Magda Goebbels - Reviews - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2002

Magda Goebbels. Anja Klabunde. Shaun Whiteside, translator. Little, Brown. [pounds sterling]20.00. 367 pages. ISBN 0-316-85912-5. Magda Goebbels, born Magda Friedlander, has secured a small niche in twentieth century European history by her action in Hitler's bunker. As Russian troups neared, Frau Goebbels murdered her children and then killed herself.

For the author, her attraction is somewhat wider: 'how could such an intelligent and cultivated woman fall prey to such fanaticism?' In Frau Goebbels the author sees a microcosm of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. The unanswered questions relating to her life apply to 'an entire generation'. This is very much a book by a German for Germans, for the generation born after 1945 and trying to come to terms with the Nazi aberration. Because the author's background lies in making documentary films for television, she has taken certain liberties as a biographer and has constructed 'dramatic scenes in order to visualise and heighten certain impressions'. She also writes with a certain breathless quality more often seen, at least in England, in romantic novels. The book has, however, also made use of surviving sources and tried to make sense of an extraordinary life and to explain in at least one case the attraction of the Nazi movement.