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is reading at the University. He reflects:
    May 12
    What indeed?
    All and nothing. I'm too lazy and, may be, too stupid for exact science.
    I want to be a man. With a profile of my own.
    A personality! On the road to a new Germany!
    May 17
    I've been wondering a long time what it is that makes me drink life so copiously.
    It's because I stand on the hard soil of my homeland with both my feet. The smell of the soil is around me. And in my veins the peasant-blood is welling up healthily.
    Armed with the friendship of Flisges, Goebbels could afford these dreams of feudalism and chivalry in the person of Michael. He was now no longer crippled, no longer the son of an urban clerk, no longer rejected for the Army; he was fused with the body and spirit of his friend writing a fictitious diary alongside his own, personal one.
    Michael meets a girl at the University called Hertha Holk with whom he becomes intimate. They go for long walks and indulge in deep talk. To her he proclaims his ardent patriotism—"For a young German, these days, there's really only one thing to be done: to stand up for the Fatherland!” Apart from her he grumbles (and he is here surely quoting his own diary) about how short he is of money— “money is muck, but muck isn't money!” With her he claims to enjoy the delights of music and the delights of love:
    A thousand insects humming. The grass is indescribably green. I kiss Hertha Holk on her soft yearning mouth. We are both very much ashamed.
Quiet, quiet summer afternoon …
In her street we part from one another …
I carry my happiness like a sweet, sweet load.
    Night! …
I walk back to the town and pluck some roses from the garden walls.
More and more red roses.
I stand at Hertha Holk's window …
I put a bunch of red roses on her window-sill.
I am happy, happy as I walk home.
Blessed hour!
    “Hertha Holk,” he says (he always uses the affectation of quoting full names), “gives me joy and strength alternately. I cannot thank her enough.” She inspires him to write.
    Meanwhile, another figure emerges, a further image from the misted mirror of Goebbels' relationship with Flisges. This is Ivan Wienurovsky, a nebulous Russian student who lends Michael Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot . This book affects him deeply:
    The spirit of Dostoevsky hovers over that quiet and dreamy land. When Russia awakens the world will witness a nationalistic miracle.
    A nationalistic miracle? Yes, that's it! That's what political miracles are like. The International is merely a dogma, but the miracles of a nation are never caused by the intellect, they're a matter of the blood. But they've got the will power of that one man Lenin. Without Lenin no Bolshevism.
    Once again, it's men who make history. Even when it happens to be bad.
    Talking to Hertha a little later he says:
    I think and act as I have to think and act. In us is a demon leading us to our destiny. There's nothing one can do about it.
    Out of the Goebbels-image within the character of Michael comes the desire to write, inspired by both Hertha and Ivan and by the spirit of Dostoevsky. He chooses for his subject Jesus Christ:
    I talk to Christ. I had thought to have vanquished Him, but I had mistaken Him for His false priests.
    Christ is hard and inexorable.
    He whips the Jewish money-changers out of His temple.
    A declaration of war on Money.
    Yet, if one said that today, they would put one into a gaol or madhouse.
    We are all sick.
    Hypocrisy is the characteristic of a decaying bourgeois epoch.
    The ruling class is tired and has no courage for new adventure.
    The Intellect has poisoned our people.
    Then he adds:
    Hertha Holk looks at me and shakes her head.
    Like Dostoevsky he becomes possessed, “given to phantasma”, suffering in “creative loneliness”. Then term is over. Hertha returns to her home, and Michael goes to one of the Frisian islands off the northern coast to write his Messianic play. “I lie on the downs and wait for a word from God's