Goebbels: A Biography (22 page)

In the meantime, great changes were occurring in Goebbels’s private life. After several affairs, he had at last found a partner he thought worthy of comparison with Anka.

The first mention of her in the diary came on November 7, 1930: “A lovely woman called Quandt is reorganizing my private papers.” But it was more than three months, during which Goebbels was involved in a whole series of other affairs, before the couple got closer to each other. On February 15, 1932, he wrote in the diary: “Magda Quandt comes in the evening. And stays for a very long time. And blossoms into an enchanting blond sweetness. You really are my queen.” He added a little “1” in brackets, which we can take to indicate that this was the first time he slept with Magda.
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Magda Quandt, twenty-nine years old at this point, was a cultivated and well-educated young woman of elegant appearance, self-assured and completely independent. Her mother had divorced her husband, the Berlin building developer Oskar Ritschel, in 1905,
and married the leather-goods magnate Richard Friedländer, who adopted Magda. In 1920 Magda met the industrialist Günther Quandt, who was nearly twice her age. The ill-matched pair were married in 1921.
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At the end of 1921 her son Harald was born. But the couple soon drifted apart. Quandt was interested in little but the expansion of his business empire, and he neglected his young wife, who was left with the household to run as well as no fewer than six children to bring up. Apart from Harald, there were two sons from Quandt’s previous marriage, and he had also taken in the three children of a friend who had died. Overburdened, Magda yearned in vain to play an active part in the cultural and social life of 1920s Berlin.
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After Quandt discovered that Magda was having an affair with a student, he separated from her, and in 1929 she succeeded in obtaining a financially advantageous divorce. It was agreed that Harald should live with his mother until he was fourteen, and then—as the future heir to a business empire—live with his father.
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The divorcée Frau Quandt had begun to take an interest in the NSDAP in the summer of 1930, had joined the Party, and was looking for some practical activity within the Berlin Gau. Taking over responsibility for the Gauleiter’s private papers seemed to her a highly suitable occupation. On February 21 Goebbels took his new lover and a group of other acquaintances on a short trip to Weimar, of all places, where he had an engagement to keep; they stayed for two days. It is no wonder that his brief meeting with Anka during this time in Weimar was a very chilly occasion.
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Not long afterward, when Magda was visiting him again, they had their “first argument,” caused by a “careless word” from him and ending with her leaving his apartment in tears. But they made up the next day.
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She now visited him often, and the numbers he gives in brackets beneath the dates of her visits show that their evenings together went off very successfully from his point of view: “She goes home late (2:3),” “Magda in the evening (4:5),” “Magda (6:7).”
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The relationship was not trouble-free; they often argued, but the new stimulus that had entered his life seemed to suit Goebbels, although he often had to remind himself that this new bond must not be allowed to jeopardize his real mission: “Then Magda came, there was love, an argument, and then love again (8:9). She is a fabulous child. However, I must not lose myself in her. But the work is too
great and too momentous for that.”
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It was clear to him: “The Party comes first, then Magda.”
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He got to know her son Harald, and he took her with him on an Easter trip to Munich, where among other things she met Hitler.
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In April there was the first serious crisis in their relationship. For days on end he tried in vain to get through to her by telephone. When she finally answered, Goebbels was to discover that her former lover had by no means disappeared from her life: “The man she was in love with before me has shot and seriously injured her in her apartment. Now she’s completely finished. I can tell from her voice that I’m going to lose her. I’m plunged into the deepest despair. I see from this how deeply I love Magda.”
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In reality, either Magda had overdramatized the situation or Goebbels’s nerves had gotten the better of him. Magda had not suffered any bullet wound. But even so, the next few days were sheer agony for Goebbels:
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“There is something unspoken between us. I think it’s the other man, her former lover. She disputes this. Our arguments are becoming fiercer.” She would not let him forbid her to make a farewell visit to her ex-lover, and she left his apartment in tears.
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But a few days later all was sweetness and light again.
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The couple spent Whitsun in Severin, a country estate in Mecklenburg owned by Magda’s ex-husband.
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Eventually the two of them began to make plans for the future: “We have made a solemn vow to each other: When we have conquered the Reich, we will become man and wife. I am very happy.”
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Anka, informed by him in June about the new relationship, was “quite shattered […] and refuses to believe it. So she thinks she can win me back again. But it’s all too late. I am with Magda, and I’m staying with her.”
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Credit 8.1

A picnic in summer 1931. In the foreground, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, behind them Julius Schaub, Adolf Hitler, Erna Hoffmann, and Johanna Wolff. Shortly after Goebbels had introduced Magda to Hitler’s court, the latter confessed to him that he had fallen in love with Magda. Eventually a solution to the problem was found that was acceptable to all three parties.

Goebbels and Magda spent July 1931 as guests of Magda’s grandmother at her house in the Schleswig-Holstein seaside resort of St. Peter-Ording.
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“Magda is like a mother and a lover to me,”
²
he wrote. “She loves as only a great woman can.”
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He was enjoying himself: “Work, love, sun, and happiness. What more do I want?” But there
was a “shadow” over all of this happiness: “Magda loved somebody else before me. That pains me and tortures me.”
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The man in question was certainly not her ex-husband, Günther Quandt, but Magda’s lover from the last years of her marriage. When Magda told him about her past love life, he found her “heartless” and was regularly overcome by fits of jealousy: an argument always ensued.
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His trust in her was “shaken,” he confided to his diary: “She has loved too much and only told me some fragments of it. And now I lie here until the early hours racked by jealousy.”
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He found consolation in his work on
Battle for Berlin
, in which he set out to tell the story of his early years in the capital.
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By the beginning of August he was back in Berlin, to find that publication of
Der Angriff
, which had already been halted by the authorities for a week while he was on vacation, was now prohibited once again. Although the ban was lifted the next day, by the end of the month there followed yet another prohibition lasting a further week.
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The frequent bans were a clear indication that his radical line was meeting with resistance from the state, and this was significant for the future policy of the wider Party beyond Berlin.

Once Goebbels had found his footing as chief of propaganda for the Reich, there began for him—about a year after the landslide electoral success of the NSDAP—a phase in which his focus increasingly shifted from Berlin affairs to the policy of the Party as a whole. This is particularly reflected in his diaries. After autumn 1931, for Goebbels and the Party elite, the question of participating in government or even of seizing power altogether moved into the realm of the politically possible. Even though, until January 1933, Goebbels was not directly involved in the negotiations that were to bring the NSDAP to power (for this purpose, Hitler preferred to be accompanied by Göring, Frick, Röhm, and Strasser), as Gauleiter of Berlin he usually received firsthand information about the outcome of discussions.

The diaries record the tactical maneuvers of the NSDAP leaders at this time, and they reveal above all how much direct and indirect influence the Party exerted on the policies of the presidential cabinets in the final phase of the Brüning government. But they also show how, as Goebbels saw it, increasing proximity to power revealed potential internal divisions within the Party. In particular he was worried that Hitler might be drawn too close to his potential allies in the
conservative camp, an orientation that would lead to open conflict within Party ranks. Goebbels therefore continued to profile himself as the representative of a radical course, thereby setting himself against Hitler’s emphasis on a “law-abiding” strategy. However, he always managed to survive inner Party conflicts by his ostentatious deference to the Party leader and his vows of personal loyalty to him.

In August an important decision was imminent: a referendum in Prussia following the so-called Stahlhelm petition, which the NSDAP supported, if half-heartedly. Goebbels disliked collaborating with bourgeois elements. The referendum concerned the dissolution of the Prussian Landtag, which was dominated by a “Weimar coalition” consisting of the SPD, the Center Party, and the DVP. The aim was ultimately to make the Brüning government’s position untenable. A petition in April proposing dissolution had only just achieved the necessary quorum. After the initiative had been rejected by the Prussian Landtag, a referendum (obligatory under the Prussian constitution if a petition was voted down by Parliament) was set to take place on August 9. In addition to the NSDAP, the project was supported by the DVP, the DNVP, and the KPD.
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But the referendum failed: Only 36.8 percent of voters on the register were in favor of an early dissolution of the Landtag (50 percent was the required level of support for the project to become law over the head of the Parliament). Goebbels saw this as a “heavy defeat” into which “the Stahlhelm have dragged us.” The conclusion he drew—and immediately communicated to Hitler by telephone—was: “So: enough of this bourgeois pap. We must be masterful and more rigorous. National Socialists. There lies redemption.” He doubted whether power could be obtained “quite so legally.”
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In
Der Angriff
he declared that “after an action initiated by others which was tactically inept and which therefore failed,” the NSDAP must set about “making clear—publicly, not just internally—the factors that led to this debacle.”
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When he traveled to Munich shortly afterward to check up on things there, he was still fuming about the Party leadership: “This rabble. They’ve got no initiative in Munich. Party bureaucracy. Without
the boss [Hitler was away] a dead torso without a head.” By contrast, his discussions with Max Amann, head of the Eher Verlag, had an extremely gratifying outcome: Amann offered him—voluntarily, as Goebbels took the trouble to emphasize—an advance of 3,000 marks for his
Battle for Berlin
. A new publishing contract for
Der Angriff
was also agreed on, which reinforced Goebbels’s authority.
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A few days later he met Hitler in the Berlin Kaiserhof. The Party leader seemed to him much too optimistic in his conviction that he could bring about the “breakup” of the Brüning coalition. He found Hitler’s “grand strategy” brilliant but thought he ought to “pay more attention to the movement. He’s too wrapped up in tactics.”
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Goebbels was obviously not aware at this point that Strasser and Frick had already been deputed by Hitler to lay the groundwork for future cooperation between the NSDAP, the Stahlhelm, and the DNVP. This collaborative venture was to be publicly consolidated at a combined mass rally planned for autumn 1931.
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