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Gitta Sereny and Albert Speer's ‘Battle with Truth’ on the London Stage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Nick White
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Abstract

Prompted by the investigative journalist Gitta Sereny's biography Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, two recent productions, Esther Vilar's Speer and David Edgar's Albert Speer, have set out to explore the reputation of Hitler's architect and later Minister of Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, the only leading Nazi to acknowledge his guilt at the Nuremberg Trials. The plays, like the biography, are concerned with the extent of Speer's knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’ during his career in the Nazi hierarchy, and consequently with the integrity of the stance he adopted at Nuremberg and thereafter – that is, of his claim of guilt by association and omission rather than by active participation. In her biography, Sereny claims that as a result of her association with Speer he eventually acknowledged his guilt to her, and was repentant. But Nick White believes that the evidence – much of it unearthed by Sereny herself – suggests otherwise, and that Sereny had failed to acknowledge that between 1978 and his death in 1981 Speer consistently deceived her about crucial aspects of this evidence. How successful are Vilar and Edgar in their quite different dramatic sifting, not only of the public persona of Speer, but also of the interpretation granted their subject by the biographer upon whom their plays, to a lesser and greater degree, depend? Nick White has taught at City University, London, and his PhD dissertation, ‘In the Absence of Memory? Jewish Fate and Dramatic Representation: the Production and Critical Reception of Holocaust Drama on the London Stage, 1945–1989’ (1998) has been followed by a companion volume of criticism, articles, and letters, The Critical Reception of Holocaust Drama on the British Stage, 1939–2000.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , May 2001 , pp. 170 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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References

Notes and References

1. Feinberg, Anat, ‘The Appeal of the Executive: Adolf Eichmann on the Stage’, Monatshefte, LXXVIII, No. 2 (1986), p. 203–14Google Scholar.

2. Ibid., p. 203.

3. See, for example, Shaw, Robert, The Man in the Glass Booth (London: Samuel French, 1968)Google Scholar, which premiered on 27 July 1967 at the St. Martin's Theatre London; and Barnes, Peter, Laughter! in his Plays One (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 339–411Google Scholar, which premiered on 24 January 1978 at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

4. Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, revised ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965)Google Scholar. The New Yorker articles appeared in the February and March issues of 1963 in slightly abbreviated forms.

5. Anat Feinberg, 1986, p. 204.

6. Ibid., p. 207.

7. Bruder Eichmann premiered at the Residenz-theater, Munich, on 21 January 1983. See also Cuomo, Glenn R., ‘Vergangenheitsbewaltigung through Analogy: Heinar Kipphardt's Last Play, Bruder Eichmann’, The Germanic Revieiv, LXIV, No. 2 (Spring 1989), p. 58–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Translated and adapted by Roy Kift, Brother Eichmann received its British premiere on 1 November 1990 at the Library Theatre, Manchester.

8. Anat Feinberg, 1986, p. 208, 209, 210, 211.

9. Sereny, Gitta, The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections, 1938–2000 (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2000)Google Scholar.

10. Sereny, Gitta, Into that Darkness: from Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991)Google Scholar.

11. MacDonald, Robert David, In Quest of Conscience. adapted from Into that Darkness by Sereny, Gitta (London: Oberon Books, 1994)Google Scholar.

12. Sereny, Gitta, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth (London: Macmillan, 1995)Google Scholar.

13. Vilar, Esther, Speer, trans. Wagner, Martin (London: Profile Books, 1999)Google Scholar.

14. Edgar, David, Albert Speer (London: Nick Hern Books, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. The Times, 3 September 1981, p. 10.

16. Speer, Albert, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard, and Winston, Clara (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970)Google Scholar.

17. Wolters, letter is quoted in Vat, Dan van der, The Good Nazi: the Life and Lies of Albert Speer (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), p. 340Google Scholar.

18. Speer's letter is quoted in Dan van der Vat, 1997, p. 341.

19. Dan van der Vat, 1997, p. 341.

20. For the English translation, see Schmidt, Matthias, Albert Speer: the End of a Myth, trans. Neugroschel, Joachim (London: Harrap, 1985)Google Scholar.

21. Dan van der Vat, 1997, p. 369. For the details of the dispute between Speer and Wolters over the chronicle see Gitta Sereny, 1995, p. 223–30, and Dan van der Vat, 1997, p. 95–99, 320–2, 339–43, 355–6, 359–62.

22. See Gitta Sereny, 1995, p. 388–401, and Dan van der Vat, 1997, p. 163–71 and 349–51. Attention was first drawn to the probability of Speer's presence at Posen by Goldhagen, Erich in an article entitled ‘Albert Speer, Himmler, and the Secret of the Final Solution’ (Midstream, 10 1971)Google Scholar. However, unequivocal evidence proving that Speer was present is lacking. After the appearance of the Goldhagen article, Speer went to enormous lengths to obtain affidavits to support his claim of absence from Posen at precisely the time of Himmler's speech, the afternoon of 6 October 1943. Sereny has shown these to be false (see Gitta Sereny, 1995, p. 388–401). Moreover, according to van der Vat, it would require a highly convoluted reading of Speer's own memoirs to reach the conclusion that he was not there, as he refers to his own speech in the morning and to other events in the evening which make his presence in the afternoon likely.

23. The Times, 3 September 1981, p. 10.

24. Sereny writes that she decided to undertake the interviews with Speer because, ‘compared with the others I had observed on trial, he seemed less primitive, more open, serious and sad: the only man with such a horrific record who manifested a semblance of conscience’. See Gitta Sereny, 1991, p. 15, 23.

25. Sereny, Gitta, ‘Playing out the Guilt of a Nazi’, Sunday Times, 7 05 2000, Nezvs Review, p. 4Google Scholar. The similarities between the way in which Sereny thinks and writes about both Stangl and Speer are too obvious to be left unremarked. Sereny first met Franz Stangl in Diisseldorf remand prison on the morning of 2 April 1971, and they talked for about two and a- half hours. Shortly before a break for lunch, Sereny commented pointedly that she ‘knew inside out of the things he had said that morning; all of them had been said before by any number of people.… What I had come for was something quite different: I wanted him really to talk to me; to tell me about himself’. Directly after the lunch-break Stangl told Sereny tearfully: ‘I've thought about what you said.… I hadn't understood before – 1 hadn't understood what you wanted.… I want to do it. I want to try to do it’ (Gitta Sereny, 1991, p. 23, 25.) This formulaic approach and routine account is redolent of a lack of imagination and flexibility rather than the acute intelligence Sereny claims for herself.

26. Overy, Richard, London Review of Books, 21 09 1995, p. 6Google Scholar.

27. The Times, 23 August 1995, p. 14.

28. Evans, Richard J., The Times Literary Supplement, 29 09, 1995, p. 5–6Google Scholar. See Gitta Sereny, 1995, p. 403–6, for Speer's visit to the V2 production installation Dora.

29. Hartman's, Geoffrey review of Sereny's biography of Speer appeared in The Partisan Review, LXIII, No. 3 (1996), p. 672–81Google Scholar, here p. 676. Dawidowicz's, Lucy S. review of Into that Darkness in The Times Literary Supplement, 27 12 1974, p. 1458–9Google Scholar, is similar in important respects:

A curious melange of personal journalism and pop history, the book is heavy with verbatim trivialities and pomposities, yet light on the serious matters.… Ambitious in scope, shuttling busily from subject to subject, the trifling mixed with the significant, the book talks too much, yet in the end tells too little.… Her method is affable discussion. As a journalist Miss Sereny seems to have had a compelling daydream of a scoop: of bringing Stangl to confront his deeds and confess his guilt, a form of rescue fantasy in which she envisioned herself as saving his immortal soul.… In a triumph of sentimentality over reality, Miss Sereny confers a posthumous humanity upon a man who had dehumanized himself.… By saying ‘I'm guilty, I wish I were dead’… he doubtless shrewdly calculated that it would please the nice lady.… It was appropriate to the whining self-pity and the tears he occasionally shed – for himself only, never for his victims.

30. See Gitta Sereny, 1991, p. 364, for her claim that her interviews brought about Franz Stangl's only candid acknowledgement of his guilt. She writes: ‘“So yes”, he said finally, very quietly, “in reality I share the guilt.… Because my guilt… my guilt… only now in these talks… now that I have talked about it all for the first time.… My guilt… is that I am still here. That is my guilt.… I should have died.”’ For Speer's similar ‘final’ confession of guilt see Gitta Sereny, 1995, p. 707–8.

31. See Gitta Sereny, 1995, p. 707–8, and Dan van der Vat, 1997, p. 344–8 and 355–6. For Sereny's article, ‘The New Speer Controversy: Did He Tell All?’, see Sunday Times Magazine, 17 September 1978, p. 64–6, 68, 73, 75.

32. See London Review of Books, 21 September 1995, p. 6.

33. See Sereny, 2000, p. 266–85, especially p. 270–1. Sereny fails to see that it is the naivety of her apparently direct approach which is so easily exploited. She also writes: ‘By the end of our first three weeks together [in the spring of 1978] I fully believed, and loved, that feeling of guilt [about the extermination of the Jews] in him’ (p. 271). She does not acknowledge that this sense of guilt which she so much admired did not prevent Speer from deliberately deceiving her about events of cardinal importance in relation to his public stance toward the murder of Europe's Jews.

34. Sunday Times, 14 March 1999, Culture, p. 16–17.

35. Sunday Telegraph, 14 March 1999, Review, p. 8.

36. Daily Mail, 12 March 1999, p. 49.

37. New Statesman, 19 March 1991, p. 37–8; Sereny's comments on the Almeida production of Vilar's play can be found in The Times, 11 March 1999, p. 21.

38. Sunday Times, 14 March 1999, Culture, p. 16–17.

39. New Statesman, 19 March 1991, p. 37–8.

40. Vilar, Esther, Speer, trans. Wagner, Martin (London: Profile Books, 1999), p. 63Google Scholar.

41. Edgar, David, in State of Play: Playwrights on Playwriting (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 27–8Google Scholar.

42. Ibid., p. 32

43. Ibid.

44. Femi Osofisan, quoted in David Edgar, ed., 1999, p. 33.

45. Edgar, David, ‘In Defence of Evil’, The Observer, 30 04 2000, Revieiu, p. 5Google Scholar.

46. Sereny, Gitta, ‘Playing out the Guilt of a Nazi’, Sunday Times, 7 05 2000, News Review, p. 4Google Scholar.

47. See The Scotsman, 4 April 1994, p. 7, and ‘Playing out the Guilt of a Nazi’, Sunday Times, 7 May 2000, Nezvs Revieiv, p. 4.

48. Royal National Theatre programme for David Edgar's Albert Speer.

49. The Independent, 29 May 2000, Review, p. 14.

50. Schmidt, Matthias, Albert Speer: the End of a Myth, trans. Neugroschel, Joachim (London: Harrap, 1985)Google Scholar; Vat, Dan van der, The Good Nazi: the Life and Lies of Albert Speer (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997)Google Scholar.

51. Edgar, David, ‘In Defence of Evil’, The Observer, 30 04 2000, Review, p. 5Google Scholar.

52. Peter, John, Sunday Times, 4 06 2000, Culture, p. 17Google Scholar.

53. David Edgar, Albert Speer, p. 63.

54. Ibid., p. 87.

55. Ibid., p. 126–8,147.

56. Ibid., p. 41–2.

57. Ibid., p. 124.

58. Ibid., p. 113.

59. Mann's, Golo review of Inside the Third Reich is quoted in part in van der Vat, Dan, 1997, p. 338Google Scholar.

60. The Independent, 29 May 2000, Revieiu, p. 14.

61. Ibid.

62. Langer, Lawrence, ‘The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen’, in Cohen, Sarah Blacher, ed., From Hester Street to Hollywood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 213–30Google Scholar, here p. 224.

63. Bower, Tom, Daily Mail, 27 05 2000, p. 12–13Google Scholar.

64. Sereny, Gitta, quoted in ‘Into the Heart of Nazi Darkness’, The Guardian, 9 09 1995, Outlook, p. 27Google Scholar.

65. Hartman, Geoffrey, The Partisan Review, LXIII, No. 3 (1996), p. 672–81, here p. 677, 678Google Scholar.

66. See, for example: Isser, Edward R., Stages of Annihilation: Theatrical Representations of the Holocaust (London: Associated University Presses, 1997)Google Scholar; Patraka, Vivian M., Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Schumacher, Claude, ed., Staging the Holocaust: the Shoah in Drama and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Skloot, Robert, The Darkness We Carry: the Drama of the Holocaust (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

67. See Robert Skloot, ‘Holocaust Theatre and the Problem of Justice’, in Staging the Holocaust: the Shoah in Drama and Performance, p. 10–26.

68. David Edgar, ‘In Defence of Evil’, p. 5.