The Master Builder

By Stefan Kanfer

SPANDAU: THE SECRET DIARIES by ALBERT SPEER 463 pages. Macmillan. $13.95.

All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are still a little in love with their sins.

--Anatole France

If any reader doubts the wisdom of France's aperc,u let him examine these stark entries. Albert Speer, author of the bestseller Inside the Third Reich, has unique credentials for speculation on the nature of evil and culpability. The architect was literally the Master Builder of the Third Reich and Hitler's Minister of Armaments and War Production. It was in his ministerial capacity that Speer employed some 5 million slave laborers; it was for that role that he was sentenced at the Nuremberg trials to long imprisonment.

The Reich lasted twelve years, the incarceration 20. That is merely first in a file of ironies. Forbidden to write a formal memoir, Speer scribbles on toilet paper, then smuggles out his work with the help of a Dutch guard who had once served as a forced laborer in a German factory. Speer's Russian captors--who alternate with more lenient Westerners--are as harsh and arbitrary as Reich Marshals. When he steals a cauliflower from the prison vegetable garden, Speer is caught and sentenced to a week of solitary confinement.

Spellbound Lover. His fellow prisoners, the great German admirals Raeder and Doenitz, squabble like jealous ensigns; the disintegrating Rudolph Hess, once Hitler's deputy, malingers and throws fits to garner pity. Speer, who displayed no discernible sympathy for workers during the '30s and '40s, grows hungry. He observes: "I often stoop to pick up crumbs of bread that have fallen from the table. For the first time in my life I am discovering what it means not to have enough to eat."

This lack of moral imagination is clearest in the book within the book--a love story of Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler. It is a romance without queerness or pathos. It is simply the reminiscence of an acolyte still spellbound after all these years. "Isn't it understandable that even now the image of the enthusiastic Hitler comes to mind?" he writes, early on. Later a guard marks a significant milestone. Speer writes: "Today would be Hitler's birthday. How many birthdays I spent with Hitler in the Berlin chancellery, with delegations paying homage to him, with grandiose parades!" He recalls his mother's observation of evenings spent at a mountain castle: "Hitler was terribly nice. But such a parvenu world!" He broods on the fact that he suddenly cannot remember the Fuehrer's "engaging traits": "Have continued to reflect on my relationship to Hitler. The theme of faithlessness." He recalls the remark of an associate, "made after an evening visit to my studio, that I was Hitler's unrequited love."

It was not so unrequited. Though Speer recognizes the Fuehrer's monstrous propensities, he is still able to write, wholly without historical remove: "[He] had the ignorance, the curiosity, the enthusiasm and the temerity of the born dilettante; and along with that, inspiration, imagination, lack of bias."

The man who could write about Hitler's lack of bias is surely incapable of rational analysis, either of himself or the beloved. Yet Speer is an intelligent, even brilliant man. His every page refutes the old belief that Nazis were all butchers or madmen. The author is a civilized stoic, who walks meters around the prison yard, "from Spandau to Peking," musing about aesthetics. He thinks incessantly, and often beautifully, about his children growing up without him.

Nuremberg Obituary. But it is in his very intellectuality that Speer chillingly reveals himself--and, ultimately, the mind of the Third Reich. In a series of entries he evokes the works of Ernest Hemingway, Martin Buber and Thomas Mann. Herr Speer never fully comprehends what might have happened if he and his comrades had triumphed. The thundering anti-Fascist Hemingway would surely have perished. Mann was a political exile whose German works literally went up in smoke. Buber, the Jew, would have ended with his brothers in the ovens of Auschwitz.

Legal judgment has already been passed on Speer. Literary evaluation has placed him in the ranks of the invaluable; he was, says Historian Hugh Trevor Roper, the brightest of the important Nazis. As for the moral judgment: that is made by Speer himself in the pages of Spandau. "Strictly speaking," he writes, "my life ended in May 1945. In Nuremberg I pronounced my obituary. That's it." The thoughts in this book are from a freed and rather wealthy man, now living in obscurity in Germany. His work is the diary of a corpse.

Stefan Kanfer

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