That potent idea of the little street you’ve never noticed before – and will never be able to find again. And that the habitual could be transcended by taking a different turning. An astonishing moment for the child reading this. Of course, later when Peter tries to go back to the shop, to return the ship to the man – because clearly he can’t have known about its magical properties – he’s unable to find the little, winding street again. The imaginary Radcliff became more loved, more real, for me than any place I’d ever known. And I’d repeatedly follow Peter down the hill from the dentist, through those blue and white streets, imagining that winding lane appearing …
But there was one other map which intrigued me in a different way. This one was even less comprehensible than the A–Z, partly because it was hundreds of years old. And, unlike the map in The Ship That Flew, it was real. It was a map of Suffolk from the seventeenth century, drawn by a man with the evocative name of Abel Swale. It hung in a dark cloakroom near the front door of our house. And I kept looking at it, as if it would possibly reveal its secrets if I scrutinised it carefully enough. And maybe, in a way, it did. There were two places on this map that I was drawn to – the first, not surprisingly, was the place where we lived, the area around which had been shaded a faded yellow: Cow’s Ford, the place where the animals used to cross the river, and the name that became so associated with my grandmother when we were growing up. The second place was far more mysterious. It was over on the coast – another country in my child’s mind – and it was an extraordinary bent finger of land that was as close to being an island as it’s possible to get.
I’d read the names of the nearby villages over and over again, repeating them as if to summon spirits. ‘Ald-bor-ough’ at the top, ‘Or-ford’ halfway down. And ‘Bawdsey’. Over this area were the strange words ‘Plomesgate Hun’ – hun? Connected to hundred? But a hundred what? I would follow my finger down the sensuous curve of the River Alde, and then reach the most glorious point where the river was finally released into the sea. And how I wanted to be there, at that place! Even to a child’s wild imagination the course of this snaking river seemed simply impossible. Surely the water would have broken through at some point? The narrowness of the land’s neck was absurd. But the map was a map. It must be true. And I repeatedly traced my finger down that curve for years, and knew that one day it would be explored. Just as surely as finding my own Kew Gardens. And now, by this eastern shingle, I am here – the place where I’m starting to write this book.
2
Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer and the Desk Killer
Gitta Sereny. A name we will return to in the pages that follow. A name that you may already know. A writer who, perhaps more than any other, attempted to grapple with the concept that is usually, and lazily, reduced to the single word ‘evil’. Virtually all of her work centres on the human necessity to understand how people can carry out appalling acts (they may not even see themselves as committing crimes), and can continue to live with themselves. And how they subsequently try to make sense of what they have done, and how it has shaped their lives, and the lives of others. Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp; Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and subsequently minister of war production. Both responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Sereny spends weeks, months, sometimes years, with her subjects. She goes through what happened, how it happened, why it happened. She’s both extraordinarily patient and mercilessly relentless. She is more interested in understanding than judging. She rarely becomes angry. She leaves judgement up to her subject, when she senses the time is right for him or her to face their responsibility. And of course we as readers can ultimately judge as well, but only when we’ve come through a process of what I now think of as ‘Serenisation’ – the understanding that’s achieved through lengthy and empathetic exploration of a person – when a ‘subject’ stops being an object of condemnation and becomes a human being again.
I met her only once, in October 2004. We had a long conversation over coffee, in a break during a conference on ‘The Psychology of Extermination’, taking place at a college in Regent’s Park organised by the psychotherapist Anthony Stadlen. I had made a contribution in which I described the research1fn1 I had started into the figure of the ‘Schreibtischtaeter’ – that almost untranslatable German concept.fn1 I wondered if she’d considered why this concept had never found an English translation, ‘desk killer’ perhaps being the closest we could get to a synonym. And to what extent did she view Speer’s fatal technocracy as falling into this category? Or did the process of psychological ‘splitting’, which she’d described so vividly in her book on him, actually hold the key to understanding the way the mind of the Schreibtischtaeter works – the way Speer seemed able to compartmentalise his work and ethics into different boxes? The session was coming to an end, she attempted an answer, but then rather generously said, ‘But I don’t think I’ve begun to answer your question, maybe we can continue our conversation in the break?’
She was shorter than I’d imagined, with the most expressive eyes, something birdlike in her manner, though not in the sense of fragile. A quick, darting intelligence, reflective, full of questions. She had little small talk, dived in straight away, wanting to know as much as possible about my research. We had an absorbing conversation, picking up references and shared understandings rapidly. At the end of our conversation she gave me her card and said, ‘Well, you must come to supper. We’ve got a lot to talk about!’
I rang her the next day, and we had a longer talk. She agreed with my view that Speer sought safety in abstraction – systems, statistics, problems. And that although he was personable, even charming, this disguised an essential lacuna in him – an inability to fully understand the emotions of others, or indeed himself. And when confronted with the reality of pain or love he seemed to panic. There was an inability to face the human being. We talked about the moment in late 1943 when he visited the Dora weapons plant inside the Harz mountains, a place of utter degradation, where life expectancy for the slave labourers was often a matter of only days or weeks. Yes, you’re right, it’s extraordinarily significant, she said – it’s one of the very few times in the war when he was directly confronted with the human cost of his directives from Berlin. And he could not look into the eyes of the slave labourers – his slave labourers. For this would mean acknowledging their humanity, and his own responsibility for their condition. The Schreibtischtaeter was out of his safe world of figures and abstractions, and suddenly that Olympian self-confidence was drained. He did not know where to look.
All of this horror is not so far away from our own times as we may like to think. The oil-company executives who rarely leave the cities, their carpeted, isolated existence which muffles any unwanted sounds or voices. The consultants who advise on ‘restructurings’ from their virtual worlds, who will never see the communities hundreds of miles away, devastated by their reports, for which they are richly remunerated. I asked Gitta her view about the psychological processes necessary to enable perpetrators like Speer, or our corporate executives today, to continue with their work. She was hesitant, and then wondered whether a lot is to do with seeing behaviour accepted by those around you. Think about how important it was for Stangl that some senior Catholics supported the supposed ‘mercy killings’ of Hitler’s euthanasia programme. Yes, absolutely, and I then added the example of Eichmann at the Wannsee Conference, who, as we learn from Hannah Arendt, felt ‘free of all guilt’ because he’d heard senior figures in the Nazi government and civil service agree on the need for ‘the final solution of the Jewish question’ – as he put it, ‘the most prominent people had spoken, the Popes of the Third Reich’.fn2