs, and there was no money for them. And the only National Socialist press organ in the city was in the hands of the Strasser brothers, from whom Goebbels maintained an ever-increasing critical distance.

Between August 1926 and the spring of 1927, Goebbels published in the
Briefe
some handy practical tips on propaganda. For the first time, he sought to bring the available propaganda media together in one place.

In August 1926 he suggested that in the coming winter, intensive propaganda should be used to “build up one or two dozen large cities of the Reich into impregnable bulwarks of the movement” and from these fortresses venture forth to conquer the provinces. But an essential precondition for this was that the regional work be subordinated
to a “single control center.” The core and hub of this propaganda offensive should be public meetings, in connection with which posters and leaflets should play an important part.
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In a further series of articles he dealt with various forms of propaganda: the “daily grind”
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of Party activists, perhaps in their workplace; the “discussion evenings”
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of local branches; and above all the core activity of Nazi propaganda, the “mass meeting.”
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It was decisively important that such large-scale events should be “prepared in painstaking detail.” Political opponents who tried to break into and disrupt the proceedings should be “politely manhandled out of the building” by the SA. If it came to the rough stuff, it would not do to be too fussy, explained Goebbels with a conspiratorial wink: “Compensation for riot damage starts at four hundred marks. I need say no more!”
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But mass meetings stood or fell by the choice of speaker. Goebbels exhorted his comrades to take good care of their speakers.
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In an article on “The Poster,” Goebbels set out some design principles: As always, posters carrying texts were given pride of place. A textual poster should coin phrases that “would eventually become slogans.” Posters should be “a skillfully formulated series of apparently unmotivated mental leaps.” He put forward as an example a Berlin poster design featuring short sentences with exclamation marks, precisely a series of “mental leaps” comprising fifteen lines of text. The whole thing should take no longer than a minute to read. In the case of visual posters, however, aesthetics played a decisive role: “A pictorial poster must be artistically flawless and convincing as propaganda.”
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Naturally, Goebbels added slyly, posters must only be put up where permitted. However, if they should be “purloined by overzealous Party members and posted on empty house walls, garden fences, or perhaps on the windows of Jewish businesses, even being stuck on with water-glass glue,” this would be “very regrettable from a moral point of view”—but could not be helped. As far as design was concerned, there was one point to bear in mind above all else: “The color of our movement is a brilliant red. There should be no color in our posters other than this revolutionary one.”

Goebbels admitted that his propaganda neither possessed a method of its own nor conformed to any theory: “It has only one aim, and this political aim is always known as ‘the conquest of the masses.’ All means used to this end are good. And all means that
ignore this aim are bad. […] Propaganda methods develop out of the day-to-day struggle.”
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He formulated this thoroughly instrumental and functional approach in many ways,
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including outright cynicism. In a presentation in August 1929 he contended that the people were “in his view mostly just a gramophone record playing back public opinion. Public opinion […], in its turn, is created by the organs of public opinion such as the press, posters, radio, school, and university and general education. But the government owns these organs.”
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It seems that in developing these principles Goebbels was not much influenced by contemporary theoretical writings about the much-discussed use of slogans in political propaganda; unlike Hitler, he was not particularly impressed by the propaganda put out by the workers’ movement or by British propaganda during the Great War. He took his cue from the model of commercial advertising, and there was nowhere better to study it than the world of everyday Berlin, which in the “Golden Twenties” had become something of a laboratory for advertising experiments.
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The commercial advertisement of those days fell more and more under the influence of advertising psychology, developed in the United States and picked up and systematically applied in Germany starting in the early 1920s. Advertising experts experimented to establish fundamental axioms about the readability of various scripts and forms, along with the optimum size, colors, and placement of advertising material; systematic work was done on the cognitive and recognition powers of passersby; and so forth. In accordance with the behaviorism prevalent in psychology at the time, advertising specialists were convinced that consumer behavior could be greatly influenced by relatively simple, partly subliminal stimuli. Much significance was attached to the principle of concentrating and repeating advertisers’ messages in the form of campaigns.
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Such new methods of commercial advertising were widely discussed in the public sphere, and their practical results could be seen in the advertisement columns of newspapers, in cinema advertising, and in the everyday metropolitan scene.

Goebbels took over these models and used them for Party propaganda. In August 1929 he attended an advertising exhibition in Berlin, casting an expert, critical eye over the exhibits: “Quite a few very good things. But most of it still inspired by the bourgeois spirit.” Significantly,
he noted the absence of “the political poster” at the exhibition.
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In a leaflet written by his head of propaganda in Berlin, Georg Stark, and published by Goebbels in 1930, commercial advertising was overtly cited as the model to follow.
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Whether it was a matter of simplification, constant repetition of memorable slogans, or concentration of propaganda material in regular campaigns, the principles of mass advertising could easily be applied to political propaganda.

If the National Socialist movement in general highlighted the significance of inflammatory speech-making among its propaganda methods, this was especially true of the Berlin NSDAP and its Gauleiter. A naturally gifted orator, during his Berlin years Goebbels perfected his rhetorical abilities; any event in which he was announced as a speaker was sure to see a strong turnout.

Joseph Goebbels’s effect as a speaker was based on a whole package of abilities. Given his slight build, he had a surprisingly deep voice that projected well, one that was carefully articulated but also capable of modulation.
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Even if he made extreme demands on his voice—as we know he often did—he generally avoided making it sound overstretched or perceptibly strained to the listener. As a speaker he commanded a relatively wide register of different styles: sometimes a witty conversational tone; biting irony; furious, even desperate accusation; solemn and triumphal pathos; an obituary oration with his voice almost breaking. He had a rich vocabulary at his disposal (sometimes adopting rare, quaintly old-fashioned phrases) and brought in many historical examples and classical quotations. On the other hand, his arguments were always easy to grasp, intelligible to a broad audience.

Unlike Hitler, as a speaker Goebbels always kept himself well under control at every stage of his address, even when completely exhausted. His acting and gestures, carefully practiced, were almost perfectly suited to the speech at hand, their lively and dramatic quality striking contemporary observers as quite Mediterranean.
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Typical were the light waving motion of his hand that accompanied the expository parts of his speech; the threatening index finger suddenly thrust skyward; the clenched fist, which he moved back and forth to beat his chest to the rhythm of his sentence; the hammering on the lectern; and the posture of arms akimbo, meant to underline the authority of the speaker.

His mildly Rhenish accent reinforced the often measured, solemn
tone of his speech. The stretching of certain vowels typical of the Rhineland enabled him to pronounce such key terms as “Führer” or “Deutschland” with particular fervor or to emit with theatrical contempt words such as “Judentum” (Jewry). With his singsong intonation and certain idiosyncratic features of expression and emphasis, he could achieve an effective heightening of his sentence and then bring it to a more or less harmonious conclusion. In short, all this lent Goebbels’s language its own rhythm, giving his sentences an unmistakable “tune,” often reminiscent of the church preacher, a “heartfelt tone,” as one of his later listeners, Victor Klemperer, was to call it.
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However, this tone could very quickly turn into that of a biting attack. It was precisely this flexibility and versatility that made Goebbels so effective as a speaker.