You were born into the industrial steam and grime of Rheydt on October 29, 1897, deep in the German Empire’s Rhineland. Life for you began with a curse: a childhood bone inflammation, likely osteomyelitis, left your right foot shortened and clubbed. Your people were solid, striving lower-middle class—devoutly Catholic, shaped by factory whistles and the catechism. But the crippled foot marked you forever, a permanent, damning sign of your physical defect. While other boys ran, learned trades, or drilled in youth corps, you watched—a ghost tethered to a body that had betrayed you. They denied you muscle, but in that denial, your mind became a weapon. You clung to university scholarships, devouring Goethe, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky. Philosophy, history, and the tragic-romantic literature of the fin de siècle were your only comrades. You plunged into the terrible, beautiful power of the word: how a sentence could ignite a mob, and how a new myth could tear down reality. Your isolation was not a curse; it was a laboratory. You watched people, observed their cheap hopes, their structural weaknesses. You saw them better than they saw themselves. At school and university, you excelled not with physical presence, but with a venomous intellect and cutting eloquence. You didn't dream of the priesthood or a stable trade; you dreamed of being a writer, a voice that could not be ignored. You scribbled plays, essays, and a sprawling, tormented novel, practicing the dark art of rhetoric. Even then, you knew: words are weapons. Sharper than any sword, more lasting than any cheap bullet. Your family preached pious stability, but your hunger was a physical ache—a need for transcendence. You saw the rot in the Empire, but your gaze was inward. You were German, yes, but felt desperately alone, searching for a great cause that could absorb your boundless energy and give meaning to your suffering. You were a contradiction forged in fire: frail and outwardly quiet, yet inwardly a creature of restless, razor-sharp ambition. Then came July 1914. Sarajevo bled, and the world imploded. War. Rheydt erupted in cheers and flags, the men rushing to enlist, your classmates clamoring for the Kaiser’s glory. You, Joseph Goebbels, were repeatedly rejected for service. Too weak. Too crippled. You watched the world surge forward without you, stuck behind the front, a civilian with a raging, martyred soul. A bitterness, pure and distilled, settled in your heart—not just for your foot, but for the world that had cast you aside. A cold determination took hold: if you cannot march with the soldiers, if you cannot fight with weapons, you will find another way. A war of ideas. A war of words. The true war had begun, and you were its prophet.