We can glimpse aspects of these moral and emotional shifts in Speer’s own words from Spandau: The Secret Diaries during the years Casalis is chaplain at the prison (1947–50). To put these into context, we need to remember Speer (at least up until this time) regarded himself as intensely reserved, often completely unable to connect with people on an emotional level. Those who worked with him during the war and before also remember a man known for his ‘personal detachment’; ‘he didn’t see when people were troubled … I think he would have been glad to have this capacity to see … but he didn’t have [it] … He was the world’s most inhibited man’ – the judgement of somebody who knew him better than almost anybody else: Annemarie Kempf, his private secretary. She relates Speer one day marvelling at Hitler’s ability to be ‘amazingly personal’ – people sitting next to him would come away feeling he had really wanted to know about them. ‘“I’m really not good at that, am I?” he said, and I said, “No, you aren’t.”’
But, within weeks of Casalis’ arrival, Speer writes of a new meditation exercise he’s attempting:
Lying in the dark I try to enter into the closest possible contact with my family and my friends by imagining each of them in detail: their walks, their voices, the characteristic movements of their hands, the way they tilt their heads when reading. I am afraid that otherwise they will slip away from me. I also imagine that perhaps I can establish a kind of telepathic connection with them by this means. Moreover there must be people who think of me with pity or sympathy, though I do not even know them. Night after night therefore, I concentrate on one of these … thinking of an individual, trying to say a few words to a particular person … [this] invariably ends with my feeling a strong craving for a better world. Then time stretches out immeasurably. Frequently I fall asleep without having come to an end. But almost always I achieve a state of inner harmony that is akin to a trance.
An astonishing act of emotional and spiritual imagination for this man, who had said: ‘I loathe peddling my feelings – they belong to one’s inner self.’ Yet here he is journeying into new territories, guided by Casalis.
For most of his adult life Speer had had little time (literally and figuratively) for reading fiction – the ultimate empathetic experience which cannot work unless you put yourself in another’s shoes. Yet soon he’s deep into A Farewell to Arms and revelling in it: ‘something new, strange and fascinating to me. I know nothing like it.’ Encouraged by Casalis, he immerses himself in wider reading – not just fiction (Zola, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy), but theology, philosophy, drama, history, psychology and even poetry. Gradually Speer grows to love books, as he reveals:
By now what has become most important to me is the world of books. Machiavelli in exile, shunned by friends, literally invited his books to be his guests. He dressed ceremonially for his evening intercourse with them, lit candles. I cannot do that obviously. But when the bolt at the cell door is slid shut at six o’clock in the evening, I am content. I know that for four hours I can remain alone with my books.
At their weekly discussions, Casalis repeatedly emphasises three things: the need to go beyond the world of facts, superficial intelligence and logic; the way that reading deeply and writing can lead to reflective breakthroughs (or ‘grace’, as it might be termed); and, through these approaches, Speer may then come to a real, inner, understanding of his guilt. Casalis could see that Speer had exceptional abilities, but he was also perceptive enough to see that it was precisely these abilities that were the obstacle to his real moral and intellectual development – because often this meant he was happy to stay within the areas he felt confident in (analytical thought, logic, systems). ‘His thinking – as well as I fear, his actions – had become facile. What he needed to do … to become the “different man” he wanted to be, was to give up everything that was easy. For Speer, who I suspect was the most determined of men at whatever he undertook, the quasi-monastic life of Spandau was ideally suited for such an endeavour.’
Prompted by this impulse to go beyond his world of architecture and mathematics and problem-solving, in early 1948 Speer begins to think about writing seriously for the first time – ‘liberation by writing things down’, as he notes in the Diaries (a phrase that could have come straight from Casalis’ mouth); the seeds are sown for the work that eventually evolves into Inside the Third Reich. He’s daunted by the task, doubts whether he has the abilities to write such a work, wonders whether his memory is good enough or if he’s ‘seeing the past as if it were already behind a veil’. But finally he realises he is the only person left who was close to Hitler, who can write with authority about those catastrophic years.
Religious faith remains an enigma for Speer. We learn that Casalis has given him Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, which he finds extremely difficult:
As I understand him, the Christian commandments represent virtually infinite values, which even a saint can only approximate … every human being inevitably sins. I must confess that for pages at a time I could scarcely grasp Barth’s thought. After the services today I said to Casalis that faith seems to me like a tremendous mountain range. Tempting from a distance, when you try to climb it you run into ravines, perpendicular walls, and stretches of glacier. Most climbers are forced to turn back; some plunge to destruction; but almost nobody reaches the peak. Yet the world from on top must offer a wonderfully novel and clear view.
Towards the end of 1949 we can see a further development in Speer – a growing desire to look inside himself, even at a subconscious level – something the Speer of the earlier years would have scorned. Casalis encourages him to write down his dreams:
Dream in the afternoon: my wife and I are quarrelling. Angrily, she walks some distance away from me in the garden. I follow her. Suddenly only her eyes are there. They are full of tears. Then I hear her voice saying she loves me. I look steadily into her eyes; then I embrace her firmly. I wake up and realise that I have wept for the first time since my father’s death.
Some days later, in November 1949, we see a concerted period of inner reflection. Speer thinks about the deeper reasons for his reserved attitude towards others, and considers his associate’s remark years before that he was ‘Hitler’s unrequited love’. He remembers his aloofness, his shyness with Hitler, and then in a startlingly honest admission says that ‘Probably I would have liked to show Hitler my total veneration; but I was never able to express feelings freely. I could not even in this case, although quite often it seemed to me that he stood high above all the people I knew, probably even above my father, whom I truly revered.’ We learn (improbably) that he’s been reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and this again triggers a way of reassessing his relationship with Hitler; he quotes pointedly from the book: ‘To influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed.’
But almost immediately Speer can see that this is too easy an excuse. And then makes an astute parallel with Gray: ‘the dandy reserved his good looks by the portrait’s taking over all the ugly features. Suppose I am now transferring all my moral ugliness to my autobiographical likeness? Would that be a way to escape alive?’ Two days later, on 22 November, he is still wrestling with himself, and particularly the question of to what extent Hitler seduced him into architectural grandiosity or whether this urge was always there within him. And then in a passage that would have delighted Casalis (had he been able to read it at the time), Speer says this: