Book Review by David Gushee

Goebbels By Ralph Georg Reuth (translated by Drishna Winstoon), Harcourt Brace, 1993.

This is an engrossing biography of one of Adolf Hitler's closest henchmen. As such, it is predictably enraging and depressing. For in Joseph Goebbels, as Ralf Georg Reuth depicts him, we have in many ways a prototypical Nazi functionary, the kind of man Hitler needed by his side to help destroy the soul of a nation and consume millions of lives. 

The Goebbels we meet in these pages is a small-souled man, driven by bitterness over childhood slights, relentless and self-centered ambition, an imperial sense of his own importance, a paganized faith in the Nazi cause, and an almost childlike (or romantic?) loyalty to Hitler himself. He is not without energy, talent, or organizational ability, and it is hard to imagine the triumph of Nazism apart from his sometimes ingenious propaganda skills. 

In the end, as Reuth shows us, Goebbels is perhaps most remembered for the cult-like decision of himself and his equally fanatical wife to kill themselves and their own children rather than to live in a world without Hitler and Nazism. "The world that will come after the Fuhrer and national socialism won't be worth living in," he wrote, and he was as good as his word. 

Reuth's biography is a bit short on analysis. Little effort is made to offer an eloquent summing up, evaluation, or reflection on the life being considered here. This is more of a documentation than a reflection on a life, but the documentation reveals a frightening soul whose appearance on the historical scene did no one any favors. 

Updated Wednesday, April 11, 2001