Watching two wood pigeons courting (or are they disputing territory?). In full spring plumage – rich grey on the back of their necks, pinky white under the tail feathers, precise white bars on the nape. They work their way back and forth along the blue, iron rail at the top of the footbridge over the railway line. Back and forth – silhouetted against a bright blue sky like two people doing a tug-of-war or two men fencing … At one point one of them tips right down, bill almost to the ground, tail thrust up high in the air, accompanied by a deep growling coo. At regular junctures they flap up, cross over, swap places and land again. One always looking away from me, the other always facing towards me. The fact that they swap places suggests that they’re courting. Far off I hear the train’s horn blow. Will they fly off as the train arrives I wonder? Intriguingly when the train passes right under them and comes to a halt, they take no notice and carry on engrossed in their ritual. However, when a young man climbs the footbridge stairs and begins to cross the bridge, they suddenly fly off and away.
Perhaps the train was too large for them to ‘see’ as a threat at all? Whereas the man is recognisable. Just as the Aboriginals couldn’t ‘see’ Captain Cook’s ship when it arrived in what was to become Botany Bay. Too big a threat to ‘see’.
I put the letter down, and look out over the garden. Could that be the answer? ‘Too big to see’? Is it possible that transnational corporations are simply too vast to perceive? That we glimpse the man, but cannot see the train? And, in a similar way, could this be why the Holocaust still defies our imaginations? Why the totality of this event has eluded the grasp of even the greatest historians over the last seventy years?
PART EIGHT
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Opening the Prisons in Our Minds
20
The Architect in Prison – a Different Man?
Albert Speer arrived at Spandau prison, together with Hess, Dönitz, Raeder, Schirach, Funk and Neurath, on 18 July 1947 after a flight from Nuremberg that must have seemed like a dream after almost two years of confinement in the courthouse there. He describes it like this:
Villages and small towns lay peacefully beneath us, seemingly intact. The fields were planted, and the forests, in spite of all the rumours, had not been cut down. Because life had stood still around me during the recent past, I had lost awareness of the fact that it was going on outside. A moving train, a tugboat on the Elbe, a smoking factory chimney gave me little thrills. We circled for perhaps half an hour over the buildings and ruins of Berlin … I was able to make out the East–West Axis, which I had completed for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday … and … the Chancellery I had designed. It was still there, although damaged by several direct hits … The Grunewald and the Havel lakes were untouched and beautiful as ever.
Inside the prison, on the western fringes of the city, the seven men are brought down to earth. They are given inmates’ clothing from Nazi concentration camps and Speer becomes ‘Prisoner Number Five’. After an initial sense of relief to be away from Nuremberg and the oppressive associations, he is assailed by depression in these first weeks, as the reality of the next twenty years in this place begins to sink in.
Three months later, on Saturday 11 October, Speer meets this man for the first time –Pastor Georges Casalis:
Vigorously intellectual, left-wing, generous, pipe-smoking, Casalis had enormous doubts about whether to accept the posting to Spandau. As well as his religious background, he’d spent four years active in the French Resistance, and realised that the work at Spandau would entail helping men ‘who were at the very least responsible for the death of an untold number of my very special friends, the friends of my war. They had not only died, many of them had been betrayed, tortured, put to death in unspeakable pain.’ Only after discussing the matter for a long time with his wife Dorothée, and also with his mentor, the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, was he persuaded to accept the job.
At the initial religious service, by candlelight, organised in a larger prison cell, Speer tells us that Casalis on that first day takes as the subject for his sermon ‘The lepers of Israel were cut off from the community of the people by a host of legal prohibitions; these were as insurmountable as a prison wall.’ Some of Speer’s fellow prisoners are outraged by the implied comparison, but Speer disagrees, accepting Casalis’ words as a challenge. He later tells him: ‘don’t spare our feelings, don’t [be] careful or protective of us. You are exactly on course, exactly what is needed.’
Speer knows immediately he will be challenged by Casalis, because after the service he tells Speer that he holds him more responsible, more blameworthy than all of the other prisoners, because he was the most intelligent. He had been responsible for extending a war in which millions had died, including many of Casalis’ own friends. Speer thanks him for his honesty, and then tells him he has a question to ask, which, given his usual emotional reserve, seems quite exceptional:
I’ll be as honest in return … I’ve been sentenced to twenty years, and I consider it just. I want to use this time that has … been given to me. What I want to ask you is: ‘Would you help me become a different man?’fn1
Casalis, speaking years later, said that Speer was at this time, ‘under the extraordinary cool he affected, the most guilt-ridden, the most tortured man I had ever known’. And, of course, to a religious man there must have been a significant challenge in that reality. Casalis agrees to help Speer, and, over the next three years, they work together in a way that is perhaps difficult for us to understand today. He later uses a strange, and remarkable, phrase to describe the process he encouraged Speer to go through – it had been ‘a continuity of reflection, of studying, of opening his mind and spirit to suffering’.
Beyond all the public position-taking, beyond all the vanities of leadership, beyond self-justifications, beyond the ego. Stripping back to the essence of the human being. A man alone. Fear, doubt, suffering. Casalis was asking Speer to make Lear’s journey to the heath, but in a totally intentional way; and in stripping away all the rank, the pomp, the arrogance of power, to try to connect with his own self, and most importantly, to connect to others who had suffered – ‘to expose thyself to feel what wretches feel’ – ‘poor naked wretches … that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm’. And, remarkably, for the first time in his life Speer begins to open as a person. A tree now transplanted to different soil, tentatively beginning to grow towards the light. There is the quality of a miracle in this process; as Speer later says to his daughter Hilde, arguing about whether God can ever be approached with rationality: ‘How do you explain … the fern I planted by mistake upside-down? It turned itself round, to grow straight up, bypassing its own root. I know you can find reasons: the nature of growth … whatever. Of course one can always say so, but if you are honest you have to admit that these are miracles, which become more mysterious the more you ponder them.’
Casalis first of all emphasises that he wants Speer to ‘expand his thinking into realms he had not yet entered’; he tells him he needs to read Karl Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik (‘Church Dogmatics’). The next week he starts on this work – 9,000 pages, thirty-seven volumes. He reads it in its entirety over the next months, then discusses the thoughts and questions that come out of it in detail with Casalis at their weekly meetings. Speer has never experienced anything like this – deeply intellectual enquiry on an ongoing basis. The process of continually looking inwards, reflecting, questioning, doubting, challenging – the polar opposite of the blind faith that fascism had demanded. As Speer begins to trust this process more and more, Casalis sees significant changes take place in Speer as he learns ‘to use spoken language to search for inner meanings and thereby let go some of the iron self-control imposed upon him, by himself, as well as others, since early childhood’. This process led him ‘to discover hitherto unsuspected imaginative freedoms’.