Evil But Human -- In Ella Leffland's Version Of Goring's Life, The Terrors Is In The Ordinary

Mar 18, 1990

Michael Upchurch

``The Knight, Death and the Devil''

by Ella Leffland

Morrow, $22.95

by Michael Upchurch

-----------------------------------------------------------------

In ``Rumors of Peace,'' Ella Leffland's 1979 novel about a young girl growing up in the Bay Area during World War II,

there's a moment when the heroine realizes with ``a clap of certainty'' that she is safe: California won't be bombed.

But her happiness is immediately marred by the thought that the war still exists, that its victims must feel ``as real to themselves, as I felt real to myself.'' She may be safe, but they are not.

This knowledge, a sort of Pandora's box of awareness, is a powerful depiction of the first imaginative leap an author makes - for there isn't much doubt that the young girl is, in crucial ways, Leffland herself. Now, after 10 years of research and writing, Leffland has made an imaginative leap of another kind with this ``historical biographical'' novel about Hermann Goring.

It's a staggeringly brave project to attempt, and Leffland acquits herself well. If ``The Knight, Death and the Devil'' doesn't quite reach the heights of Gunter Grass's ``The Tin Drum'' or Elsa Morante's ``History: A Novel'' - to my mind, the two finest novels that tackle World War II - this is explained by a difference in the nature, rather than quality, of the three books. Grass and Morante work from inside the inferno; Leffland's self-assigned task has been to enter it from outside, combining a historian's adherence to the facts with a novelist's flair for character, detail and narrative momentum.

The 700-odd pages move briskly and incisively in 92 tightly constructed chapters. After a brief glimpse of Goring's exchanges with a U.S. Army psychiatrist on the eve of the Nuremberg trials in 1946, followed by an elegant eight-page precis of German history from 914 to 1897, Leffland ushers us into the childhood world of her protagonist.

She deftly conjures an unruly boy whose disciplinary problems are solved by his enthusiastic response to military school. If her account of young Hermann's delight in toy soldiers and military uniforms can't help but be foreboding, it's also buoyant with innocent energy.

Goring's World War I aviation heroics, his despair at Germany's condition following defeat and his subsequent attraction to the Nazi party are unfolded with understatement and confidence. Hermann - Leffland brings you close enough to him to call him by his first name - at first appears no more sinister than the average army martinet who wishes the world were run as efficiently as his own household. He's an enthusiastic political partisan who sees himself as ``the inheritor of all the chivalry of German

knighthood,'' and his colleagues and underlings note his ``hearty, fatherly warmth.''

In her jabs at his constantly fluctuating weight, his taste for spectacular jewelry and his substance abuse (morphine following his injuries in the 1923 Munich putsch; paracodeine tablets, on a grand scale, later on), Leffland is only marginally disapproving. Like most vulgar behavior, Goring's is easily poked fun at and relished.

To some degree, even, Leffland is sympathetic to Goring's failings and foibles, which makes her revelations of his darker side all the more effective. His metamorphosis from partisan to virtual terrorist in the 1930s is seen by certain of his intimates - particularly Nazi foreign press secretary Putzi Hanfstaengl - with a giddy horror. Something missing in his rules of behavior, his ``chivalric'' code, make his evil look almost absent-minded; it easily coexists with that fatherly warmth.

Seven-hundred pages of nothing but Goring would be more than most readers could take, and Leffland, realizing this, has drawn in two compelling characters who serve as complementary and strangely ambivalent moral prisms for the Nazi years.

Both are based loosely on real characters.

Goring's Swedish stepson, Thomas von

Kantzow, is an idealistic young man who sees his stepfather as Europe's best chance for peace in the years leading up to 1939. He wants him to take over from Hitler. Later, after fighting in Finland against the Soviets, he becomes a powerless, numbed and cynical spectator, disgusted by the knowledge that he is still ``capable of giving way (to the) thrilling martial glory'' of a Nazi victory parade.

More sympathetic but no less unnerving is Rosa Korwan, a Jewish provincial stage actress and friend of Goring's second wife, Emmy. Determined not to leave Germany, Rosa survives in Berlin until well into the war with a luck that smacks of serendipity. Her secret seems to be a Bartleby-like renunciation of the world, and the ongoing drama of it is a key in maintaining the novel's tension.

Leffland's physical description is vivid and sensuous, conjuring ``bracing Berlin air, sweet as wet flowers and knife-sharp.'' Her dialogue is sprinkled with German vocabulary and imbued with a stiffness that evokes a Teutonic correctness. The mixing of factual text - letters, speeches and diaries - with fictional invention is close to seamless, and an afterword scrupulously notes what is fact and what is fiction.

Leffland has looked into a dark place, a terrifying place, and realized that much of its terror lies in how easily the fabric of ``ordinary'' life is able to coexist with the darkness. In accenting the seemingly normal, if irascible, behavior of a protagonist who has weight problems, office worries, family joys and crises like anyone else, she gives evil a disarmingly human and recognizable face.

It can't happen here?

Given the right set of circumstances, Leffland hints, it can happen anywhere.

Michael Upchurch is a Seattle novelist and critic.