B006OAL1QM EBOK (9 page)

And so the gushing words are resumed in the style of a teen-age boy. Yet, it must be remembered, Goebbels now was twenty-eight years old. Else's explanation gives another point of view. She remembers him now to have been boyishly energetic and as moodily temperamental as an adolescent. In spite of the way he writes in his diary, she claims it was always he who pursued her, and not the reverse. She was fond of him and gave way to him, but as time passed and he did not change she wanted more and more to break their engagement off. But at Düsseldorf he prevailed once more, pleading himself as he claims she pleaded with him.

So relations were resumed again. In January it is “lovely hours…. Walked along the Rhine arm-in-arm. No money for lunch. And yet so happy, so contented … farewell, you sweet woman.” On 31st January he writes succinctly: “Sent Else a nasty letter”; no more. In February he could afford to be patronising: “She had tears in her eyes when she left. How small and touching are her little troubles! It is pouring with rain.” In April he awaits her with passion. “There is so much yearning in me,” he cries.

By early summer Goebbels, as we shall see, was suffering from inordinate vanity because of the special attentions paid to him by Hitler. In June the diary begins to refer to renewed differences between the lovers, and in the middle of the month he writes: “Else sends me a brief and frightfully matter-of-fact letter breaking it all off. What am I to do? She is, of course, completely right. We can no longer be even comrades to one another. Between us there is a whole world.”

Fundamental to these differences now was the fact that Else had Jewish blood in her veins and belonged by temperament and upbringing to the comfortable middle class of the Rhineland. But by the end of July she was back again. “Letter from Else. Forget the past. That is Else all over! I sometimes can't understand at all why she loves me so. In a way she is really a little petty bourgeoise.” Nevertheless he accepted her return with some display of ardour. “Am I a woman-eater?” he asks himself after they had met by chance when she joined the train at Duisburg just as he was hoping to establish satisfactory relations with a pretty woman he had found on the journey! But you cannot eat your cake and have it. In September it was all over. “Else wrote me a farewell letter. So be it.
In Gottes Namen!”
They met to say good-bye. “Oh how it hurts. She goes, never to come back.” Within a few weeks he was in Berlin for good, and the tortuous, tormenting love affair was finally over.

It is not without interest that Else's friend Alma was at any rate for a while in his thoughts even when he was ostensibly engaged to Else. He writes as if he had a brief affair with her possibly when Else was on holiday in Switzerland during August 1925. There are slight references to other girls which suggest casual love affairs. And Goebbels' sense of the dramatic could not be satisfied unless he was able to toy with his memories from the past. The troubled relation with Anka had lasted almost as long as the affair with Else, and he likes to recall it now and then. “These days I think so much of Anka,
dieses prächtige Frauen-zimmer
…. Anka, I'll never, never forget you… She certainly doesn't think of me … Why did Anka have to leave me alone? Was it a breach of promise? And if so, was it on her part or mine? I mustn't think about these things. Only work can relieve me of my anguish.”

People who are uncertain in their understanding of human relationships frequently seek an emotional substitute in pets. The Goebbels family had a pet Alsatian called Benno, and throughout the period of his work in Elberfeld Goebbels was always trying to get hold of Benno. in spite of the unsuitability of his mode of life for looking after an animal, particularly one of Benno's size. But Benno was another outlet for Goebbels' ill-spent emotions, and he frequently appears in the diary. “Benno's such a clever animal,” he remarks after taking him for a walk in Rheydt. “Dogs so often put us humans to shame by their loyalty and their kindness.” In June 1926 he was making one of his efforts to get the family to send Benno to Elberfeld. “I look forward to getting this good friend to live with me again. Maybe he will be my only real friend.” Later, when Benno had arrived, he notes: “Benno lying under the bed and snoring away. He is like me, alternating between complete inertia and wild bouts of chasing. In a way, that is what I really want. A bit of fighting for me is as important as water for a fish.”

The struggle that he made out of his work and the worry that this gave him he relieved by ceaseless intrigue to better his junior position in the
Gau
office. For it is now, so late in his life, that his prolonged adolescence seems to have passed and his character as a mature man began to take its shape. He still, however, had a boyish yearning for his week-ends at home with the family, though his relations with his father were by no means happy. To both himself and to them he played the part of the over-worked enthusiast who always had a mountain of administrative labour waiting for him whenever he returned from the crowded halls where he had rushed to address audiences that hung gripped and tense on his two-hour orations before relaxing into prolonged applause. He is coyness itself about his need for sleep, even though he is, after all, only addressing his own image on paper. “Work galore … I'm fagged out. I ought to sleep for a year…. Lots of post and work. I'm so tired, so tired…. I look forward to Christmas! That means quiet, quiet!… Good night!” he says, peeping at himself from his notebook. “So tired, so tired” recurs on page after page.

The theme became an obsession with him. “I am desperate. I am up to my eyes in work. I don't know where to turn. I've bitten off more than I can chew…. And I must do everything alone. Horrible slave-driving…. Mother, help me. I can't go on. I barely weigh a hundred pounds. They are exploiting me with far too much work.”

In May 1926 he wrote: “I shouldn't like any more to have so much talking to do. Much rather devote myself to the paper and administration. Though even there I would have more work than is good for my health.” On 29th October 1925, his twenty-eighth birthday, he says: “I'm getting old. It makes me shudder to notice it. My hair is beginning to fall out. On the way to getting bald. But in my heart I want to remain young for ever and ever.” Three months later he writes: “I look completely emaciated. Horrible!” Even the suspicion he might be ill excites him. In September he feared for his nerves: “I shall have a nervous breakdown. I am absolutely a nervous wreck.” In December he suffers a typical attack of depression: “Terribly depressed once again…. At such times I suffer the most horrible hours of my life. Particularly when quite alone in a slow train home. Sometimes I
yearn
for a
family
and
peace
. Stay still, my heart!!” He hated the trains and the long hours away. “Once again homelessly
drifting
for a
whole week
. Oh, what an
awful, merciless
world!… Woe to him who hasn't a home!” He even feared he had tuberculosis when he had a pain in his back. However, he may well have rather fancied these depressions as a necessary element in his complex and interesting character. In September 1925 he says the opposite: “Off again soon. Back to the gypsy life. But I love that sort of life very much,” and again later on: “Now the travelling starts again…. There's a relief in the energy of moving about.” With another burst of coyness he calls himself “you old restless”. He rather fancied his peripatetic nature.

Goebbels' diminutive salary of 200 marks a month (£10 according to the value of the time) was a constant worry to him. Virtually the first entry of the diary is: “No money.” On 14th August he cries out to himself: “Money. Money. Money. I am completely broke. It's enough to make one sick.” The following day he had to telegraph home for assistance, and there are many later references to the inadequacy of his salary to make ends meet. In January 1926 he complains that his debts are weighing on him.

Usually it was to the family that he turned to get him out of financial trouble. But life at home was not always easy, mainly because of his father. “Father is always the same, a good, well-meaning bourgeois.”

“Two days in Rheydt. Much joy, but also a good deal of trouble and annoyance.” The main cause of the trouble between father and son was Goebbels' apostasy. “From home not a word for quite some time now. The family is angry with me. I am an apostate.” “I have got into a hell of a lot of trouble so that I wouldn't mind leaving again right away. But I don't, because I don't want to hurt mother.” But generally his visits home were happy ones. “They spoil me with all their blessings and their kindness and love.” “Tomorrow I will stay home. That is what I look forward to with all my heart. I suppose that at home, after all, they are really my best friends. How much have I lost? And what have I got in exchange for it?” This last remark was written in August 1926 when he had already secured the attention of Hitler.

His relations with the Party were as deliberately complex and passionate as his relations with women. In August 1925, when the diary begins, he had worked for only a few months and was in a very junior position. Nevertheless his vanity was roused because of his success as a speaker, and he set himself out to charm his immediate superior in the
Gau
office at Elberfeld, Karl Kaufmann, and his ultimate superiors, the men who had engaged him, Gregor and Otto Strasser of Berlin. His duties were threefold—to speak as an agitator, to edit a new political magazine sponsored by the Strassers, the
National-sozialistische Briefe
(the first issue of which appeared in October 1925), and to attend to organising work in the office.

When Gregor Strasser proposed in August to found the journal, Goebbels' heart leapt up. He saw himself rising to heights in the North German Party group—"headquarters, Elberfeld; senior partner, me,” he writes with joy. “A paper to come out every fortnight. Publisher, Strasser. Editor—
moi
! Just as we want it.” Now he was all in favour of Strasser's radical interpretation of National Socialism because through it he could channel his ambitions. By September he was absorbed in preparations for the first issue.

Reading the diary quite literally one would be excused for assuming that, apart from Kaufmann, Goebbels was the senior official and responsible directly to Strasser. Yet until Hitler seduced him from Strasser, mainly in the summer of 1926, Kaufmann claims that he held only a very junior position and had no say in Party policy. He was solely the agent of the Strassers and Kaufmann. It was therefore his day-dream of power and his mounting vanity that made him write as if he were the equal of his employers, and after a while in some measure their superior.

Until his later conversion, Goebbels was entirely for the Strassers. For example, in October he writes: “Had a long and comprehensive talk with Strasser, and complete unanimity was reached.” “Strasser speaks. Splendid… With wit and keenness and irony and everything.” “Strasser isn't nearly as much of a bourgeois as I took him to be.” In November (at Berlin) Otto has his turn of favour. “Strasser's brother is just as decent a chap. I want to make him my friend.” On this same occasion Goebbels was “deeply impressed” by Ludendorff who spoke to him “for a long time”. In December he manages to get in a gesture of superiority when he was asked, according to Kaufmann, to do some drafting on a Party programme. Goebbels himself writes as if they had turned to him in despair.
“Strasser's draft is inadequate,”
he writes, underlined. In January, however, it is “complete agreement on everything”. In March “Strasser is quite a man!” and “What a wonderful Bavarian type he is. I am very fond of him.” After this he was gradually to become more critical as he fell increasingly under Hitler's spell.

In a similar way at first he made up to Kaufmann, the district Gauleiter, to whose staff he was attached. Kaufmann, nevertheless, was slightly younger than Goebbels which put him at some disadvantage. In September he reached the stage of using the intimate term of address with his chief: “Now I am calling Kaufmann
du
. I am very fond of him.” In October they helped to celebrate each other's birthdays which happened to fall in the same month. Goebbels was very pleased: “Letter from Kaufmann. Birthday letter. What a dear, kind chap! It's made me very happy…. Kaufmann my loyal, good comrade!” However, Kaufmann, unlike the Strassers, had the misfortune of working in the same office as his subordinate, and this soon made him the object of criticism and the subject for intrigue. By November there are references to “having it out with Kaufmann”. In January he adopts a new, superior attitude to his chief. “Am worrying about my friend Karl Kaufmann. He is much too unbridled. Perhaps I can help him…. Kaufmann is too good-natured and soft.” On 1st February he wrote: “Kaufmann doesn't treat me as a friend should be treated, and I stand here with my hands tied.”

When confronted recently with the diary, Kaufmann did not know whether to laugh or be angry. Goebbels, he claims, was an inveterate intriguer and as jealous as a woman if his chief paid attention to anyone beside himself. The troubles recorded in the diary were mostly of his own making through his suspicion that he was not for some reason the centre of Kaufmann's attention, and he could bear no form of criticism whatsoever. These were the ‘differences' that had constantly to be cleared up with Kaufmann inside or outside the office. In January Goebbels becomes openly scornful: “Am worried greatly about Karl Kaufmann. He is sometimes so strange and unsure of himself.” “Kaufmann seems to be toying with a dictatorship, but he is much too soft to be a Fuhrer.” “I fear,” he says at the end of the month, “that I am going to lose Kaufmann before long.” He was paying too much attention, apparently, to someone else. In February Kaufmann “is so confused and on edge. Much of it, of course, is his own fault.” February in any case was a month of crisis between Hitler and the Strassers; Goebbels records ‘heart-to-heart’ talks with Kaufmann to get things off his chest. “I would like to hug him,” he concludes with satisfaction. But by April he goes so far as to think that Kaufmann is jealous of his success. Goebbels' ambition was beginning to batten on Hitler.