later the files show Göring suing a Munich editor, Dr. Fritz
Gerlich, for having claimed that Göring had broken his word of
honor by escaping after the beer hall putsch. As the summer
election campaign began, another typical suit on the attorney’s
file was being brought by Göring against a Count Stanislaus Pfeil
for having stated in public that Göring was once heard to shout,
“Waiter, a bottle of champagne!” from his sleeping compart-
ment in a train in East Silesia. It seems clear that Göring had de-
veloped the monumental vanity of which the pharmaceutical
textbooks on morphine had spoken.
Meanwhile, Brüning’s government had collapsed, and for
want of a better alternative Franz von Papen, a reputable officer
who was otherwise a non-entity, had been appointed interim
chancellor; at the end of May Hitler grudgingly agreed to
support Papen, but only until the elections were held two
months later.
Before leaping into the election melee, Göring went to the
Mediterranean island of Capri to recover from the obsessive
melancholy that still seized him, nine months after Carin’s
death, whenever he thought of her, entombed now in Sweden.
From Capri he sent a telegram to a blond German actress he had
recently met in Weimar, Emmy Sonnemann, saying he hoped to
see her when he returned there during the election battle. Sepa-
rated from her husband, the actor Karl Köstlin, Emmy was a
domestic, unsophisticated Hamburg woman. Perhaps not as well
versed in politics as she might have been, she at first confused
Göring with Goebbels when they met, but in the spring of
Hermann had contrived a second meeting in Weimar, where
she was on the stage, and she had been oddly impressed by his
frequent and tender references to his deceased wife.
Although Emmy would become Göring’s second wife, the
ghost of Carin von Fock was to dog them everywhere. His first