Joseph Goebbels is a name struck permanently in infamy, both as a master of Hitler’s Final Solution and a curious juxtaposition of the ideals of success and hypocrisy. Goebbels was German Chancellor of the Third Reich for one day, after Hitler killed himself as Russia invaded Berlin. His six children were then poisoned inside the Hitler’s bunker, and he and his wife committed suicide.
But at heart, was the root of Joseph Goebbel’s vaulting ambition merely the backlash of a frustrated artist? Unlike survivors of Kosovoan pogroms and dictators of modern banana republics, Goebbels chose to end his life rather than face the concrete disillusionment of some of the most expensively fabricated personal myths the world has ever seen.
More so than Hitler, Goebbels was something of a Napoleon whose public life held the moral qualities of a emperor. His six pretty children were deified by the press and consciously marketed to the German people as resultant of Hitler’s policies. Goebbel’s wife Magda functioned as his Josephine, living one life in the public eye and a private, solitary life alone with her children.
Like Napoleon, Hitler had fallen under the spell of earlier German and Russian writers and political theorists. Goebbels’ literary skill and ambition was thus transfused into making rhetoric for Hitler to flog to the masses. Hitler used Goebbels even when his policies were patently against human rights to popularize the new ideas with an image more congruent to the German psychology.
But Goebbels was famously unfaithful, and his affair with another woman caused almost a breach in the Hitlerian regime of public myth. The schism in the family was public enough to cause a photo opportunity after the recrimination period had ended, a strangely moral twist on a personal hypocrisy that spoke volumes.
For many years Joseph Goebbels and his family were touted by German Chancellor Hitler as the perfect German family. Goebbels himself could have been said to appear the counterexample to Hitler. Good looking, well-educated, with a beautiful family that as featured in media newsreels as the quintessential German existence, Goebbels was the John F. Kennedy of Germany.
His image was founded publicly to supplant the previous eras of Jewish domination of German culture, theatre, arts and other institutional establishments. Goebbel’s astringent new photogenic ideal of family life was saturated into the German mind, suggesting any other children or family life was less than ideal, undesirable. This paved the way for Hitler’s “Final Solution”.
Goebbels is a permanent reminder of how diseased the human mind can become, albeit educated and exposed to the greatest leadership roles and freedoms possible in modern politics. His frustration at not attaining literary and theatrical success led him to publish his exasperation with society by supplanting the current arts establishment and destroying a generation of critics using sophisticated socialist theories and viciously abusive methods.