Rereading Albert Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich” By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Hitler rose to power because he exploited
in Germans that sense of what Speer called “personal unhappiness caused by the
breakdown of the economy,” which “was replaced by a frenzy that demanded
victims.” He turned history into a reservoir of resentments. And he spoke
simply. Speaking simply, in this case, meant discarding complexity and
disregarding truth.
The book was a worn, thick burgundy paperback, spine splintered in three parts, tiny print crammed on its pages. I read it in the bedroom downstairs, our family dumping ground of books and newspapers, old clothes, forgotten things. I must have been about ten. On the University of Nigeria campus, where I grew up, books (and videocassettes) drifted in and out of homes, borrowed and returned, creased and torn, passed around. I read everything - thrillers, history, romance, classics -some in a cursory way, with passages skipped. But this book absorbed me. I remember certain lines, as words will sometimes float in memory long after a book is forgotten. A theory of ruins. I remember a mute dog named Blondi. I remember the photographs. Grainy, black-and-white images that spoke of European mysteriousness.
Almost thirty years
later, I have just reread Albert Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich.” To return to
the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is
curious about the self I once was. What could I, at the age of ten, have found
so engaging in the memoir of a Nazi, Adolf Hitler’s de-facto No. 2 man? Perhaps it was the
book’s narrative energy, its lucid tone and textured scenes, which create a
kind of fluency. Speer’s affluent but unappealing childhood would have
interested me—his sickliness, his distant parents, who employ maids in white
aprons and fret about their social standing.
So, too, the palace intrigues of
Hitler’s petty court, unctuous men tiptoeing around him, swallowing words that
might offend him, jostling for his praise. The characters are compelling, and
might have seemed all the more piquant by being “real” people. They are flatly
sketched from anecdote, but the unencumbered clarity of their portrayal has a peculiar
appeal: the fat, self-indulgent Hermann Göring, drinking champagne and hoarding
stolen art; the small-eyed soullessness of Heinrich Himmler. The
uncomplicatedness of these sketches functions, too, as emotional directive: we
are to feel disgust for Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann, a gentle
pity for Hitler’s partner, Eva Braun.
And then there is the
character of Hitler himself. It might have amused me that a man whose “magic”
Speer often refers to did not seem at all magical. In Speer’s telling, Hitler
is duplicitous and vacuous, so intimidated by accomplished people that he
surrounds himself with shallow hangers-on; he is humorless and only laughs at
the expense of others; he tiresomely repeats himself and is delusional, even
before the war, with what Speer describes as “fantastic misreadings” of
reality. Yet Speer was devoted to him. Awed by him, loyal to him.
In this litany of
Hitler’s flaws, Speer demonstrates a slick honesty whose goal is to disarm. If
it disarmed me as a child, it repels me as an adult. His rueful acknowledgment
of his dedication to Hitler, and his philosophical puzzlement at his own
complicity, seeks to cast a glaze of innocence over him...read more:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/rereading-albert-speers-inside-the-third-reich