From the first chapter:
"JOSEPH Goebbels reaches puberty at about thirteen. But given his later reputation is itworth emphasising that he will be thirty-three before he first has sexual intercoursewith a woman.15 For the intervening twenty years this brilliant but celibate cripple’slife will be a trail of temptations, near-seductions, and sexual rebuffs etched into hismemory. At thirteen he and his pal Herbert Beines have a grubby mudlark of a friend,Herbert Harperscheidt, whose stepmother Therese always wears crisp, clean skirts;so Joseph Goebbels recalls fourteen years later. The sexual arousal that he first de-tects towards this mature female returns when he is fifteen. He harbours secret crusheson women like Frau Lennartz, the factory owner’s wife. Evidently another passion-object, his brother Hans’s girlfriend Maria Liffers, does not return his feelings be-cause his teachers and her parents protest and Goebbels has a frightful scene with hisfather. All of his pals have girlfriends—Hompesch has one enticingly called MariaJungbluth. Goebbels however senses only a ‘dark yearning’ as Eros awakes in him.
‘My libido is sick,’ he will write aged twenty-six. ‘In affairs of the heart we humansare all scandalously selfish. For the phallus we sacrifice hecatombs of immortal souls.’16Basking in what he sees as one woman’s love he will reflect, ‘I am everything toher.␣ .␣ . Or am I allowed to savour life’s treasures more intensely because I am doomed to depart it early on? Now and again I have this premonition!’ "