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Title: Michael: A Novel by Joseph Goebbels, Joachim Neugroschel, Joachim Nevgroschell ISBN: 0-941693-00-7 Publisher: Amok Pr Pub. Date: September, 1987 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Interesting read...
Comment: Michael returns home to Germany from the front lines of both Russian and French battle-fields and begins studying at a university where he meets Hertha Holk, whom he describes as "a beautiful woman! Blondish-brown hair, silky soft, in a heavy knot on the back of that wonderful neck...she peers deamily out a window...suddenly, she turns around to me, and I look into a pair of large, grayish-green enigmas." His writing style paints visionary & emotional pictures in the reader's mind; "Hertha Holk: I read the name in her notebook. How much closer just a name brings us. We are no longer strangers even though we have not exchanged a single word."

Throughout the novel, it is Goebbels himself I picture in Michael's place; when he and Hertha exchange their first kiss, as the two talk repeatedly about politics & philosophy...and their powerful love for each other, as he watches a seeming prototype of Hitler speak, when he meets & befriends young Gustav Adolf on an island vacation, as he debates with his friend Ivan Vienurovsky & best friend Richard, when he flies into a rage & destroys a play he's written after Hertha leaves him, and as he toils away in a worker's pit. The last 1/3 of the novel is absent Hertha Holk (a character who's inspiration was Goebbels' real-life true love, Anka Stalherm), and I found myself wishing her return. The only downside of this book is the anti-Semitism in some diary entries, which I'd much rather read in Goebbels' WWII essays. The polemics stick out like sore thumbs perhaps because the book was completed before Goebbels joined the NSDAP and it later saw many revisions to include the Nazi philosophy as well as Hertha Holk's minor emotional turmoil, before actually being picked up by a publisher and mass-produced.

All in all, it's a surprisingly good read (written mostly in a diary form--it is said to be taken largely from Goebbels' own personal diaries of 1919 & 1920, which no longer exist), perhaps because it bears many similarities to Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther," with fairly well developed characters, and an ending that sounds cliched if you're told it before-hand, but pulls at your gut once you've read it for yourself. An excellent addition to any WWII history class, and highly recommended to those interested in what was truly the 'roaring 20s'--the 20s in Germany.

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