So what, ultimately, are we to make of what happened between Speer and Casalis in those three years in Spandau? There is a danger in simplifying Speer’s experience; it’s tempting to see it as a wholly progressive arc of development. But, of course, the truth was far from that. However genuine Speer’s attempts to become a different man were, however rigorously he applied himself to Casalis’ programme of reading and discussion, there were always other forces, other instincts at work. Indeed, one of the fascinations of reading the Diaries is to witness a kind of ontological struggle raging inside Speer in this period. A large part of him relishing the challenge, and the toughness of the monastic regime Casalis has set in motion, but another part still dreaming of grandiosity and power in the outside world.
Only weeks after meeting his new mentor he is still describing in the Diaries how hard it is to relinquish his ‘dreams of having a place in the history of architecture’ and boasting of how he’d planned ‘the biggest domed hall in the world’ and repeating Hitler’s words to his wife: ‘I am assigning tasks to your husband that have not been given for four thousand years. He will erect buildings for eternity!’ In the spring of 1948, when he’s deep in his reading of the theologian Karl Barth, he’s also recalling excitedly in his diary memories of grand meetings with Hitler and Winifred Wagner (the composer’s daughter-in-law), or Hitler’s detailed appreciation of an ornate theatre in Augsburg. In late 1948, a year into the intense focus on his inner life – this supposedly reflective existence – he still confides to his diary breathlessly that his wife has just received a letter from Mrs Alfred Knopf, and notes with excitement that she’s the wife of ‘the well-known American publisher who has published the works of Thomas Mann in the United States’ and that he eventually ‘would like to bring out my memoirs’.
In the Saturday meetings with Casalis, Speer would be the deeply thoughtful man grappling with his inner guilt and discussing theology, completely accepting Weil’s challenge ‘to strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world.’ Yet, away from Casalis, it seems the external world of pomp and material success still held enormous attractions for the imprisoned architect. Perhaps it is not surprising that he never told Casalis about his writing in these years (knowing how shocked he would be by some of the subject matter); and perhaps it is also not surprising that, after his release, Speer once again became so seduced by the world of fame and power – which Casalis saw, correctly, only as a kind of regression.
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There is a tantalising aspect to how we evaluate words which actually get written down and published. The fixity of such a process gives a kind of elevated status, a sense that the words could last for years, on many occasions long after the death of their authors. Yet, in many cases, it is the spoken words between people that could tell us vastly more. How much more extraordinary than reading Speer’s fragmented, and highly selective, account of his life in the Diaries would it be if we could listen to him and Casalis talking together on one of these Saturdays in the prison chapel. In a similar vein, how wonderful it would be to be able to capture the uncontainable flow of words spoken between friends who haven’t seen each other for too long. Like clouds of birds and butterflies flying into the dazzling light so a single one can no longer be seen. And all that is conveyed in the hesitations, the way of rephrasing, the nods and murmurs of agreement, the shared laughter. Without Sereny talking to Casalis (and then, later, these conversations being transcribed), we would never have learnt about many of the most important aspects of Speer’s life.
This raises deeper questions about what is valued and given status in our societies. The way that we have habitually overvalued the written, and undervalued the spoken, just as Socrates predicted; the way we have, for hundreds of years, in a similar way, glorified the quantifiable product at the expense of the unquantifiable process. To give just a single example – read virtually any obituary today, and you will see an absurdly narrow way of looking at the world. In a page about the woman or man in question, there will be whole paragraphs listing all of their publications, their books, their external world ‘achievements’; almost nothing on their humanity – nothing on the nature of their happiness or their struggles with depression or their experimental sexuality or their capacity for friendships or the unorthodox nature of their family relationships. And at the end, that ridiculously limited coda – ‘He is survived by his wife and two children.’
In a similar way, I know that some of the most important work being done in the world today is invisible to many of us. Because we have not yet developed a language for valuing processes rather than products. For the last fifteen years, for example, Donald Reeves, formerly rector of St James’s Church, Piccadilly, and his partner, Peter Pelz, have been working intensively in Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo and the Republika Srpska. Their peace-building initiatives, grouped under the banner ‘The Soul of Europe’, have all been rooted in creating safe spaces where people from different ethnicities and political backgrounds can come together and start to talk to each other. This has often involved perpetrators, and relatives of perpetrators, sitting down next to survivors, and relatives of survivors, of the worst European atrocities since the Second World War. One of their guiding maxims is that ‘Change happens when those who do not usually speak are heard by those who do not usually listen.’
I will never forget the experience of sitting in an orchard in Prijedor in July 2005 – the scene of some of the most barbaric acts of the Bosnian War a decade earlier – with a dozen young women and men, some teenagers, some in their early twenties. Their fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers had been directly involved in the massacres and torture; some had killed and tortured, some had been killed and tortured. Yet here they were ten years later, young Bosnian Muslims and Serbs, sitting together in a circle, under the apple trees, and listening to each other. Talking together about how they could build a memorial to the dead of Omarska.fn2 In this still extremely divided society, Reeves and Pelz always try to work in an even-handed way – they have developed strong reconciliation processes which have enabled the rebuilding of the Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka to take place, and they are also creating an initiative that will help to protect the position of the Serbian Orthodox minority in Kosovo. This is some of the most important work on healing and reconciliation going on anywhere in our continent – yet, when they try to get their projects supported by funders, they are repeatedly told: ‘your deliverables are not there’, they need to demonstrate ‘quantifiable partnership models’.
The language for the work they (and other pioneers around the world) are doing does not yet exist.
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In August I travelled with two friends, Stefan and Alice, and Alice’s two children, to try and find the grave of Simone Weil. The only information I had was that she had died in 1943, at a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, but I wasn’t aware she had been buried in the town until finding a photograph of her gravestone in a recent biography. I’d assumed that she would have been interred in France, her body repatriated after the war. But then, when you learn more about her attitude to her native country, you realise that France would not necessarily have welcomed back such a ‘troublesome daughter’, even after death. After all, this was the woman, vehemently anti-nationalist, always appalled at French colonialism, who infamously, perhaps even magnificently, wrote this comment in her journal on the day the Nazis thundered into Paris, and she could hear the Panzers rumbling down the Champs-Élysées: