SOURCE: "From National Bolshevik to Hilterite" and "From Reich Minister to Reich Chancellor," in Goebbels, translated by Stephen Wendt, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1976, pp. 13-66, 210-26.

In the following excerpt, Remain examines Goebbels's novel Michael and his diaries for the years 1942 and 1943.

Michael: a German Fate

Goebbels' literary output from 1921-24 included several plays, most of them unfinished: one about Christ, Judas Iscariot; another, Heinrich Kämpfert; and plays called The Sowing and The Wanderer. The Wanderer was produced on November 6, 1927, by the National Socialist experimental stage company in a matinee performance of a memorial service at the Wallner Theater in Berlin. This play, consisting of a prologue, fourteen scenes, and an epilogue, borrows its form from Dante's Divine Comedy. Just as Virgil leads the Italian poet through Inferno, so the wanderer leads the despairing author "over the heights and through the valleys of German history." A repeat performance...