Goebbels: A Biography (2 page)

Nearly all the leading officials of the Nazi regime fled the capital as the Soviet troops advanced, and even the top leadership looked to save their lives as the Third Reich collapsed. Heinrich Himmler, hoping to pass unnoticed among the millions of defeated Wehrmacht soldiers, was caught and identified. After Hitler’s death, Martin Bormann joined in an armed attempt to break out through the cordon of enemy troops around the Reich Chancellery and died in the act. Hermann Göring and Albert Speer surrendered to the Allies. Goebbels was the only member of Hitler’s innermost circle to hold out in the bunker and ultimately follow him in committing suicide—and he was the only one who dragged his whole family down with him to their deaths.

This last step was deliberately staged for its effect on posterity. By merely ending his life along with his wife, he would simply have appeared to be drawing the logical conclusion from a hopeless situation. To his way of thinking, this would have been seen as an admission of the complete failure of his life’s project, as a miserable exit at the moment when his political work, the work of the previous twenty years, was about to end in a colossal disaster. What Goebbels wanted, however, was to create, with his wife, a dramatic grand finale, to leave posterity with an “example” of the “faithfulness unto death” his wife had invoked. He could no longer use the resources of conventional propaganda. But the extreme act of wiping out his entire family seemed to him a way of proving to the whole world that, to the bitter end, he was absolutely committed to Hitler; that he was the only member of Hitler’s clique prepared to set aside his most fundamental human obligations in the name of demonstrating his loyalty. He saw in this last step a chance to turn the total failure of his life’s course into a life’s work that seemed to be utterly consistent and marked by unqualified devotion. At the same time, this last propaganda performance also revealed Goebbels’s great psychological dependence on Hitler. With the Führer’s suicide, his own life, too, seemed to have lost all meaning. Indeed, for Goebbels and his wife the continuing existence of their own family after Hitler’s death was unthinkable, since they regarded their family as Hitler’s family, too. This absolute reliance on Hitler was to be made into a virtue by suicide: faithfulness unto death.

Throughout his life Joseph Goebbels was driven by an exceptional craving for recognition by others. He was positively addicted to others’ admiration. It was fundamentally impossible for this addiction to be satisfied. It revealed itself, for example, in the delight he continued to take, after so many years in the business, as propaganda minister and overlord of the Third Reich’s public sphere, in the fanfares with which the media—controlled by himself—greeted his speeches, and in their appreciative comments on them. He regularly noted such “successes” in his diary.

His character fulfilled all the essential criteria recognized in current psychoanalytic practice as defining a narcissistically disturbed personality.
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On the one hand, there was the yearning for recognition and the powerful urge to be seen as great and unique, already highly developed in his early years; the megalomaniac fantasies about his future role in the world; the pride and arrogance; the lack of empathy for others; and the tendency to exploit personal relationships with icy detachment for personal ends. On the other hand, there was his readiness to subordinate himself without reservation to some supposedly greater personality and not least the bouts of depression he suffered whenever the anticipated outstanding success failed to materialize. In order to appease this hunger, Goebbels—privately deeply insecure about his impact on others—needed constant praise and recognition from an idol to whom he completely subordinated himself. From 1924 onward, this idol was Adolf Hitler. By constantly confirming Goebbels’s exceptional brilliance, Hitler gave him the stability he needed to maintain control over his life, a stability otherwise lacking in this unbalanced personality.

There is no doubt that a narcissistic craving for recognition was the main driving force behind Goebbels’s career. He clearly manifested the chief characteristics of this addiction: conceit; a restless obsession with work; unreserved self-subjugation to an idol; disdain for other human relationships; and a willingness to place himself beyond generally accepted moral norms in pursuit of his own ends.

Goebbels’s aim in life was to prove that he, Joseph Goebbels, was able to unite the German people behind his own political idol and leader, Adolf Hitler. In seeking to fix this conviction in people’s minds, Goebbels produced and left behind a vast amount of material. There is the flood of printed matter, film footage, and audio recordings generated by the propaganda machine he directed; the enormous volume of contemporary reports on the public mood, indicating the success of this propaganda effort; and finally his diaries, edited between 1993 and 2008 by Elke Fröhlich of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History and comprising thirty-two volumes. The diary was above all intended to document his success.
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He himself set forth the individual chapters of this success story in full: the rise of a not especially privileged man of the people to the position of spokesman for a “socialist” National Socialist Party in western Germany; the conqueror of “red Berlin” and creator of a “Führer” aura around the figure of Hitler by adroit use of propaganda between 1926 and 1933; the man who united the masses into a “national community” behind Hitler in the years after 1933; and finally the closest supporter of his leader, spurring the German people to a supreme effort in wartime. The core of this autobiographical narrative has survived to this day in various forms, albeit in a negative context. Ever since Goebbels’s death, the material created by him and his colleagues has been put to multimedia use and has remained influential. No film, no schoolbook, no popular or academic treatment of the Third Reich can manage without this material. Everyone now knows what is meant by “Goebbels propaganda.” No one looking for an explanation for the obvious support the Nazi system enjoyed among the great majority of the German population can afford to overlook Joseph Goebbels.

A particular challenge facing the propaganda minister’s biographer is that of questioning the self-portrait so effectively created by Goebbels and thoroughly revising his historical role. The biographer’s chief problem from the outset is, in fact, that the vast mass of material about the propaganda minister and Gauleiter of Berlin originates either with him or with his propaganda machine and was presented for the purpose of demonstrating the preeminence and unique historical success of Joseph Goebbels. However, closer analysis reveals that the large number of texts Goebbels wrote about himself and the wealth of material that his propaganda machine used to document his influence offer a surprising number of starting points for deconstructing the self-image Goebbels projected.

As the author and chief propagandist of the Third Reich, Goebbels was concerned above all to hold up a mirror with which to admire a larger-than-life reflection of himself. Gazing into this mirror, he could give full vent to his narcissistic cravings. Lacking both inner balance and external confidence and profoundly mistrusting his effect on other people, he needed constant affirmation that the magnificent image in the mirror really did represent him, Joseph Goebbels. He derived this affirmation from the leader he had chosen, a leader sent from God, as he supposed, to whom he subordinated himself. The more completely he subjugated himself, the more weight he ascribed to the judgment of this idol.

The mountains of evidence Goebbels left to posterity that demonstrate his self-affirmation and self-adulation in fact serve to bring out very clearly his insecurity, his dependence, and his overwhelming conceit. In this historical biography, first and foremost concerned with the question of the part played by Goebbels in the leadership of the Third Reich, insights gained into the deficiencies of his personality can help to develop wider perspectives. A particular purpose of this biography is to open the way to an analysis of the construction and modus operandi of the Nazi propaganda apparatus.

The conventional approach to the history of organizations and structures cannot quite encompass the position Goebbels built up for himself over time through accumulating and, in part, amalgamating various offices. It was historically unique and completely tailor-made for him, bearing the stamp of his personality through and through. Only a biography, therefore, can make it fully intelligible. He combined the offices of Gauleiter of Berlin, head of propaganda for the Party, and leader of a ministry that was especially invented for him and united the management of the mass media with the National Socialist control of cultural life. In addition, he was tasked with certain special functions, again tailor-made for him, for example in the area of foreign policy. To the extent that Goebbels succeeded during the war in extending his authority beyond propaganda into other spheres, eventually assuming a central role in the conduct of the nonmilitary side of the war effort, it was—as we shall see—a result of his attempt to shape the public sphere into his desired image, particularly under the conditions of the “total war” he himself propagated. The connections, often quite subtle, among his various responsibilities become apparent only through a description of his life.

A Goebbels biography not only enables us to take a look behind the scenes by bringing together a multiplicity of sources to show how Nazi propaganda was conceived and carried out; it can also question the frequently asserted omnipotence of Goebbels’s propaganda. Here, the deconstruction of Goebbels’s self-constructed image, as bequeathed to posterity, of the brilliant director of propaganda plays a central role. It will become clear that narcissistic self-elevation not only represented an important aspect of Goebbels’s character but was also decisive in creating the image he built up over the years, so powerful that it was by no means demolished even by his death. It will be apparent that Goebbels was not the absolute master of the whole propaganda machine, as he liked to think, but that in some areas, at least, he was obliged to share his responsibilities with other Nazi apparatchiks. Above all, however, we shall see that the enormous impact claimed for propaganda by the National Socialists, and particularly by Goebbels himself, was itself an integral component of Goebbels’s propaganda. The importance of a biographical approach is emphasized by the fact that the man who asserted the all-powerful effect of propaganda was a textbook case of self-overestimation who had difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction.

Moreover, biography can make an important contribution to the general history of the Third Reich. Goebbels, with his diaries, has left us the most important insider’s chronicle of Nazism and its Führer, from the re-founding of the Party in 1924–25 until the end of the regime. No other source of insight into the inner workings of Nazi power can compare. True, Goebbels often stood outside the decision-making process, but he did have the opportunity to observe at close quarters how decisions were arrived at. With his fixation on Hitler and consequent inability to take a critical view of him, he often gives us a unique and peculiarly authentic perspective on the dictator.

The diaries, the basis of this biography and one of the chief sources for histories of the Third Reich, were transcribed many years ago for publication without notes or commentary. But to give them their full value as a historical source we need to analyze the propaganda minister’s personality and ambitions. This book is the product of a double process: evaluating the diaries as a historical source for a biography and interpreting them in the light of the author’s personality. Particularly in the early years, the diary was a site of self-reflection and self-criticism for Goebbels. But quite soon it began chiefly to serve the purpose of confirming his successes to himself, consolidating his success story, brushing aside failures and setbacks, constantly reinforcing his own morale, and driving him forward along the path taken. If the self-critical passages are the most interesting parts of the earliest diary, the almost complete absence of self-criticism is perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of the later volumes.

The diaries had a further function as a place for Goebbels to deposit material he would go on to use elsewhere. Textual comparisons reveal how the diary corresponds with his publicity-oriented and literary writing as well as with his private letters. No clear distinctions can be made: The diary is frequently the first draft of a literary treatment, perhaps consisting of colorful descriptions of individuals, dramatized events, evocations of atmosphere, or aphorisms. The writer of the diary was not just a chronicler but also a journalist and a literary author, collecting impressions and trying out various forms. Once he had gained a foothold in politics at the end of the 1920s, his ideas about the secondary uses of the diary became more concrete. It served him now, above all, as the basis for publications centered on the recording of political chronology. Its utility can be seen, for example, in books such as
Kampf um Berlin
(Battle for Berlin, 1931) or
Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei
(From the Kaiserhof [Hotel] to the Reich Chancellery, 1934), where he was chiefly concerned with one thing only: the success story of Joseph Goebbels. Eventually, in 1936, he sold the right to publish the diaries—after revision—to the Party’s publisher, Max Amann and also planned to draw on them for publications connected with a projected official history of the Third Reich.
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The variety of ways in which Goebbels proposed to utilize the diaries should be borne in mind when reading them.

Not least, though, the purpose of the diary was to provide an aide-mémoire and logbook of events, and this function increased with the growing range of offices that the propaganda minister acquired. An important turning point was the start of hostilities against the Soviet Union. The entries were now no longer handwritten but dictated to a secretary, with the result that the personal content of the texts was further diminished, and the diary became diffused and inflated by the admixture of other texts—military situation reports, the minister’s official correspondence, and whatever else was lying around on his desk.