First Words Of The New Era

He confessed to Else in June 1923 that he felt that he did not fit into this world. She, too, was becoming disheartened. She had written at the end of April that it was awful “the ways these bleak, grim times, unremittingly weigh us down, making you so disconsolate, so miserable.” It was probably her sympathy that moved him to write a letter of more than thirty pages, a review of his messed-up life. “I know that at one point my situation was better. Today I’m shipwrecked on a sand bar…I am given no peace to come to myself. Being unfulfilled in one’s work is a terrible torment.” Extrapolating from his own lot, he speculated that “intellectual youth” were so anguished because no one let them take their rightful place in society. “The old men of yesteryear” held all the power and insisted on hitching to “their wagon, their world” “us young people, who bear a new world in our hearts and only with shame and distain tolerate the domination of the old one.” 

After a phase of deep depression Goebbels experienced bursts of fanatical determination. In one such moment he wrote to Else that the new age would be ushered in not by businessmen and bankers but by those who had remained “pure” and had not “dirtied their hands with the lucre of a godless world.” And if this new era should come too late for him, that was alright, too; it was grand and fine to smooth the way for an era of greatness. He was not the only one who felt this way, he wrote. He was one of the best, the youth. “We’ll be the ferment that brings about the revolution and gives rise to new life. We’ll have the right to speak the first word in the new era. And this word will be: truth; death to lies and fraud; love.” 

-excerpted from “Goebbels” by Ralph Georg Reuth