I’m reading Goebbels: A Biography
Envious of the rich and feeling oppressed by them?
A series of articles by Goebbels appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter in the following weeks. On May 24 the paper published part of his attack on Reventlow from January,54 and in June the first of his essays, “Idea and Sacrifice,” a declaration of war on the “bourgeois,” whom he hated, as he openly conceded, not least because they displayed what “we have not yet conquered in ourselves, a touch of small-mindedness placed by Mother Nature in every German cradle.”55 He harped on the same subject later that month with his contribution “Sclerotic Intelligentsia,”56 and again in July with “National Community and Class War.”57 This latter article took the form of an open letter to Albrecht von Graefe, leader of the Deutschvölkische Freiheitsbewegung, in which Goebbels described the class war as the repression of the great mass of the people by a very small exploiting class. They and their bourgeois accomplices, their “shameless henchmen” (Graefe and company, in other words), were preventing the formation of a true “national community.
Paying attention to politicians who say outrageous things?
If the whole object of Goebbels’s highly robust propaganda campaign was to attract attention at any price, he certainly succeeded: “People started talking about us. We could no longer be ignored or passed over in icy contempt. However reluctant and furious they were about it, people couldn’t avoid mentioning us.” The Party was “suddenly at the center of public interest,” and “people now had to decide whether they were for or against.
Bored with your job? Having trouble getting a new one?
On January 2, 1923, Goebbels took a job in a bank. Else had strongly urged him to take this step;116 the doctor of philosophy, as he now was, seemed to have few other professional prospects. But his dislike of this new occupation set in quickly and grew steadily. … Back in the Rhineland, he received his dismissal notice from the bank. Although various literary projects were taking shape in his mind, he went looking for employment. He found none.
Looking to buy a high quality piano?
The piano manufacturer Edwin Bechstein and his wife, Helene, were fervent supporters of Hitler, who made use of their home for discreet political meetings.
Living at home and fighting with the parents?
He found the atmosphere in the family home increasingly oppressive. He wanted to get away, he confessed in late December: “If only I knew where to!” At home he was “the reprobate, […] the renegade, the apostate, the outlaw, the atheist, the revolutionary.” He was “the only one who can’t do anything, whose advice is never wanted, whose opinion isn’t worth listening to. It’s driving me crazy!”
One huge change: people didn’t waste as much time in graduate school back then:
Back in Heidelberg, Goebbels worked toward his doctorate. His reading matter, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, was not calculated to lift his mood. On the contrary, this grand attempt to situate the decline of Europe within a universal history of the rise and fall of the great cultures induced “pessimism” and “despair” in him. Beset by such dark thoughts, he plunged into work on his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote in four months in Rheydt after the end of his Heidelberg semester.