Cherrypicker | Literature
A Follower Novel

In her latest novel, Nora Bossong writes about the life of the convinced National Socialist Magda Goebbels, but from the perspective of a homosexual follower.

By Holger Moos

Magda Goebbels, the wife of National Socialist propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, is notorious. Nazi propaganda stylised her as a supermother. The names of the six children of this marriage all began with the letter H – a tribute to Adolf Hitler, who was the couple's best man. Shortly before the end of the Second World War, she and her husband committed suicide in the so-called Führerbunker. She was also cruel and merciless towards her six underage children, whom she poisoned shortly beforehand because they were “too bad for the life that comes after us”, as she wrote in a letter she left behind to her son from her first marriage.

Nora Bossong's novel Reichskanzlerplatz follows the life story of Magda Behrend, who was initially called Magda Quandt before she became Magda Goebbels. But she is not the main character in Bossong's novel. The author uses a narrative trick by “inventing” a historical figure and placing her at the centre of the story.

This character is modelled on a law student about whom little is known. Magda had an affair with him during her unhappy marriage to the industrialist Günther Quandt, who was 20 years her senior. In the novel, this student is called Hans Kesselbach and is the son of an officer and war invalid. At school, Hans meets Magda's stepson Hellmut Quandt, with whom he develops a homoerotic inclination. Hellmut is his great – and tragic – love. This is because he has fallen for his very beautiful stepmother Magda, who is only seven years his senior, and dies young.

No Core of Her Own

Hans is also fascinated by Magda. The daughter of an unmarried servant girl from a poor background, she is adopted by a Jewish merchant at the age of seven and thus grows up in middle-class circumstances. Nevertheless, she later does everything she can to escape her original social background. Hans once observes: “The fact that her past frightened her was not unusual for a woman who had married into a milieu that was higher than the one she came from.” In general, Hans ponders many things about Magda in the novel, perhaps precisely because she remains mysterious to him. Sometimes it seems to him “as if she had no core of her own”.

After Hellmut's death, Hans initially throws himself into wild sexual adventures in Berlin's Tiergarten to suppress his grief. He then begins an affair with Magda, which leads to her divorce from Quandt. Magda is well paid. She lives in a stately flat on the eponymous Reichskanzlerplatz, which is now called Theodor-Heuß-Platz and was known as Adolf-Hitler-Platz during the National Socialist era. She organised musical salons there, which were also frequented by Nazi celebrities.

The Quickly Forgotten Democracy

Hans knows that he is just a “distraction” for Magda: “She was looking for something unconditional, something she could finally believe in.” This refers to Nazi ideology. She married Joseph Goebbels in 1931. He, of course, had numerous love affairs, which plunged Magda into depression and led her to turn to alcohol. From then on, Magda's life was independent of Hans' career, who went to Italy as a diplomat and later moved to Switzerland. The two only meet occasionally; she is aware of his homosexuality but does not expose it.

Once, when Hans wanted to visit an old friend in Switzerland, he met the SPD politician Otto Braun there. Braun was Prussian Minister President from 1925 to 1932 and fled Germany shortly after the Nazis came to power in March 1933 because he feared for his life. Braun appears in the novel as an amateur gardener and states with disillusionment: “The Germans have forgotten democracy as quickly as a word from their school days.”

Would we have acted differently?

It would have been easy to portray the figure of Magda Goebbels as an unscrupulous monster, but that is not Bossong's point. Instead, she uses her as a projection screen in two ways - on the one hand, to tell an exemplary story of the decline of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the National Socialists. On the other hand, Nora Bossong mirrors Magda's life story in that of Hans. The latter is a phlegmatic and brooding, but ultimately opportunistic follower and a necessary complement to the phenomenon of Magda Goebbels. After all, the Nazi regime needed not only the perpetrators of persecution but also the numerous followers who conformed in a mixture of fear, self-interest and repression.

Reichskanzlerplatz is therefore “not a keyhole novel” about Magda Goebbels, as the jury of the SWR Bestenliste in October 2024 quite rightly stated, but shows the entanglements of people in an inhumane political system. The novel is told from the perspective of a “mediocre” person who asks himself whether he could have acted differently, could even have saved Magda. This also raises questions for the reader. “These are questions we have to ask ourselves. And we also have to ask ourselves whether we ourselves would really have acted differently in this situation, as many like to claim,” says Bossong in an interview.