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• 1 2018-05-24T17:29:59+00:00 Envy/Around the Gedächtniskirche 1 plain 2018-05-24T17:29:59+00:00 This short article was published by Joseph Goebbels in his right-wing newspaper Der Angriff, or The Attack, and an attack it was: he lambastes the descent into moral corruption he perceives in German culture; writing about a memorial church allows him to evoke national and religious history to contrast with the jealousy for American culture he felt was debasing German identity. He writes that “the German people is alien and superfluous here. To speak in the national language is to be nearly conspicuous” (The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 561). In order to counteract this erasure of German culture, Goebbels believed a fierce campaign for German nationalism was necessary.
  
  Goebbels situates his critique of mass consumption of foreign culture in a hub of metropolitan bustle, perhaps to greater show how thoroughly the Gedächtniskirche has been forgotten. His description of the chaos of traffic speaks to the sense of overwhelm conservatives also commented on. Regardless on where the popular culture came from, conservatives felt that there was too much of it going on at once, constantly, everywhere. Mourning the numbing necessary in the face of this sensory overload, Goebbels sees “the heart turned to stone in this city” (561) , echoing Georg Simmel’s 1903 critique in “Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). Rather than Simmel’s more dispassionate reflection on the impact of city life, Goebbels violently rejects the temptations of the big city as ultimately increasing personal inadequacy, which is the driving force behind much envy: the less you think of yourself, the more appealing the glittery, artificially overstimulating nightlife would seem, and through continued exposure and eventual habituation, return to the everyday life that you and your family has led for generations would seem increasingly unfulfilling, thus fueling an unending cycle of consuming the new and forgetting the old. Goebbels argues that the cure for this cycle is to willfully reject this modern glamor precisely because it is so enviable.
  
  Underneath this vitriol for the envy of others, however, lies a certain note of envy on the part of Goebbels himself. For all his championing of the merits of traditional German nationalism, a campaign of embracing the past is still based in the past, and lacks the appeal of novelty and innovation that this American culture sparkled with. Goebbels cites “the eternal repetition of corruption and decay, of failing ingenuity and genuine creative power” (561). He unwittingly paints himself as this failing ingenuity while speaking of outdated practices seeking to replace the creative power undeniable in American trends for which Berliners were green with envy.