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the great exception. Born in the
Rhineland of middle class parents, he managed to study by fits and
starts at six universities: Freiburg, Bonn, Wurzburg, Cologne, Munich
and Heidelberg where he won at last the degree which makes him now
"The Doctor."Restless, neurotic, fond of taking long
rambles at night, he turned to poetry and wrote a bad play. The
Wanderer. When rejection slips piled up he put it away. Today State
theatres play The Wanderer and Nazi audiences who know what is good for
them wildly applaud. The year before Adolf Hitler and General Erich
Ludendorff tried their "beerhall putsch" in Munich (TIME,
Nov. 19, 1923), Dr. Goebbels had attached himself to "The Supreme
Leader" as a useful handyman and organizer, always bobbing up when
wanted in a raincoat two sizes too big. When Herr Hitler was convicted
of treason and given a light sentence of "detention in a
fortress" it was Dr. Goebbels who kept the party machine from
disintegrating, handed it back a useful tool to Herr Hitler when he
got out a year later. In 1926 only South Germany was strongly
Hitlerite. Socialist Berlin remained hostile, cold. "The Doctor"
north. Soon he and his newspaper Der An griff were the scourge of
Berlin. At one time 126 libel suits were pending against Editor
Goebbels. Coarse, provocative, scathing and sometimes close to obscene
(especially when describing the habits of Jewish Berlin officials),
"The Doctor" created a furor, won thousands of adherents
among Berlin's disgruntled youth and proved up to the hilt his
scathing maxim: Mit den Augen der Masse sehen—das ist das
ganze Rätsel der erfolgreichen Propaganda. ("See with the eyes of the
masses—that is the whole secret of successful propaganda!") This
secret, shared and exploited by Goebbels and Hitler, accounts in no
small degree for their success. Statesmen like the late Dr. Gustav
Stresemann could not see with the German masses that what was needed
was a philosophy of defiance and escape. Today Minister of Propaganda
Goebbels plays on the entire German press, stage, screen and radio (to
use his own expression) "as upon a vast keyboard." In lieu
of solid Nazi achievements, for which Germany must wait, the
Government provides sensation after sensation, from the burning of
un-German books to threats (not as yet carried out) to sterilize Jews.
"Ours is a program without compromise," is his rallying
cry, "backed by men who will carry it out passionately! "A
watchword without formula, but filled with living energy! WE DEMAND !'
*Modest in other respects, Der Rcichsprädsident
carrier a monster fountain pen with a nib three sixteenths of an inch wide. With
this weapon of vanity he signs municipal golden books in such heroic style that the thirteen
letters von Hindenburg sprawl a full nine inches long.
