Magda - Meike Ziervogel

Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the chief bureaucrat of the Holocaust, in 1961, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to explain the way in which apparently ordinary men and women came to be involved in the horrors perpetuated by the Nazi party. Perhaps this is the most disturbing aspect of Holocaust scholarship; it would be comforting to think that the architects of these acts were anomalies, rather than unremarkable specimens of humanity. Acceptance of this essential ordinariness forces us to confront the way individuals can abandon norms of morality in return for gain, or through fear of resisting. Gitta Sereny’s remarkable interviews with Albert Speer and, in particular, with Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, chart the small steps which transform everyday people into monstrous figures; Leonard Cohen’s poem All There is to Know About Adolf Eichmann likewise stresses the ordinariness of his subject, listing his unremarkable physical attributes before confronting our expectations: ‘What did you expect? Talons?’

This is also the approach taken in Meike Ziervogel’s debut novel, Magda. In writing this novel, Ziervogel states that she has attempted to perform dual tasks; to confront what she sees as a bias in accounts of Nazism which focus on the roles of men whilst assuming that women were passive bystanders, whilst also exploring the psychology of her subject, the events which led to her becoming the First Lady of the Third Reich, and eventually to poison herself and her six children. Although it is seven decades since the events described in the novel, this approach is still fresh; Wendy Lowell’s Hitler’s Furies, released this month, is one of the first academic accounts of women who actively participated in the Holocaust. 

As Ziervogel's afterword makes clear, Magda is a work of fiction, which aims for psychological truth over historical accuracy. There is no way of knowing exactly what happened in the final days of Magda Goebbels's life in the bunker, though the discovery of the corpses of six children with ribbons tied in their hair is undisputed. The author's role is to find a convincing explanation of how this came to pass. Magda is examined from various perspectives, switching from an omnipotent authorial voice to the testimony of Magda’s mother, interrogated by a bored Soviet commissar after the downfall, and the diary entries of Magda's eldest daughter, Helga. What we see in these accounts is a breakdown of the mother-daughter relationship across three generations. Magda is illegitimate, packed off to a harsh convent school, where she develops a steely exterior. When an unpopular girl attempts to befriend her, Magda forcibly rebuffs her, showing that 'she was no weak, needy parasite, clinging to others, sucking their blood only to get crushed at the end'. 

After the poverty she experienced in her youth, it is no wonder that Magda sought out power, and was so determined to cling on to it. Fabrice d’Almeida’s High Society in the Third Reich (2009) demonstrates that the inner circle of the Nazi party enjoyed aristocratic levels of wealth and privilege. During the 1936 Olympics, for example, Goebbels himself staged ‘a lavish evening on Peacock Island on the River Havel, to which guests were ferried in motorboats manned by crews in immaculate livery’. Magda, who by her mother’s account was ‘always behaving like she was an angel, she was, a woman of the world, aloof', is able to shine in this world. Unlike the other women she meets at rallies ('simple women with flat shoes & brown woollen cardigans'), Magda appears as ‘a priestess in flowing robes', with 'that mink stole soon becomes her trademark'. 

Compared to the weak and inconsistent men who surround her, Hitler appears messianic in Magda’s eyes. She first sees him giving a speech, and is immediately overawed: ‘there He stands before Magda, a little man on a podium who has assumed the stature of a giant using nothing but simple words & a strident voice'. Later, they become intimate, and he performs the dual roles for her of powerful God-figure and benevolent father. He sees her almost as a sister, closer in character to himself than many of the men around him, calling her a saint and 'a woman with real spirit’. Joseph Goebbels himself is a minor figure in the plot. He is disappointed when she gives birth to daughters; she is dismayed by his affairs. Although there is passion evident in the accounts of their courtship, the couple rarely appear in tandem after this.

Instead, we understand Magda through her relationship with the women in her family. Magda’s mother constantly meddles in her affairs, using her as a pawn in her relationships with men, and pulling her out of school so she can find work to support them. She fails utterly to understand Magda’s mentality, telling her bored interrogator 'I gave her the advice. She should get married again, have children, they'd fill her empty life'. Magda's relationship with her own children is similarly tarnished. By the end of the war, suffering from constant migraines, she is a remote figure: ‘if at all, she appears only at dinner’. Her husband, is so disappointed by his eldest daughter's birth that Hitler becomes the first man to hold Helga. Where Magda was abandoned to the Nuns, Helga is raised by Nazi surrogates, led by 'Uncle Adolf, that grumpy old man in his big house'. The one person to offer her hope is Eva Braun, who attempts to arrange for Helga to escape with a young soldier named Knut, but there hopes come to nothing as Helga is irrevocably tied to her family’s destiny.

Only once do we hear Magda’s own voice, in a prophetic ‘Vision’. During this passage, in which Magda justifies the killing of her children, she also confronts her own guilt. Death, she argues, is preferable to the fate of Berlin under the Red Army. She imagines Helga being forced into prostitution for food, the degradation of her family matching that of the city: 'the enemy soldiers amuse themselves with her eldest, so that Magda and her children have enough money to buy stale bread... It won't be long before they have learned to steal'. In this vision, she has to confront the fate she has created for her daughter: 'This is what the German soldiers have done to their women - and much worse. And I now have to pay for it… Do you actually know what was going on all those years? What the Fuhrer, Father, all of them were doing? Do you really believe that German soldiers raping Russian women was the worst of it?'

A more troubling interpretation can be found in Ernest Becker’s Escape From Evil, which discusses a Nazi ‘philosophy of blood and soil which contained the belief that death nourishes life… is thought to mystically replenish life’. In this account, Magda has been ideologically prepared for the sacrifice of her children. Whilst there is a practical aspect to her actions, there is also a mystical level in which Magda sees the blood of her offspring as somehow redeeming her in posterity, making her sacrifice and commitment even greater. 

Magda is an incredibly uncomfortable read. The most horrifyingly claustrophobic sections are those recounted by Helga, as the family retreat to the bunker at the end of the war. Not old enough to fully understand what is happening to her, but not young enough to carry on regardless like her siblings, the reader longs to sympathise with her, but at the same time is forced to recognise that her upbringing within the inner circle of the Nazi party has poisoned her future, as surely as her mother was affected by her own childhood. 

Ziervogel’s writing is studiously matter-of-fact for the most part, but the complex narrative structure is skilfully handled, with the ‘Vision’ section particularly impressive. The tone avoids the temptation towards preachiness or kitsch, delivering a weighty psychological assessment of its subject in 113 pages. Without her motivations ever becoming overt, we see the steps which Magda took to ensure her position, and the mechanisms she used to justify the mayhem unleashed by Nazism, the appeal of Hitler’s myths which she was happy to accept. As Magda fusses over her sleeping children, putting ribbons in their hair before she poisons them, we see her at once as an ordinary woman and as an embodiment of evil; willing, like the bureaucrat Eichmann, to perform her allotted role in the Nazi system without thought to her own personal morality, obsessed with obedience and outward appearance to the exclusion of all else.