Introduction

Reporting on Hermann Göring’s appearance in court at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Janet Flanner was struck by a remarkable dissonance. Defending himself against unprecedented charges of “crimes against civilization and humanity,” the Nazi Reichsmarschall presented an image, Flanner wrote, of “the last great figure from the Renaissance.” In this remark Flanner quotes Göring’s own “sinister four-year-plan economic expert.” She detailed in The New Yorker, “He undeniably looked the bravura personality in his vast, sagging, dove-colored jacket and his matching voluminous breeches, with his fine, high, maroon boots and his maroon neckerchief, and above it his hard, blue eyes and what is left of his mobile, theatrical face.” Refusing to look the part of the craven villain, Göring played himself up as a gentleman and dandy, keenly aware that he was performing in his final act. As Flanner’s profile suggests, his impersonation of a cultivated signor complicates the impression that a person like him could commit “crimes against civilization.” Many years as a journalist covering the Third Reich did not guarantee her absolute condemnation of evil’s ability to fashion and flaunt an alluring public face. Indeed, a unique quality of her journalism is her stubborn immunity to out-of-hand judgments of human character; for Flanner, the construction of political selfhood and the performative features of identity were worthy of extended, nuanced study.

Flanner was not the only reporter struck by Göring’s coordinated spectacle – another New Yorker journalist, Rebecca West, lingered over his “coarse brown skin of an actor” and “plotting eyes” looking “facetiously around.” Grotesquely magnetic, Göring’s projected self-image distracted viewers from feeling moral repugnance at his inventory of war crimes, creating a spectator’s complicity with his embodied version of the Third Reich’s lethal appeal. Perhaps in response to just such evaluations, Mary McCarthy once said, “Janet regarded these men as if they were actors, saw these people as if they were stars, in which case there would be no conflict between liking one and another.”