The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [24]
On state occasions, Goering restrained himself, but only a bit. He favored uniforms he had designed himself, often in white or pale blue or gray, and he changed outfits four or five times a day. He wore so many medals that Germans joked (quietly) that the decoration nearest the edge read, “Continued on the Back.” When Goering visited Italy in 1942, Mussolini’s foreign minister confided his scandalized first impressions to his diary: “He wore a great sable coat, something between what motorists wore in 1906 and what a high-grade prostitute wears to the opera.”
EVERYTHING TO DO with Goering, from his ego to his ambition to his waistline, was outsized.*(Even the chairs in his office were so colossal, an American diplomat complained in a letter to President Roosevelt, that he found himself perched atop one “like some sort of animated flea.”) Goering liked jewelry, for example, but he did not merely enjoy it, as many people do. He liked to pile up his favorite pieces in great heaps and then push his hands into the pile so that diamonds and rubies and emeralds would run through his fingers. At Carin Hall, he did not simply exchange his urban clothes for those of a country squire, as other wealthy men with rural retreats might do. Instead, Goering outfitted himself like a Germanic Robin Hood, in leather jerkin and high green boots and six-foot spear.
His favorite costumes reflected his dislike of the contemporary world. Though he was commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, the epitome of modern military power, Goering thought of himself as a Wagnerian warrior from centuries ago. “He obviously would have loved to sail through the air on a wild condor, his overcoat flowing, hurling a spear at the enemy monsters,” observed one of his fellow Nazis.
He would have liked the Luftwaffe, too, to go to war brandishing spears. Goering refused to outfit Germany’s long-range bombers with navigational instruments, for instance, although the military advantages of such equipment were not in dispute. The problem was aesthetic. To him, pi lots were gladiators, not technicians. “My flyers are no projectionists and my fighter craft no cinemas,” Goering decreed. Other features of the modern world met with the same disdain. Goering liked to boast that he had no idea how a radio worked.
He seemed constantly to be starring in some sort of private play, and even those who had no problem with his politics found themselves bewildered by the man himself. A Nazi named Otto Wagener, a powerful figure in the Reich’s early days, described a visit to Goering’s Berlin apartment. The great man left Wagener waiting for him and finally made his appearance in a red gown and red Turkish slippers with turned-up toes. Wagener murmured something about giving Goering time to finish dressing, then realized his blunder.
Goering led the way to his den, a red room with red drapes, lit by immense candles on tall, ornate stands. Wagener tried to light his cigar at one of the tapers but found he could not reach as high as the flame. The Reich Marshal’s desk and the area around it stood on a thronelike perch, raised high above the seating area reserved for visitors. Goering, in his sultan’s robes, eased into his chair and took out an immense notebook and a fat, red pencil perhaps twenty inches long. “I felt,” Wagener wrote in his memoirs, “as if I were in the cell of a mental patient.”
THEN CAME CARIN Hall, and everything that had come before looked understated. Goering named the immense estate for his first wife, who had died of tuberculosis in 1931. Of his eight houses, this was his favorite. Built with millions in state funds, it sat two hours outside Berlin at the heart of a sprawling park stocked with bison, elk, and Goering’s pet lions.
The house stretched room after glittering room, several of them devoted solely to the display of Goering