Anmerkungen Zu Goebbels' Dissertation „Wilhelm Von Schütz Als Dramatiker. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Dramas der Romantischen Schule”

Joseph Goebbels defended his doctoral thesis entitled „Wilhelm von Schütz als Dramatiker. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Dramas der romantischen Schule” at the University of Heidelberg in 1922. His „Doktorvater” was professor Max Freiherr von Waldberg, who two years after the seizure of power of the nationalsocialists, in 1935 was deprived of his chair. Goebbels frequented, prior to the defense of his thesis, in Heidelberg the seminar of the highly reputed historian of literature of the era, Friedrich Gundolf, who belonged to the circle of „conservatives of culture” who declinend to assume the role of the „Doktorvater” of the thesis. The two most striking characteristic features of the doctoral thesis of Goebbels are nationalism on the one hand and mysticism i.e. messianistic ideas (search for the „leader”) in accordance with the thought of Dostojevsky on the other.