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Most important of all, Göring is the one Nazi leader the German people understand and like. They worship Hitler in a mystical sort of way. They love Göring and call him "wiser Hermann." "Our Hermann." To the German people Göring is the embodiment of the satiation of all their own more normal appetites. They love sport. Göring is Reich's Master of the Hunt, lives in the middle of a 100,000-acre game preserve, imports falcons from Iceland to pursue that medieval sport. He plays tennis in the garden behind his palace in Berlin, wearing a hairnet to keep his long reddish hair from falling away from the balding area. He skis in a fur cap, rides in all kinds of costume. He has himself photographed at all his sports except swimming. Because of his sensitiveness about his hyper-developed mammary glands, other guests were excluded from a Baltic beach where Hermann and his wife went bathing. But he displays no such squeamishness in regard to his guests' sensitivities. All of them are expected to frolic with his lion cub, Caesar, and distinguished visitors at Karinhall are invited to watch his prize cattle breed.
Göring is a national decoration. His gaudy uniforms and many medals are a national—and international—joke. He lives in piratical splendor. He took his second wife, Emmy Sonnemann, out of the Prussian State Theatre, bedecked her in flowing garments to accentuate her fullblown beauty and roped her in the biggest pearls a Greek merchant could collect for him. Göring lives far beyond his salary. Nobody in Germany cares where he gets the money.
To the beer-loving Germans, Hermann is a delight. Besides putting away quantities of champagne, burgundy, hock, whiskey, brandy and assorted liqueurs, he quaffs beer by the quart out of huge stone mugs. He will paw nearby females with hearty indiscrimination when carrying a load of Pilsner.
The German people love to eat heartily. Since they cannot in wartime eat heartily, Hermann does it for them, consuming cream puffs by the dozen, wolfing huge helpings of everything, dirtying his sleeves and vest in the process. He plays Falstaff both because it is good politics and because he likes the role. "Look at me!" he roars, slapping his enormous stomach. "I have lost pounds in the service of the country. Why do you complain at cutting down your meals a little?" It makes no difference to unser Hermann or his people that the 40 pounds he lost last year (270 to 230) were for vanity, not country.
Years of Wrath. Göring's gargantuan lust for living may be glandular, or it may simply be overcompensation for years of privation, despair and wrath. Certain it is that much of his ruthlessness was acquired during World War I and while he was an obscure revolutionary, hating the "Jewish republic." More than Hitler or Goebbels or the late Ernst Röhm, who were abnormal anyway, Göring is a product of Germany's generation of defeat, of which Erich Maria Remarque has written.