Volume 41, Number 6 · March 24, 1994
The True Believer
By Gordon A. Craig
Goebbels
by Ralf Georg Reuth, translated by Krishna Winston
Harcourt Brace, 471 pp., $27.95
Goebbels and 'Der Angriff'
by Russel Lemmons
University Press of Kentucky, 167 pp., $22.00
Joseph Goebbels: ein nationaler Sozialist
by Ulrich Höver
Bouvier Verlag, 496 pp., DM 98
The top echelons of the National Socialist party were by no means bereft of literary talent. Adolf Hitler, after all, wrote two books, and Alfred Rosenberg was an indefatigable pamphleteer and the author of an anti-Semitic and anti-Christian treatise called The Myth of The Twentieth Century that was tedious but widely read. While imprisoned in Spandau after the war, Albert Speer kept a diary and later wrote an account of the inner workings of the Third Reich as he had seen them, and after the verdicts were announced at Nuremberg Joachim von Ribbentrop was heard to lament that now he wouldn't be able to finish his 'beautiful memoirs.' But far and away the most productive of Nazi writers was Joseph Goebbels, who even as an adolescent was experimenting with poetry, plays, and auto-biographical novels, who started writing for newspapers as early as 1922, a habit that persisted, and who in 1924 began the diary that he continued faithfully until his death.
Review, 5740 words
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