Short Stories

“NINETEEN THIRTY-FOUR” (SHORT STORY)

In the heart of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels sits at his desk.

Hitler’s propagandist is crafting myths, rituals and hatreds with cold precision. Outside his office, Germany hums with the life he shapes and moulds, a vast machine under his relentless control.

“Nineteen Thirty-Four” is a historical short story about the collapse of reason.

How much further can Goebbels push his ambitions?

When will his dreams become nightmares?

3,000 words / 12 minutes of unsettling reading pleasure

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‘Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred?’ Bertrand Russell

STEFANO BOSCUTTI

NINETEEN THIRTY-FOUR

The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never again escape from it.

Joseph Goebbels is writing in his diary again, atop dozens of architectural plans for the extensions to his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Berlin. The plans sit on his glass-topped walnut desk.

Already housed in a series of gracious buildings directly opposite the Reich Chancellery, Goebbels needs more space for his ambitious plans to extend Adolf Hitler and Nazism through art, music, theatre, films, books, radio, posters, magazines, newspapers. To thrust Hitler into every facet of German life.

Hitler and the Nazi Party’s surge to power in Germany had been astronomical. As the party’s chief propagandist, Goebbels had engineered Hitler’s public appeal and historic ascent. Crafted many of the Nazi myths and rituals that spread anti-semitism and demanded unquestioning devotion to the leader, to the Führer.

Goebbels is the most devoted and fanatical of Hitler’s followers. He owes everything to Hitler.

It was Hitler who urged his implausible rise through the Nazi Party. From district administrator in Elberfeld to district leader in Berlin, from editor of the party broadsheet to head of all party propaganda.

Goebbels looks down at the gilt-edged, featherweight paper of his diary, a blood-red ribbon swaying down the page. He had come a tremendous way in ten years. From a lonely boarding room to the second most powerful man in all of Germany. From a lost novelist to holding the heart of the nation in the palm of his hand. From scrounging coins to owning one of the most beautiful villas in Berlin. A husband, a father, a saint for his country.

A series of electoral victories the previous year had catapulted the Nazi Party to power and Hitler to the role of chancellor at the head of a coalition government. Within two short months he had introduced emergency powers that suspended individual liberties, subsumed the position of president and secured the passage of the Enabling Act, which gave his government the power to issue laws and decrees independently of the Reichstag, the national parliament.

Hitler required a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag to pass the bill. Eighty-one Communists were either arrested or banished. Twenty-six Social Democrats could not take their seats to vote because Nazi Brownshirts had detained them in Nazi-controlled camps. The bill was voted into law four hundred and forty-one to ninety-four.

The Enabling Act’s full name was the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich.” It was the constitutional basis of Hitler’s absolute authority, absolute dictatorship. It assured Hitler was immune from the possibility of prosecution.

The purges began the next day. Socialist and Jewish judges, lawyers, and other court officers were removed from the justice system and the civil service. Police power became independent of judicial controls. Political and ideological opponents were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps under the exclusive authority of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, the elite guard of the Nazi state.

Any political opposition is outlawed. The church is put on notice. There is a nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned businesses.

Hermann Göring establishes the Gestapo. Goebbels lights the fire at the first book burning in Berlin. Thousands of books written by Jews, political opponents, and liberal intellectuals go up in flames.

New political parties are banned. Sterilisation programs are introduced to purify Germany. Jews are banned from working in literature, press, broadcasting, theatre, film, music, and fine arts.

Goebbels is obsessed with ambition. He looks upon the German press, stage, screen, radio and arts as a vast keyboard, ready to provide sensation after sensation.

Nothing is sacred. Not even the murder of former colleagues and friends. Nazi party socialists and leaders like Ernst Röhm are executed without a warrant, without a trial. Anyone who can personally stand up to Hitler is killed. Any threat real or imagined is eliminated.

Goebbels looks over his tidy office with a thin smile. The furnishings are understated, the light warm. The official Government portrait of Hitler hangs on the wall behind him. Goebbels’ shiny black hair is combed back perfectly. His nails freshly manicured and buffed. His expensive double-breasted suit is sharply woven. Despite his physical infirmities, he carries a certain noble elegance. Taut, cool, self-possessed.

He knows Heinrich Hoffmann is waiting in the anteroom. Hoffmann is Hitler’s official photographer and Goebbels knows he will be lobbying to try new poses for Hitler, afraid the public is becoming bored with his public image. But candid images of Hitler are banned.

Goebbels allows only three public poses to be captured of Hitler - one hand on one hip, a hand on each hip, and arms folded. Strength, purpose, determination. He knows the secret of successful propaganda is to simplify and repeat, simplify and repeat, simplify and repeat ad infinitum.

Goebbels also knows Hoffmann wants to take new images so he can claim new copyrights and royalty payments on those images. Hoffmann is already rich from the royalties from all the uses of Hitler’s image in all those postcards, all those posters, all those books.

Hoffman has the annoying habit of drinking too much. Another irritating habit is calling Goebbels by his first name. Goebbels insists everyone except Hitler call him Dr. Goebbels. It is how he signs his correspondence, how he is named on the covers of his books, how he is credited in his articles. Even Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini calls him ‘Il Dottore.’

Hitler calls him ‘my dear Joseph.’ Much to the chagrin of senior Nazi Party leaders like Göring, Heinrich Himmler and Rudolph Hess who are constantly vying for Hitler’s attention, Hitler’s affection.

Goebbels was not a medical doctor. The honorific came with a doctorate he had completed in German language and linguistics from Heidelberg University.

The degree is in the top drawer of his desk. Under a copy of a Time newsmagazine from last year with his black and white pencilled portrait on the red framed cover. The caption reads: MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA GOEBBELS “Say it in your dreams: ‘THE JEWS ARE TO BLAME.’”

The cover story inside was supposed to ridicule Hitler’s rise to power, mock Goebbels’ propaganda efforts as unsophisticated. Goebbels remembers how he and Hitler had sat around a fireplace giggling over the cover story. He remembers one paragraph word for word.

To an amazing degree Herr Hitler and Dr. Goebbels possess in common the trick of talking to grown Germans as if they were children, yet with such furious fire, conviction and intensity that the soul of the German listener is uplifted and soars in joy. “Germany can no longer be ranked as a second-class power!” cries Hitler. “Be proud of Germany!” shouts Dr. Goebbels with his curious but effective gesture of clenching both fists close to his bosom as though about to tear his chest. “Be proud of a Fatherland for which millions sacrificed their lives! Strike a rogue more than once! Believe in the future - then only can you be a victor!”

Even in Germany, Goebbels’ propaganda was dismissed as childish. Intellectuals thought it absurd. Such fools, Goebbels thinks. For propaganda to work it must be crude, primitive. Hitler had taught him to appeal to people’s inner Schweinehund, inner bastard. To appeal to people’s raw emotions, not their intellects. Distil any issue down to black or white outcomes, either-or simplifications, Germans or Jews, victory or defeat. Never allow people room to think or reason for themselves. Blast through any resistance, pound the message straight into their hearts.

Simplicity and repetition - constant repetition - are the keys to reaching the masses. Goebbels believed the skill of British propagandists during the Great War was that they used just a few powerful slogans and kept repeating them. Hitler believed Germany did not lose the war because the artillery gave out but because the weapons of men’s minds did not fire.

Hitler’s great insight was the recognition that violence and propaganda could and should be an integrated phenomenon. The purpose of Nazi propaganda is not to brainwash ordinary Germans or to deceive the masses. Its principal objective is to absorb the individual into a mass of like-minded people, to articulate what the crowd already believes. To express in words what the audience feels in their hearts.

For Goebbels the mass mind is dull and sluggish, and for ideas to take root, they have to be constantly re-seeded. Recognition, comprehension, retention, and conviction are different stages in the cognitive process, and repetition facilitates and strengthens each step. Sensory exhaustion grinds down any opposition. Citizens are not targets to be persuaded so much as to be conquered, ravished. The Nazis seek internal commitment, not just external compliance.

Goebbels prides himself on being able to see into the soul of the people and to speak the language of the man in the street. He senses the secret vibrations of the people.

In August, Goebbels opened the Tenth International Radio Show in Berlin with a speech declaring radio as the eighth great power. He wanted a radio that reaches the people in their homes, a radio that works for the people, a radio that is an intermediary between the government and the nation.

Goebbels had seized control of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft - the Reich Broadcasting Corporation - a national network of regional broadcasting companies and imposed strict rules on permissible content. But radios in Germany are expensive, easily exceeding a month’s wages for ordinary workers.

Goebbels approached electrical engineer Otto Griessing to design a radio that is technically simple, easy to mass-produce, and inexpensive. The result is the Volksempfänger, the people’s receiver, the people’s radio, which Goebbels introduces at the Berlin show. It is subsidised to make it half the price of the cheapest radio on the market.

More than a hundred thousand units sell during the first two days of the exhibition. Before long almost every German household has one. Goebbels had succeeded in giving Hitler a direct conduit into people’s homes via the airwaves. The monthly government media license fees of two Reichsmarks per radio flow directly to Goebbels’ office.

In October, Goebbels consecrated the German press to Nazi service. Why gag the press when you can censor it more effectively? Is news not the first draft of history?

A new National Press Law makes it a crime to practice journalism in Germany except as a licensed member of Der Reichsverband der Dentschen Presse, headed by Goebbels. The law covers all persons who share in forming the mental contents of any newspaper or political periodical through the written word or pictures.

To obtain a license a candidate must prove that neither he nor his wife had even one Jewish grandparent, must be a German citizen over twenty-one years of age, trained for at least one year in journalism and consecrated to Goebbels’ ideals.

Everything written or photographed must be in the interest of the state. Editorial skepticism only makes people uneasy and is outlawed. Dissension is forbidden.

Under the law newspaper owners and editors are stripped of the power to discharge members of their staffs for reasons of their own. They can only do so for reasons of the state. Disputes are to be settled by a Reich Press Court, the judges appointed by Goebbels.

From now on every German journalist is legally responsible to uphold the state. For Goebbels, it is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion.

Goebbels had wed one of his secretaries Magda Friedländer three years earlier. They were married in the snow, dressed in black with Hitler as the best man.

Magda had originally married into the founding family of BMW and sired a son, Harald. Her first husband forced her to drop her Jewish surname before granting a divorce on generous terms.

Goebbels legally adopted Harald as his own son. Their first child, Helga, was born last year. Another daughter, Hildegard, had been born this year. Four more children - Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig, and Heidrun - will be born by nineteen-forty. It was common gossip in Berlin society that Magda delivered a baby a year for the German cause.

Everyone believed the children’s names all began with ‘H’ as a tribute to Hitler - a notion Goebbels did not dissuade. In truth it was Magda’s first husband who chose names beginning with ‘H’ for his other two children by his first wife. An innocent family tradition.

Magda’s top-floor apartment on the Reichskanzlerplatz in Berlin became a favourite meeting place for Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials. Its upper-class address and furnishings lent an air of sophistication, a sense of authority.

Magda was tall, blue-eyed, ice blonde. She embodied the Nazi’s Aryan ideals of beauty and devotion. Since Hitler was not married, she often stood by his side at official functions.

For Hitler she was the perfect German hausfrau, the ideal German housewife and mother. For Goebbels she and the children were fodder for his propaganda efforts, often photographed and propped in countless newsreels as the model German family.

So ambitious is Goebbels that he refuses to take time for necessary rest. He fears being away from his duties for even a day or two will see him lose his grip, see him miss something important.

Goebbels closes his diary. A pain shoots through his stomach. His nerves are troubling him, an itch on his leg has become unbearable, a recent kidney attack has caused terrible pain. He is very tired and badly in need of rest. Yet such is his ambition and jealous concern for keeping power that he refuses to heed his doctor’s orders to go to the thermal springs at Karlsbad for a cure.

He looks down and smiles grimly. He can’t see the rallies, the spectacular events, the roaring crowds, the floodlights splitting the night sky. He can’t see the destruction to come, the calls for total war, the millions of lives lost, the children marched to their deaths. The horror of the holocaust.

All he can see are the plans for his new headquarters, his new dominion.

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This is a work of fiction. While many of the characters portrayed here have counterparts in the life and times of Joseph Goebbels and others, the characterisations and incidents presented are totally the products of the author’s slippery imagination. This work is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It should not be resold or given away. Thank you for your support. (Couldn’t do it without you.)

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STEFANO BOSCUTTI

NINETEEN THIRTY-FOUR

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