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 \u2013 or, as Orengo\u2019s title suggests, even a romantic partner in some strange, asexual way. <\/p>\n
Speer flattered the dictator\u2019s self-image as a frustrated artist, indulging Hitler\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
He became one of the regime\u2019s most powerful figures. Yet in the popular imagination, Speer has never occupied quite the same place in the public imagination as Hitler\u2019s other leading henchmen, such as G\u00f6ring, Goebbels and Himmler. <\/p>\n
If anything, for many years Speer enjoyed a wholly undeserved postwar reputation as a \u201cgood Nazi\u201d<\/a> \u2013 almost entirely through his own deft manipulation of unreliable memory and selective confession. At the Nuremberg trials<\/a> his disingenuous and partial \u201cconfessions\u201d helped him escape the hangman\u2019s noose. Subsequently, his bestselling but deeply unreliable \u201cmemoir\u201d Inside the Third Reich<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n Orengo does not focus on exposing Speer\u2019s many evasions and bare-faced lies. Historians have long established<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Orengo\u2019s principal concern, rather, is Speer\u2019s endless self-mythologising itself. He draws an implicit parallel between Speer\u2019s spectacular orchestration of the Nuremberg rallies \u2013 the grand, impressive but ultimately hollow architectural spectacles that first made him famous \u2013 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>, a witness to and victim of Nazism, who warned against reducing politics to aesthetics.<\/p>\n Orengo maintains a critical detachment from his protagonist. He fully anatomises Speer\u2019s 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\u2019 reactions to his own refracted image. <\/p>\n There is little dialogue. Most encounters between Speer and Hitler in particular are reported speech. Speer himself is most often referred to simply as \u201cthe architect\u201d (and later, enjoying his celebrity, \u201cthe star\u201d). Hitler is \u201cthe guide\u201d \u2013 a literal translation of f\u00fchrer. <\/p>\n In the novel\u2019s last third, Gitta Sereny<\/a>, the German-British writer who tried over many years\u2019 enquiry to see through Speer\u2019s moral evasion and self-deceit, is \u201cthe historian\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n The novel is structured in layers of perspective. For the first two-thirds, we see the world through Speer\u2019s eyes. Then the focus shifts to Sereny, as she attempts to uncover Speer\u2019s moral evasion and self-deception. Yet Orengo shows that Sereny, too, has her own blind spots. Finally, the narrative adopts Orengo\u2019s own viewpoint, that of a 21st-century writer reflecting on what the horrors of Nazism still mean for us today.<\/p>\n Orengo\u2019s 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 F\u00fchrer\u2019s Unrequited Love might be regarded not as a whodunnit but a \u201cwhotoldit\u201d; and as in any good mystery the question \u201cwho benefits?\u201d is key. <\/p>\n Like a mystery, the novel is concerned with guilt and accountability. Orengo\u2019s stylistic elegance and complex perspective never collapse into the relativism Speer himself \u2013 a postmodernist in life if never in architecture \u2013 deployed. The novel also never loses sight of its real subject, the urgency of moral reckoning. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org<\/a>. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org<\/a> The Conversation UK may earn a commission.<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Writing a biographical novel about one of modern European history\u2019s most skilled liars \u2013 whose fame rests almost entirely on his own self-crafted stories \u2013 is, to say the least, a difficult task. So it\u2019s not surprising that Jean-No\u00ebl Orengo has approached this challenge by making his superb novel about Nazi architect and war criminal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Speer\u2019s self-mythologising<\/h2>\n
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