I don’t quite know how to classify this. Metaautofiction? Not quite, because it’s not written by the subject, but it feels different to anything I’ve read before. Detailing the progression of ‘Hitler’s Architect’, Albert Speer, through the Nazi party, the Nuremberg Trials, imprisonment and then post-release fame. It’s this last section that I found most interesting, particularly Speer’s relationship with the historian Gitta Sereny (a former member of the French resistance). The whole thing is written in a very blank style. I thought the changing designation of Speer throughout (the architect, the minister, the prisoner, the star) was an interesting little trick and something I might nick at some point.
Obviously, any depiction of the Nazis is depressing and soul crushing, but that doesn’t mean one should avoid them. The current climate makes it feel more necessary than ever to be aware of how these horrors happen with the cooperation of ordinary folk.
Excerpts
Contemporary buildings should be built with a mind to the ruins that they would later become. It was already an architecture of impact because of its outsize dimensions. It would be even more so if they could prefigure now what sort of ruin it would produce.
It wasn't just a case of using the most durable and most noble materials - the best stones, the best wood, the best fabrics – in the service of durable and noble forms - domes, colonnades – but of using engineering and physics to predict the spots where the cracks would be most beautiful, where the disintegration would be most eloquent and full of pathos.
p80
[Hitler] admired Islam, believing that Europe and the Aryans had chosen the wrong religion when they went with Christianity, that Jewish sect with a mournful Jew as its figurehead, rather than a prophet sanctifying the sword against the infidels. But that was how it was, the vast majority of Germans of Aryan stock were Christians, he had to deal with it, in peacetime as well as in times when war was raging everywhere on the planet.
P129
The Third Reich doesn't forget us, and as long as there are still human beings, it will never forget us. It was designed that way. To make itself unforgettable by the sheer scale of its crimes and the excesses of its monuments. Crimes and monuments.
Its aesthetic won the war. It lost the war of arms but won the war of signs. And the conflict continues on the moral and artistic level, a never-ending total war.
Every kid on earth now knows who Adolf Hitler is. They know the Nazi salute and the 'Heil Hitler!' Most people do it at least once in their life, as a game, to be provocative. Some adolescents in their thirties, forties, sixties still do it even now. From Algiers to Tokyo, Damascus, Mexico, Bangkok, Tehran, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the dark side of the moon, everyone knows the SS uniform, the swastika armband, the leather, the torchlit parades, the Panzers, the Stukas, Hitler and even Göring, Himmler, Goebbels, a quartet from the history books turned into figurines, video game, filmed, graphic or written biopic, alternative histories, S&M gear, Wehrmacht helmet and heels, fishnet stockings, fashion, rock, the quenelle gesture, swastikas, young people revelling in the double S, Wolfsangel style, the Azov regiment, battalion, company, tank columns on the console and on the steppes, Eastern front for ever.
On the other side, unless it's a relative of yours, coming up with the name of a deportee is more complicated. For most of them, it's a very eloquent concert, a long silence, the orchestra pauses, searching, finding at best only the name of a camp - Auschwitz - and firstand foremost, signs: a yellow, six-pointed star sown onto the chest, numbers tattooed onto the lower arm, striped pyjamas - a binary alternance here too, the flipside of the anti-aircraft searchlights - emaciation, white, bony anatomies, an image floating on the surface of commemorations that become increasingly abstract as the last of the deported pass away, and anonymous, where the human being, the Jew, becomes simply an element of the Nazi décor.
But a proper name?
P248
Buy ‘You Are The Führer’s Unrequited Love’ by Jean-Noel Orengo at bookshop.org