Writing a biographical novel about one of modern European history’s most skilled liars – whose fame rests almost entirely on his own self-crafted stories – is, to say the least, a difficult task.
So it’s not surprising that Jean-Noël Orengo has approached this challenge by making his superb novel about Nazi architect and war criminal Albert Speer, You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love, a work of metahistory. This means the book, translated from French by David Watson, is not just a historical narrative – it also reflects on the act of storytelling itself. Orengo examines the who, when and especially the why of the stories we tell about history.
For a decade Speer enjoyed a unique position as courtier and protege to Adolf Hitler. He may in fact have been the closest Hitler ever came to an actual friend – or, as Orengo’s title suggests, even a romantic partner in some strange, asexual way.
Speer flattered the dictator’s self-image as a frustrated artist, indulging Hitler’s fantasies of a thousand-year Reich. Later, as minister for armaments from 1942, Speer was responsible for supplying the military equipment that allowed Germany to carry on fighting its doomed struggle against the allies to the bitter end.
He became one of the regime’s most powerful figures. Yet in the popular imagination, Speer has never occupied quite the same place in the public imagination as Hitler’s other leading henchmen, such as Göring, Goebbels and Himmler.
If anything, for many years Speer enjoyed a wholly undeserved postwar reputation as a “good Nazi” – almost entirely through his own deft manipulation of unreliable memory and selective confession. At the Nuremberg trials his disingenuous and partial “confessions” helped him escape the hangman’s noose. Subsequently, his bestselling but deeply unreliable “memoir” Inside the Third Reich, written between 1946 and 1966 as he served a 20-year sentence for war crimes, recounted his relationship with Hitler as a kind of Faustian tragedy of blind ambition.
Speer’s self-mythologising
Orengo does not focus on exposing Speer’s many evasions and bare-faced lies. Historians have long established that despite his claims to the contrary, Speer was fully aware of Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust. As overlord of munitions production, his hands were steeped in the blood of a multitude of enslaved concentration-camp workers.
Orengo’s principal concern, rather, is Speer’s endless self-mythologising itself. He draws an implicit parallel between Speer’s spectacular orchestration of the Nuremberg rallies – the grand, impressive but ultimately hollow architectural spectacles that first made him famous – and the elaborate web of excuses and self-justifications Speer built to rehabilitate his image after the war. The novel is also shaped by the ideas of philosopher Walter Benjamin, a witness to and victim of Nazism, who warned against reducing politics to aesthetics.
Orengo maintains a critical detachment from his protagonist. He fully anatomises Speer’s ambitions and desires as he carefully charts the stages of his descent into the Nazi maelstrom. Yet he never invites us to identify with this fundamentally shallow figure, a stranger to himself who can only manifest through others’ reactions to his own refracted image.
There is little dialogue. Most encounters between Speer and Hitler in particular are reported speech. Speer himself is most often referred to simply as “the architect” (and later, enjoying his celebrity, “the star”). Hitler is “the guide” – a literal translation of führer.
In the novel’s last third, Gitta Sereny, the German-British writer who tried over many years’ enquiry to see through Speer’s moral evasion and self-deceit, is “the historian”. By rendering his principal characters in these archetypal terms, Orengo underscores the studied elusiveness in which Speer shrouded his crimes and depersonalises his story to explore its wider implications.
The novel is structured in layers of perspective. For the first two-thirds, we see the world through Speer’s eyes. Then the focus shifts to Sereny, as she attempts to uncover Speer’s moral evasion and self-deception. Yet Orengo shows that Sereny, too, has her own blind spots. Finally, the narrative adopts Orengo’s own viewpoint, that of a 21st-century writer reflecting on what the horrors of Nazism still mean for us today.
Orengo’s real subject is the struggle over memory itself. Who remembers, what is included, what left out and how and why some ways of remembering prevail over others. In genre terms, You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love might be regarded not as a whodunnit but a “whotoldit”; and as in any good mystery the question “who benefits?” is key.
Like a mystery, the novel is concerned with guilt and accountability. Orengo’s stylistic elegance and complex perspective never collapse into the relativism Speer himself – a postmodernist in life if never in architecture – deployed. The novel also never loses sight of its real subject, the urgency of moral reckoning.
The reader of this lucid, elegant novel is left to reflect on the many ways in which, in the wrong hands, art and memory can conspire to obscure as well as to illuminate.
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Barry Langford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.