The "Lying Press"

A visit to the Goebbels Villa in Brandenburg, and some thoughts on Elon Musk

Before the election I happened to be in Berlin, and for some reason one October weekend I rode my bike up to the Villa Bogensee, an overgrown lake retreat once owned by Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. It was a news item in the spring, when the city of Berlin announced the property could be had for free by anyone who passed muster with city officials and promised to keep it in shape, since the crumbling lodge had become too expensive for Berlin to maintain and too awkward, somehow, to destroy.

I took a train to the rural town of Wandlitz and rode my bike about four miles, first across farmland, then into a yellowing beechwood forest near Bogensee, one of Brandenburg’s many lakes. There was rich autumn sunshine. My cell-phone data gave out. By the end of the road I was close to nothing but the fine old German forest, eternal subject of poems by Goethe and Rilke, or kitsch-Romantic nonsense by power-grabbers like Goebbels. Hermann Göring had an estate up here, too, on another lake, where he wanted to revive a supposedly pure and original breed of Polish horse.

The front of the villa says BOGENSEE in arching iron letters, and the courtyard would have made a cinematic arrival scene for cars driving up from the Hauptstadt in the 1940s. Corroding near the front door was a statue of an naked, embracing couple, man and woman both moss-grown and missing their heads.

The house rotted quietly, too. You couldn’t go in but you could peer through the windows at the still-furnished rooms. The house had been used as a field hospital by the Allies and then as a sort of Communist summer camp by East Germany during the Cold War. Now it was hollow but still indestructible-looking — too expensive to maintain, too risky to sell outright (what if a neo-Nazi buys it?), and too impractical to destroy. Other people walked around the property with their bikes and there was a sense of mistrust. Why is that person here? But the wife of a retired couple smiled at me. “Apparently no one home,” she said drily.

I laughed. “Apparently not.”

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Goebbels revived the term Lügenpresse — “lying media” — during the Third Reich. He used it as an epithet for Jewish and foreign journalists who reported on the military ambitions and pogroms developing under Hitler in the ’30s. (Turns out they weren’t lying.) But the phrase remains convenient cover for any set of people who want to grab or maintain power. Before the Nazis, the German Catholic establishment used the term against journalists who were sympathetic to the 1848 socialist revolutions; right-wing protesters revived it just a decade ago because they didn’t like reports in mainstream magazines or on TV about Islamic immigration to the West. No doubt, in every case, there were mistakes and even outright lies in “the media.” But the phrase resurfaces whenever some scoundrel wants power.