The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,16

topic, in fact we are standing where once the heart of the Nazi government pulsed. Bombings and Communist-era refurbishments have delivered this place from the accusations of the eye, but I’m sure you still feel its desolate rhythm. Over there, where today you see a Chinese restaurant, its life seeping away for lack of patronage, once stood Hitler’s mortal monument to immortal glory: the new Reich Chancellery.”

No one in the group showed any reaction to this announcement. Everyone’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, and the sunglasses held steady. Margaret reddened. She turned and hurried to the next stop of note—the Propaganda Ministry of Joseph Goebbels. The flesh of this ministry shuddered slightly when Margaret arrived, as if its sleep had become restive. She scanned the faces of the group again as they came abreast of her, but still they were placid and remote.

“In the Berlin of the Nazi era, the street we’re standing on was nonexistent,” she said. “On this site stood a baroque palace, made over in the classical style in the 1820s, and commandeered by the Nazis in 1933 after Hitler’s election. The young Dr. Joseph Goebbels, vicious, club-footed, and intelligent, was at the helm of this new ‘Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda.’ Dr. Goebbels expanded the role of propaganda to the point where nothing in the nation breathed entirely free of it. The ministry building, by 1935, had mushroomed, a steroid-fed monster, with addition after addition spreading cancer-like over the central city. The original palace was ultimately destroyed by an incendiary bomb, but these Nazi-era additions live on,” Margaret rattled off by rote.

The Floridian stepped forward, his hand pressed into the air.

“Yes?” Margaret said. She stopped breathing. She knew what was coming—she had ignored the transformation at her own peril.

But no. All he said was: “What sort of a ‘doctor’ was this Dr. Goebbels?”

“Ah!” Margaret cried. “Goebbels received his doctorate in literature in 1921. He even wrote a novel. Extremely long, ranting, autobiographical. Never published.”

“He killed his children, didn’t he, Goebbels?”

“No, that was Göring,” said his wife scornfully.

“Marian, God damn it, it was Goebbels.”

“You’re ahead of me,” Margaret said, relief swelling her. “Yes, the short answer is—yes, it was Goebbels, the propaganda minister, who killed his children at the end, together with his wife, Magda.”

“What kind of a lady was she?” asked a young Scotsman.

“Oh,” said Margaret, blushing at the question. “Oh. Goebbels’s wife.” And then all at once Margaret felt the sweet old trance returning, just as if the city had not transformed. “She was—” Margaret paused, her eyes light, “a highly intelligent woman. She was an only child, the apple of her Jewish stepfather’s eye. As a young woman, before she met Goebbels, she was first devoted to Buddhism, then to Zionism. She married a wealthy industrialist at the tender age of nineteen, one of the Quandts—do you know them? A family that still controls Germany. Unhappy and drowning, headstrong, she became the zealous lover of the Zionist leader Vitaly Arlosoroff, does anyone know of him?”

The groups’ eyebrows were raised. No one replied.

“An important man as well.” Margaret went on. “Goebbels’s diaries indicate without any doubt that Magda continued to sleep with her revered Jewish lover long after she started with Goebbels. Goebbels, the wag, adored her wild ways, her perversity; he wrote”—and here Margaret made a show of speaking in a buffoonish, Nazi-style German—“ ‘Magda ist von bestrickender Wildheit. Sie liebt, wie nur eine grosse Frau lieben kann,’ which means, friends, in English, ‘Magda is of a mesmerizing wildness! She loves as only a great woman can love!’

“Goebbels was insecure, jealous, romantic, and cruel. Insecurity-driven romantic jealousy will make you sick, maybe some of you know this,” Margaret looked at the crowd before her. “It made him sick anyway, and he lamented, justifying his cruelty to all his other little tarts. What a fool he was!” Margaret crowed. She could feel herself getting carried away. Her heart was beating, and she could barely decide what to tell them, there was so much that occurred to her. “He was obsessed with the power of his ‘eros,’ as he called it, and his imperative to conquer and master the love force within him! He was grandiose, self-aggrandizing. Strangle and conquer your love, he always said—and what an agony when he couldn’t! He champed at the women who stayed distant, those in particular. The early, great love of his life, whom he lusted after, limping, following her from university to university, and by whom he was