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form of criticism of the liberal Government of post-war Germany which could act as a conductor for his hatred and frustration. He introduced Goebbels not only to the theoreticians of Communism but to the works of Walther Rathenau, the German statesman and philosopher. 10
    Through Flisges Goebbels discovered Dostoevsky. It is clear that both these young men read and discussed books which seemed to them to offer some kind of analysis or solution to their spiritual and social problems. Their late adolescence was spent in the difficult, destructive atmosphere of post-war Germany, a cruel time for any young intellectuals to try to achieve a balanced view either of society or of their personal conduct. Goebbels was still attracted by certain elements in Christianity, and Dostoevsky's emotional mysticism fed what was left of his religious imagination. Soon, in addition to Michael, Goebbels was to write a play in verse called The Wanderer . 11 It is about Christ. It was never published.
    Goebbels, therefore, in company with his friend passed through a phase of nihilism which left a destructive adolescent element in his nature which he never outgrew. In later life he would frequently act with the petulant cruelty of a very young man determined to avenge himself on a society that seemed to him insufficiently perfect for his taste. He thought of himself as a mature revolutionary. Only too often he seems to be avenging the humiliations of the early days when his numerous articles for the Berliner Tageblatt were being rejected by its Jewish editor, Theodor Wolff, and Richard Flisges was pressing him to read the works of the Jewish writers, Marx and Rathenau.
    Flisges, still uncertain of his proper place in society, became a labourer and was killed in a mining accident in July 1923. By that time contact between him and Goebbels seems to have been virtually severed. But the young nihilist still remained in Goebbels' thoughts, a martyr to the wickedness of the German social system. Fusing himself and Flisges into a composite romantic figure, a Byronic warrior, Goebbels wrote his brief novel Michael while still a young man under the direct influence of this friendship.
    Michael is barely thirty thousand words in length, and is therefore in effect a long short-story. Goebbels writes in the first person, and uses his favourite literary form, the diary. He had kept a personal diary from the age of twelve, and it is evident from the style of his writing that in adolescence he grew to be the kind of person who fancied himself on paper, writing in a narcissistic and highfalutin style like a youth making heroic faces at himself in a mirror or striking handsome attitudes. To keep a diary which is a record of things done, people met, places visited or even more intimate experiences is one thing, but to pour out for one's private reading self-conscious phrases, long chains of coy exclamations and lush emotionalisms all paragraphed like blank verse is quite another. Goebbels fingered his literary emotions like a miser stroking his gold.
    Michael is the diary of a hero who combines the occupations of a soldier, a worker, a poet, a lover, a patriot and a revolutionary. Here is the opening:
    No longer is the stallion neighing under my thighs; no longer am I hunched over a gun or tramping through the muddy clay of neglected trenches.
    How long it is since I walked the vast Russian plain or the shell-ridden French countryside!
    A thing of the past!
    Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of war and destruction. Peace!
    The very word is like balm on a wound still trembling and bleeding. I seem to grasp the blessing of that word with my hands.
    When I look out of the window I see German land: towns, villages, fields, woods…
    Homeland! Germany!
    Michael leaves the death-wishes of war behind him and becomes a student “anxious to grasp life with every fibre of my being”. He is in rooms; he is his own master. He meets an old school friend who asks him what he