“want to get their whole circle of friends interested in the
Hitler movement and Hermann is absolutely bombarded with
questions, opinions, and comments. Everybody tries to spot
flaws in Hitler and criticize his program. Poor Hermann has to
talk, talk, talk and answer questions until he’s fit to drop. But all
the time I can see that the circle around us is expanding, and
that we’ve won over a lot of them to Hitler and his cause” and
she went on to mention one prince who was forty, chairbound,
and paralyzed, “the poor fellow,” but always got wheeled into
the meetings that Göring addressed.
Sometimes, those audiences were twenty thousand or even
thirty thousand strong. Göring’s style was demagogic rather
than analytical, but, with unemployment touching four million,
audiences found style less important than content now. “We
shall flatten our opponents!” he would roar, and sit down to
thunderous applause. He took to wearing the party’s now-
universal brown shirt, with his blue Pour le Mérite slung non-
chalantly over a dark brown leather necktie. Ploughing his fur-
row across the German election landscape, he spoke at Magde-
burg, Frankfurt, Plauen, and Mannheim, pulling himself to-
gether so as not to crack up during each speech, as Carin
whom her mother had urged to join him in Germany wrote
on June . “But he collapses like a wounded man afterward.”
Later that summer she fell ill again. He transported her to
the hospital at Bad Kreuth, on Lake Tegernsee, and took her son
under his wing, walking and climbing with him in the moun-
tains.
The rival parties were now fighting over seats in the
Reichstag. Göring’s speeches took on a more combative style. On
August , police agents reported that speaking at the Krone Cir-
cus in Munich Göring had defamed the Weimar Constitution
and the present government. “He called the minister of the in-