Today I reckoned out that if I make my twenty-one-year imprisonment equal to a year, I would today have arrived at 27 October. If I equate it with the twenty-four hours of one day, 11.1 seconds pass every day. It is now only eight seconds beyond 7.58 p.m. That is, the day has already gone by, but the evening and the night still lie before me.
Is there something here – in fact in the whole enterprise of the Walk – that goes beyond a playful love of mathematics? Which is numerically obsessive? When relations with other human beings are so challenging, is there a sense of safety in numbers? Finding a kind of sanctuary in the discipline of counting and walking? Returning to something from childhood that had provided him with enormous pleasure and reassurance. As he had explained to Gitta Sereny, talking about his childhood: ‘I loved mathematics … I can’t describe to you how much or why I loved it. But becoming a mathematician was all I had ever thought of. It did everything for me that was … well … joy. It was my way … of experiencing triumph.’
As the year of his release grows nearer, he realises it’s extremely unlikely he will be able to complete his circumnavigation of the world, but still he walks further and further each day:
21 December 1964: Today I passed Seattle on the West Coast of the United States. In sixty days, despite cold and high winds, I have covered 560 kilometres. Recently I broke my day’s record and in five hours and forty minutes covered twenty-eight kilometres. By now my tramping has infected several of the guards. Some days four or five persons can be seen on the track, with determined looks on their faces. ‘I’ll tell you the difference between you and me,’ Hess said to me today. ‘Your follies are contagious.’
But again, just a couple of weeks later in January 1965, news from the outside presses in, and Speer begins to feel fearful about his release in this new climate:
the newspapers are full of the Auschwitz trial, and I have the impression that the past … is once more being revived. Suddenly I feel something akin to fear of the world out there, which I no longer know and which is beginning to rediscover, with so much new passion, the things that have been slowly fading for me since Nuremberg, by dint of my conscious acceptance of atonement. And suddenly Spandau seems not so much the place of my imprisonment as of my protection.
He then expresses confusion, noting since the war the crimes of the supposedly ‘good’ side in the war – the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, the Russians in Hungary, and says:
How much more difficult it has become to accept within oneself the guilty verdict pronounced by those judges. Moreover, the many years of brooding, of dialogues with myself, have dissipated my former guilt feelings. For at bottom every confrontation with one’s guilt is probably an unconfessed search for justification … And now this trial! I must seize upon what is being written in the newspapers about Auschwitz now as a kind of support. That can help me restore the lost meaning of these Spandau years, and at the same time help me recover moral clarity.
A fortnight before his release Speer tallies up his kilometre totals for each year of the Walk Around the World – ‘the only tangible result of the Spandau years’, as he expresses it rather curiously, ‘there is nothing left but statistics, production figures’:
1954–5 2,367 kilometres 1955–6 3,326 1956–7 3,868 1957–8 2,865 1958–9 2,168 1959–60 1,633 1960–1 1,832 1961–2 1,954 1962–3 2,664 1963–4 2,794 1964–5 3,258 1965–6 3,087 Total 31,816
Even on his last day in Spandau, 30 September 1966, he’s still calculating the precise distance he’s travelled: ‘Since I drew up those statistics I have tramped an additional 114 kilometres. In a moment I am going into the garden and will cover another ten kilometres, so that I shall be ending my walking tour at kilometre 31,936’ (amidst the excitement of the last day, Speer, uncharacteristically, miscalculates – the ten additional kilometres he walked subsequently took the total to 31,940 kilometres). Anyway, by this final stage, Speer is in deepest Mexico, and so informs us that ‘At 11 p.m. a telegram is to be sent to my old friend which he should receive around midnight: “PLEASE PICK ME UP THIRTY-FIVE KILOMETRES SOUTH OF GUADALAJARA, MEXICO. HOLZWEGE”.’fn5
A black Mercedes, courtesy of the industrialist Ernst Mommsen, is waiting for Speer, with his lawyer Flaschner and his wife, Margret. On the stroke of midnight the gates of Spandau swing open, and Speer’s twenty years are over, in a blaze of flashbulbs and television spotlights. They drive the short distance to the ornate Hotel Gerhus in Grunewald, where they spend the night and where Speer gives the first of the numerous press conferences he was to hold after his release. The next day, Speer and Margret drive to a remote house in Schleswig-Holstein, where they spend a fortnight with the rest of the family. Although everyone tries hard, Speer feels a ‘sense of awkwardness’ and then makes this extremely revealing comment, which later appears on the last page of the Diaries:
I think as I write this a few days later, that I should not attribute the sense of awkwardness to Spandau. It is even possible that the stiffness with which we sat facing each other in the visiting room is the kind of contact that accords with my nature. Hasn’t there always been a sort of wall between me and others? Has not all casualness been only a strategy to make that wall invisible? … My whole life, in fact, appears to me strangely alienated. Architecture I loved, and I hoped to make my name live on in history by building. But my real work consisted in the organisation of an enormous system of technology.
*
And what became of his friendship with Casalis, whom Speer had called ‘the most important person in my life’? After his release, Casalis came to feel that from a spiritual point of view there had only been a regression in Speer from the man he’d known in prison. The man who had journeyed, by the time Casalis left Spandau in 1950, from being ‘the most tortured man I’d ever known to the most repentant’. After Speer’s release they met on only four occasions – extremely surprising given the glowing words that he had used about Casalis. But perhaps explained by Speer’s delight in his public celebrity on his release (abhorrent to Casalis), and his sense of male pride. Casalis describes the penultimate time they were together, driving Speer in his little Citroën 2CV to Lille:
We continued our Spandau conversations, but obviously from a different position. In Spandau he was the prisoner, living what he called then his ‘sixteenth-century life’ … His talks with me then were very central to all of this, and yes, I could see that they started something in and for him, and created in him a new dimension, a new space. But in the very public existence of his post-publication life, someone like me was … marginal … You know it is very difficult, very complicated for people who have received help from someone at a moment of great need, to return to such a person, to turn back to such a person. It is not that it is difficult to acknowledge what has been done for them. The real difficulty is to go on knowing someone who, at a time of crisis, has got to know you so deeply.
We know from Dorothée Casalis that there was one further meeting between Speer and Casalis after his release from Spandau. And her account of this particular evening demonstrates that Speer continued to feel riven by guilt even after he was a free man again: