"The Goebbels Experiment"

When I was a boy old books spurred my fascination with World War II .  My grandfathers had both fought—one in North Africa and Italy and the other in Germany.  When I would pour over my Grandpa Mel’s books, which my Grandma LaVerne kept beside his medals and rucksack in her apartment, “Vernie” as I’d call her, would sometimes characterize some of the war’s major characters.  Vernie had a way of quickly summing up a person:  “He was a general” or “He was a real jerk.”  

When I pointed to a slicked, beady-eyed man screaming behind a microphone she said, “That’s Goebbels.  He was evil.”

As the “Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” Joseph Goebbles directed the sinister pageantry of the Third Reich and after the Weirmacht's calamitous defeat at Stalingrad, Hitler slithered into isolation and confidence in him ebbed and Goebbels became the reptilian face of the German war effort.  What Vernie likely remembered was the news reels of the Fuhrerbunker in bombed out Berlin.  (It is interesting that what lives after him is a propaganda film!)  In these notorious images, the camera sweeps over the dead bodies of Goebbels's six murdered children lying beside the charred corpses of their father and mother.  The Reichminister had decided he would die beside Hitler thus condemning his whole family as well as his name. 

In “The Goebbels Experiment” Lutz Hachmeister  has skillfully pieced together film reels from Weimar to bunker Berlin to tell the story of Goebbels very public life.  Kenneth Branagh provides a narration of excerpts from Goebbels diaries. 

The person that emerges from the excerpted diaries is not some angel of evil but a highly literate (he received his PhD in literature) and vain careerist whose petty quarrels and political jockeying belie a gnawing and ever-present insecurity, especially about being an intellectual in a party that denounced reason.  He had much to be insecure about.  To one reporter, “He had a gaunt, rather small body, a disproportionately large head, and an incredible mouth…a mouth that cut his face in two.  I noticed particularly that, even then, he moved a bit like a puppet.”  Francis Bacon once modeled the mouth of his screaming Pope on Goebbels in full harangue.   

He was a failed writer a poor journalist; he was awkward, club-footed, homely, and effeminate.  In his early years as a Nazi activist, there were even rumors he was homosexual.  When working for the Angriff (The Assault) he mastered the art of lying, manipulation, and poured his failed literary ambitions and insecurities into his personal diaries.

When discussing his relationship with Magda it was not enough to love her, he needed to “possess” her.  She must “belong” to him.  And what was the point of having six children if not showing of your virility and extreme commitment to the cause of National Socialism. 

Hachmeister's reels excel in that they remove the fanatical fire of a Goebbels speech by supplying his cynical and dryly precise analysis of them.  Goebbels is interested not so much in the content, but the coherence of speech, the facial expressions of the orator, and the care and precision of each gesture.  They were merely theatrical work.  Nothing more.  He may have believed whole-heartedly in the principles of the Reich, who’s to say?  But what the director highlights are the unprincipled ambitions in Goebbels core and an insatiable desire to be accepted.  Need Germans to commit to some vague notion of “total war”? No problem, a speech will do!  Destroyed cities and ruined buildings are deflating morale?  All the more reason for a new propaganda film and radio address!  There is a twisted elation in the destruction of war as a means of receiving the washing acclaim of the crowd, the heartfelt appreciation of the destitute.      

But I think the great Austrian radical Ernst Fischer captured the sickening feeling in the experience of Nazi theatricality--the evil of their propaganda in his memoir, An Opposing Man.  Though he was writing about Hitler, he could just as easily have been writing about Goebbels: 

I loathed everything about him, his voice, his face, his figure, his form of expression, his gestures, the very least of his pronouncements.  Although he did not drink, he was the beery smog of all beer cellars made flesh, a doper drinking himself crowd-silly, after every mass-meeting drained, drooping and pallid, seemingly wading through slime.  And beforehand, the baying, the bellowing, the screaming of the little man in the throes of hysteria, gone off the rails, the déclassé petit-bourgeois turned gangster, an amalgam of pity for himself and vindictiveness towards all those who have made something of their lives—the skilled worker, the noted writer, architect or painter, the senior executive officer—a pariah dog taking his cue from a werewolf, a man gone down in the world, self-commiserating and ruthless, perfidious and attitudinizing, struggling to reach the top by fair means or foul, a sob in his throat, teeth bared, a sham Nero dreaming of ovations, of artistic renown, of holocausts, the rabble-rousing genius of complete dehumanization.