Joseph Goebbels - Early Life

Early Life

Goebbels was born in Rheydt, an industrial town south of Mönchengladbach on the edge of the Ruhr district. His family were Catholics; his father was a factory clerk, his mother originally a farmhand. Goebbels had four siblings: Hans (1893–1947), Konrad (1895–1949), Elisabeth (1901–1915) and Maria (1910–1949; married to the German filmmaker Max W. Kimmich). He was educated at a Christian Gymnasium, where he completed his Abitur (university entrance examination) in 1916. He had a deformed right leg, the result either of club foot or osteomyelitis. William L. Shirer, who worked in Berlin as a journalist in the 1930s and was acquainted with Goebbels, wrote in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) that the deformity was from a childhood attack of osteomyelitis and a failed operation to correct it. Goebbels wore a metal brace and special shoe because of his shortened leg, but nevertheless walked with a limp. He was rejected for military service in World War I, which he bitterly resented. He later sometimes misrepresented himself as a war veteran and his disability as a war wound. He acted as an "office soldier" from June to October 1917 in Rheydt's "Patriotic Help Unit".

Goebbels attended the boarding school of German Franciscan brothers in Bleijerheide, Kerkrade in the Netherlands. Gradually losing his Catholic faith, he studied literature and philosophy at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg and Heidelberg, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on a minor 19th century romantic dramatist, Wilhelm von Schütz. His two most influential teachers, Friedrich Gundolf and his doctoral supervisor at Heidelberg, Max Freiherr von Waldberg, were Jews. His intelligence and political astuteness were generally acknowledged even by his enemies.

After completing his doctorate in 1921, Goebbels worked as a journalist and tried for several years to become a published author. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Michael, two verse plays, and quantities of romantic poetry. In these works, he revealed the psychological damage his physical limitations (having a clubbed foot, and, in a lesser sense being so far from the Aryan ideal, having brown eyes and dark brown hair and standing at only 5'5) had caused. "The very name of the hero, Michael, to whom he gave many autobiographical features, suggests the way his self-identification was pointing: a figure of light, radiant, tall, unconquerable," and above all "'To be a soldier! To stand sentinel! One ought always to be a soldier,' wrote Michael-Goebbels." Goebbels found another form of compensation in the pursuit of women, a lifelong compulsion he indulged "with extraordinary vigor and a surprising degree of success." His diaries reveal a long succession of affairs, before and after his marriage before a Protestant pastor in 1931 to Magda Quandt, with whom he had six children.

Goebbels was embittered by the frustration of his literary career; his novel did not find a publisher until 1929 and his plays were never staged. He found an outlet for his desire to write in his diaries, which he began in 1923 and continued for the rest of his life. He later worked as a bank clerk and a caller on the stock exchange. During this period, he read avidly and formed his political views. Major influences were Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler and, most importantly, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-born German writer who was one of the founders of "scientific" anti-Semitism, and whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) was one of the standard works of the extreme right in Germany. Goebbels spent the winter of 1919–20 in Munich, where he witnessed and admired the violent nationalist reaction against the attempted communist revolution in Bavaria. His first political hero was Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, the man who assassinated the Bavarian prime minister Kurt Eisner. Hitler was in Munich at the same time and entered politics as a result of similar experiences.

The culture of the German extreme right was violent and anti-intellectual, which posed a challenge to the physically frail university graduate. Joachim Fest writes:

This was the source of his hatred of the intellect, which was a form of self-hatred, his longing to degrade himself, to submerge himself in the ranks of the masses, which ran curiously parallel with his ambition and his tormenting need to distinguish himself. He was incessantly tortured by the fear of being regarded as a ‘bourgeois intellectual’… It always seemed as if he were offering blind devotion (to Nazism) to make up for his lack of all those characteristics of the racial elite which nature had denied him.