The Little Loudspeaker

JOSEPH GOEBBELS (367 pp.)--Curt Riess--Doubleday ($3.95).

One June night in 1922, an embittered little German provincial limped into Munich's largest hall to listen to a political speech. What he heard made him go "alternately hot and cold ... I was beside myself. I was shouting hurrah! . . . The man up there looked at me for one moment. His blue eyes met my glance like a flame. This was a command! At that moment I was reborn." .When it was all over, the oratory-drunk convert limped to a table and filled out a form. Joseph Goebbels had become Nazi Party member No. 8762.

At 25, Goebbels was desperately poor, a restless product of eight German universities. When he was in his teens, his Catholic mother had wanted her son to enter the Church, but the priest who interviewed him saw something the mother had missed. Said he: "My young friend, you do not believe in God."

Cynical Academic. When he tried to enlist in the army in 1914, he was sent home as unfit (a childhood attack of osteomyelitis had left him with one leg four inches shorter than the other). He wept all night in his room, but when he went to the university he claimed that he was a war casualty. By the time he became No. 8762, he was a cynical academic who saw no future before him. Four years later, in October 1926, Hitler made him the Gauleiter of Berlin.

Curt Riess, a German newspaperman who left the Reich in 1933, has written Joseph Goebbels in the conviction that "without Goebbels' propaganda magic, Hitler certainly would not have become a world menace." That could well be true, but Author Riess never makes it plain why. After reading hundreds of quotes from Goebbels' writings, most readers will wonder not so much at his effectiveness as at the credulity of the people who swallowed it all. What Riess has failed to communicate is the color, the dash, the audacity and the timing that made Goebbels' commonplace stuff palatable to gullible Germans. Reading his biography is like reading the dialogue for a W. C. Fields movie without ever having seen Fields.

Obvious Conclusion. Riess's failure is a pity, for much of his material is fresh. He attended the Nurnberg trials, talked with Goebbels' mother and sister, his butler, his secretaries, his tailors, his physicians and beauticians, the actresses who slept with him or said they did. He came away certain that Goebbels was contemptuous of the Nazi gang. He reached the obvious conclusion that if Goebbels had known in 1934 what he knew ten years later, "he might then have abandoned the Nazi cause." The same might have been said of any of the Nazi masters who could see, by 1944, where they were headed.

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