Speer continued to be troubled, tortured by the Jewish question. He asked Georges whether he could introduce him to friends who had lost relatives during the war and the occupation – that is Jewish men and women. Georges hesitated and then he contacted two sisters who had lost several members of their family in Auschwitz and elsewhere. They spent an evening which was both extraordinary and terrible with these two women, and their husbands who let it all out – their hatred, their violence, their grief in the face of the irrecoverable. And he [Speer] took it all, and said: ‘I have to hear this. I must not protect myself. That’s how it is.’ A few times Speer said ‘I was responsible.’ I don’t know if he was able to say ‘I was guilty’, but responsible at least. Yes, he felt that very strongly that evening.
*
Reading between the lines. Always necessary, but acutely so in Speer’s case. We have seen the remarkable developments that took place in him during the years that Casalis was chaplain at Spandau, the vast majority of which must be attributable to his exceptional guidance of Speer; we have also heard Speer’s own praise for the pastor. His influence in these years was profound. Yet it is still an unsettling experience to go back to Speer’s actual words from the Diaries and then to contrast these with the words he uses with Gitta Sereny in the interviews for her book. Like Sereny (given Speer’s eulogistic comments about Casalis and the critical role he played during these years), I was also astonished not to find his name even mentioned in the index of the Diaries. And in the body of the text, between October 1947 and June 1950, Casalis is mentioned on only seven occasions:
11 October 1947 (Casalis’ first service)
18 October 1947 (Speer’s fellow prisoners complain about the previous week’s sermon)
26 October 1947 (Casalis preaches that he is ‘the greatest sinner among us’)
15 May 1948 (Speer asks Casalis to postpone his wife’s first visit)
5 February 1949 (Speer and Casalis discuss the nature of religious faith)
14 February 1949 (Casalis arranges for Speer’s cousin, Hildebrecht Hommel, to visit him – his first personal visit in Spandau)
1 June 1950 (Speer describes Casalis’ departure)
But even this final mention of the pastor in the Diaries is curiously formal, with no hint of the intensity of their relationship, their weekly discussions or the programme of intellectual and spiritual development which Casalis had taken Speer through:
Chaplain Casalis, who has cared for us for three years, is going to Strasbourg. His sermons have taught me the meaning of faith. He tolerates no half measures and is effective because of his total commitment. Perhaps in the future too, his influence will help me through these Spandau years. In order to keep from losing my composure during his last sermon, I tried translating his words into French. Afterwards we were able to sit down together for half an hour because no Russian was present. Deeply moved, in bidding him goodbye I said with full conviction, ‘May God preserve your strength.’
When Sereny challenges Speer about the omission of Casalis from the index of the Diaries (but not the book – as she appears to imply), and asks him why he hadn’t written about their relationship, Speer shrugs: ‘I’m not sure; perhaps it was too important, or perhaps … because I failed him.’ Or perhaps it was more a question of the male pride that Casalis had recognised. No doubt when these diaries were first published in Germany in 1975 Speer wanted to let it appear that he had completed his journey alone. And acknowledging Casalis’ formative role, at least in Speer’s eyes, would have meant diminishing his own sense of personal achievement, of having come through the test of twenty years of imprisonment.
Whatever the realities of the relationship between these two men, there are some fascinating differences between the verbal account that Casalis gives to Sereny and the written version of Speer’s in the Diaries, especially relating to the early days of Casalis’ ministry at the prison. Speer, as we’ve seen, states that Casalis’ sermon on his first day – 11 October 1947 – centres around the isolating treatment of lepers in the Holy Land, and that the other prisoners are deeply offended by this, and make a formal protest before the following week’s service on 18 October, when he writes that: ‘Raeder officially protested to Chaplain Casalis, in the name of five of his fellow prisoners’ (not including Speer) ‘because the chaplain had referred to them as lepers’.
But in Casalis’ account given to Sereny, the first services ‘passed tranquilly enough’, and it is only ‘on the sixth Saturday [my emphasis]’ that he ‘very nearly came a cropper when he chose as his subject Jesus’s healing of the leper’. After this the prisoners leave in silence, refusing to shake hands with Casalis as they usually did. The following week, according to Casalis, ‘Raeder stood up at the end of the sermon [my emphasis] … and said “Last week … you deeply offended us. It is entirely impermissible to address us as lepers.”’ The week after, both Casalis’ account and Speer’s written account tally in agreeing that the sermon is based on Jesus telling the Pharisees ‘it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ But Speer then simplifies, and in so doing irons out Casalis’ nuanced and humane position. He says, baldly, that Casalis ‘took occasion to say that he is the greatest sinner among us; all the churchgoers were gratified’. However, Casalis remembers breaking off from his sermon to suggest that they must not take the words from the Bible literally, as they are parables which each person needs to interpret the meaning of themselves. He then tells them:
In my own interpretation of the parables, to me the first sinner and first sick person is always myself. We are together in this experiment here, in this attempt at finding common ground between you and your inner selves, between you and me, and between the things Jesus said and what you can accept or find in them. I am in that no different from you. I search.
Why spend time going through the details of these differing accounts? Couldn’t some of this simply be attributable to inevitably diverging memories of the same events? Maybe so, but it is also worth considering that Speer deliberately conflated two events that happened six weeks apart – meeting Casalis for the first time and Casalis’ sermon about the lepers that caused offence.
Why would he do this? Because by emphasising the furore over the sermon, he wouldn’t have to confront the memory of himself, at the most difficult time in his life, talking to Casalis after that first service – one of the most significant conversations of Speer’s life. And, astoundingly, completely omitted from his account in the Diaries. By doing this he wouldn’t have to confront the memory of Casalis telling him he considered he was more blameworthy than any of the others in the Nazi leadership. And he wouldn’t have to confront the memory of that vulnerable, broken man asking Casalis for help – the most important eight words that Speer ever spoke to another human being:
‘Would you help me become a different man?’
21
Searching for Antigone in Ashford, and for Languages That Do Not Yet Exist …