Synopsis
Eyewitness accounts, diaries, and archival material help to reconstruct the life of the head of the Nazi propaganda ministry
Reviews
Hitler's most faithful vassal and the only major Nazi to remain with him to the end, Josef Goebbels (1897-1945) used his position as Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment to convince much of the German populace that their Fuhrer was a virtual god, the would-be savior of the fatherland. In this assiduously researched biography, Reuth, a German journalist, presents new material on Goebbels's role in the Rohm putsch, the campaign against the Jews, the response to the July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life and the final days in the fuhrerbunker in the spring of 1945. Reuth takes a close look at Goebbels's formative years, his early career as a journalist, the development of his talent for agitation and propaganda and his fateful vision of Hitler as all-powerful father figure. He also explores how Goebbels compensated for his short stature and club foot, with emphasis on extramarital affairs including the extraordinary story of Goebbels's passionate liaison with Czech actress Lida Baarova, a relationship that Hitler himself ended. Although Reuth's writing style may not be compelling, the documented facts of Goebbels's life as they unfold here hold the reader's interest. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Impressive, well-translated (from the German) life of the notorious Nazi propaganda chief and anti-Semite, much of it drawn from new sources. To tell the story of Goebbels--a leading architect of Nazi style, and the man perhaps closest to Hitler--Reuth (a reporter for the Frankfurter All-gemeine Zeitung) uses material uncovered from Staasi files and personal papers owned by a Swiss attorney. Goebbels's nightmarish childhood in a poor, hard-working Roman Catholic family is nicely explicated, and the author shows how the boy--repeatedly ill and rejected by schoolmates and his mother (who considered her son's clubfoot to be a divine punishment)-- discovered books while in the hospital for a failed operation. Reuth captures Goebbels as a young, liberal socialist and aspiring writer, willing to lie and steal, fascinated with drama, his work dominated by Nietzsche and Spengler and his personal life dominated by a taste for women above his station. Similarly, the author captures post WW-II Germany, and how this desperate country--in which no kind of ability, industry, or talent was a guarantee against poverty--nurtured Goebbels's search for a savior who could galvanize the stricken Volk and satisfy his own personal longings as well. Hitler is shown doing with Goebbels what he did with all his followers--giving the future propaganda minister belief and energy, then stripping him of convictions and reducing him to a slave (albeit an effective one), whose campaign to launch a pro- Nazi newspaper proved to be a master-stroke of media manipulation generations ahead of its time. Before long, Goebbels, who'd studied under Jews he liked and respected, became under Hitler's rule the ``twisted dwarf'' of Kristallnacht. A harrowing account that focuses clearly on the man and his long degeneration rather than on his politics. (Thirty-three b&w photographs--not seen) -- Copyright 1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Unlike his f{}uhrer, who assiduously erased most traces of his background, the reich minister for public enlightenment and propaganda spewed out torrents of verbiage from youthful days and preserved almost all of it. But it has been secret until recently, as were two other sources, his diaries from 1944 to 1945 and court proceedings against him in the 1920s, when he created the National Socialist force in Berlin from scratch, chiefly by instigating street battles that produced broken Communist heads and martyred brownshirts. With new material to work from, Reuth seizes the biographical opportunity to sketch a man of chillingly analytical, clear-sighted mendacity, a tragic figure only to the extent that his end, as a charred corpse in Berlin, was in such ignoble contrast to his origin. Since he was the hope of his devout Rhinelander family, his father spared no sacrifice for his son's education, which bent toward the literary studies in which he earned a Ph.D. But somewhere in his 20s--in his resentment at not being published and reduced to clerking in a bank--young Joseph became a radical socialist. All the more poignant the paternal query, quoted by Reuth: "Do you intend to take up a profession unsuitable for a Catholic?" Of course he did, and scored a critical success in creating the f{}uhrer myth of the 1930s, that Hitler was Providence's agent to redeem the Germans from their woes. As commander of German press and radio, who, words and lies aside, personally contributed to the Final Solution by making Berlin "Jew free," Goebbels isn't easy to sympathize with, but Reuth avoids easy indignation to present insights not just into the horror but also into the internal politics of fanatical Nazidom. A definitive account. Gilbert Taylor
Why another book on the master of propaganda for the Third Reich? According to Reuth, a correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a number of years have passed since there has been a good biography on Goebbels. Furthermore, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, some additional new diaries of the former Nazi and other documentation have come to light. Reuth traces Goebbels's life from a strict, lower-middle class, Catholic family, through his education and eventually his captivation by Adolf Hitler. Reuth's writing style is lucid, which makes the complexities of the Nazi propaganda chief a little easier for the general reader to follow. Still, the student of Nazi Germany will learn nothing new from this book. For public libraries that have no works on Goebbels; in any case, the book should be augmented by the diaries: The Early Goebbels Diaries (1962), Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels (1978), and The Goebbels Diaries 1939-1941 (1983).
Dennis L. Noble, Eastern Montana Coll., Billings
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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