‘This Awful Waiting’

Abstract

There was little in the outward childhood of Paul Joseph Goebbels to suggest the huge influence he would subsequently exert on twentieth-century history. He was born on 29 October 1897 in the small manufacturing town of Rheydt, which lies some 25 kilometres west of Düsseldorf, and 35 kilometres east of the Dutch frontier. Rheydt adjoins the larger town of Mönchen-Gladbach, and both are close to the industrial area of the Ruhr, which lies on the eastern side of the River Rhine. In the late nineteenth century, fuelled by the rapid expansion of German industry, Rheydt’s population was increasing rapidly, and a new town hall, completed in 1896, symbolized local pride and economic achievement. Goebbels’ father, Friedrich, or ‘Fritz’, was a clerk in a small firm; his mother Katherina, was, according to Goebbels’ early biographers, ‘a simple woman of little education’.² Both parents were devout Roman Catholics, and models of respectability. Goebbels had two older brothers, Konrad and Hans, and two younger sisters, Elisabeth and Maria. When Joseph was still an infant, his parents were able to move to their own terraced house close to the centre of Rheydt, within walking distance of its railway station and the red-brick Church of St Mary. The most remarkable thing most can find to say of Goebbels’ childhood is to repeat anecdotes about his disability, and how resentment about this fed into his adult development.

A wild yearning for strong feelings burns inside me, for sensations, a fury against this faded, flat, normal, and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a department store perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for tickets to Hamburg, to seduce a little girl, or to stand one or two representatives of the bourgeois order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed most inwardly was this contentment, this healthiness and cosiness, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of the mediocre, the normal, the average.

Hermann Hesse, The Steppenwolf, 1927¹