by David Edgar
MRS WINTERINGHAM. Now, stop that.
She kisses him.
SPEER. They invited me to lunch. I said I had a previous engagement.
She takes a glass of wine, and drinks.
MRS WINTERINGHAM. It’s wonderfully cold.
She kisses him again.
Well. Cheerio.
MRS WINTERINGHAM knocks her drink back.
Hey, I could have a shower, couldn’t I?
SPEER. Of course you could.
Taking off her jacket.
MRS WINTERINGHAM. And this evening, Herr Speer, I wish to be escorted to the theatre.
SPEER. You know, in Spandau, I made a theatre in my mind. I would imagine purchasing the ticket, leaving my coat in the cloakroom, buying a programme, sitting down. And looking forward to the curtain rising, and the cool draft from the stage –
She takes over as she goes out.
MRS WINTERINGHAM (taking over).‘ – the cool draft from the stage, with its smell of glue, dust and papier mâché’. Yes, I know. It was your imagination!
SPEER takes off his jacket, loosens his tie.
SPEER (to himself). Yes. If you think about it.
The room has been growing dark and peculiar. SPEER feels strange.
It was that that got me through.
SPEER stands. The transformation is beginning to take place.
So what’s this here?
2.8.2 The Mausoleum
SPEER is looking through the smoke at a huge, emerging space; the grey expanse punctured by a line of lights stretching into the distance.
SPEER. What’s going on?
Pause.
SPEER. Is it . . . am I in a street?
A MAN emerges from the darkness, throwing a huge shadow.
SPEER. This is an air-raid?
The MAN approaches, followed by other MEN.
SPEER. Or else . . . torches? This is Nuremberg? Is this then? Is this me?
HITLER. No, Speer. It’s me. And now.
HITLER is in stormtrooper uniform. HESS, SCHAUB, HANKE, also in stormtrooper uniform, behind him. It’s like a gangster raid.
HITLER. As if you didn’t know. So what have you been up to since I saw you last?
SPEER. What do you mean?
HITLER. As if I didn’t know.
He turns and nods to the others, who swagger upstage into the darkness.
You’ve been trying to remake yourself. You have been trying to become a different man.
SPEER. What’s this?
HITLER. Having been ‘condemned, robbed of your liberty, tortured by the knowledge that you’d based your life upon a lie’.
SPEER. Oh, of course, the dreams.
HITLER. Having been ‘intoxicated’, ‘blinded’ by the power I granted you.
SPEER. The dream. The dream in which you know.
HITLER. How you nevertheless stood up heroically at the end, to save the last weak remnants of the German people. At risk of being taken off and shot of course! How you were not responsible for the conditions of your labourers but now I understand you are suddenly responsible for Linz! But as you say. The dream in which I know.
SPEER. I never said you’d have me shot.
HITLER. Oh no? What did you tell that pornographic magazine?
SPEER. I’m not sure I recall.
HITLER. ‘My Führer . . . there is something I must say to
you . . . ’ ‘What is it?’ You be me.
SPEER. ‘What is it?’
HITLER. And then you: ‘My Führer, all these months, when I have been pledging my unfailing loyalty, I have been sabotaging everything you have commanded. When I said I stood unconditionally behind you, I was actually betraying you behind your back. When I said I’d never lie to you, I was actually lying at the time. And I didn’t have the guts to tell you then, but I don’t have the guts to live with my deceit and so now there’s nothing you can do about it I’m confessing it to you. Oh, and if you like, I’ll stay here in Berlin with you and we can die together!’
SPEER says nothing.
And what did I say, then? According to this fairy tale?
SPEER. ‘We will never speak of this again’.
HITLER. Oh yes. And my eyes ‘filled up with tears’. Whereas what actually occurred, on this momentous evening?
SPEER. I’m afraid I don’t remember.
HITLER. I passed you in a corridor. I said ‘Goodbye’. And that was that. But, oh no: ‘My eyes filled up with tears’.
Pause.
Hm?
SPEER says nothing.
And the workers in the mountains. And your shock. And pain.
SPEER. In fact, I did my best to improve their conditions –
HITLER. Your shock and horror at my ‘giving up’ the German people.
SPEER. I didn’t realise you could be so heedless of their fate –
HITLER. But most of all, the lie that after everything you didn’t know.
Pause.
SPEER. It was true. I didn’t know. As I have proved to my own satisfaction.
HITLER. What? Still?
SPEER shrugs, confirming.
Had I not always said that once the strong had been eliminated, all is lost and it is pointless trying to save the rest?
SPEER. Of course.
HITLER. That without its strongest elements, the German people would degrade into a feminised and weakened lumpen mass, as prey as Slav subhumans to the cholera of Bolshevism?
SPEER. Yes.
HITLER. That the Soviet state was a criminal conspiracy that would have to be destroyed, with implacable determination?
SPEER. You’d implied that, certainly.
HITLER. And does not the destruction of a state ‘imply’ the physical elimination of its functionaries, without mercy or consideration of the rules of war?
Slight pause.
And when I said – as I said repeatedly, and publicly, that if there was a war, it will lead inevitably to the annihilation of the racial source of Bolshevism, why couldn’t you believe it? Why did you insist that anti-semitism was ‘a vulgar incidental’? I said it – clearly, time and time again. I didn’t say ‘resettlement’ or ‘cleaning efforts’. I did not speak of ‘special handling’. And yet you all insist that when I said the Jews must be destroyed, I only meant ‘defeated’. That when I said ‘eliminate’ I didn’t mean ‘exterminate’, I only meant ‘exclude’. That when I said ‘purge’ and ‘perish’ and ‘annihilate’, it was of course a metaphor. Why was I cursed with never being taken literally? How could the world have been so blind? And how could you?
Slight pause.
But oh. ‘I turned away’. As ever. Not your fault. Why not admit it? Why not confess it? Why not come clean now?
SPEER says nothing.
Hah?
SPEER says nothing.
All right, I’ll tell you why. Speer, you present yourself as a man inspired by a great vision but who saw that vision trampled into dust. By me. Yet without me there was no vision and there was no man. Who made you, Speer? Who appointed you his architect? Who promoted you to be his armourer? Who inspired you to dream dreams you could never dream alone? You did what I required of you. You realised my vision. And if you are in a hall of faces then the face is mine.
HESS, HANKE and SCHAUB come forward with wreaths.
SPEER. You are laying wreaths.
SCHAUB. He lays them all the time.
HITLER lays wreaths.
SPEER. Who they are for?
HESS. They are for the best.
SPEER. The best are dead.
HANKE. The best are dead.
HITLER. And of course when I said our new Berlin was a mausoleum, you did not believe me either. ‘The names of our Germanic fallen, carved on every stone.’
SPEER looks in anguish at HITLER. HITLER hands wreath to SPEER.
So then: be me.
SPEER. There is no need. I have been you ever since I met you.
HITLER. Yes.
&nb
sp; SPEER. I thought my life began with you. But it ended with you.
HITLER. Yes.
SPEER. You were the nightmare. Always. Obviously.
HITLER. Yes.
SPEER. Your tomb was Linz. Mine was Germania.
SPEER looks back for the last time into the huge grey disappearing space. His eyes are full of tears.
HITLER. Why are you crying?
SPEER. I am crying for myself. And the life I could have led if I’d been different from the start.
HITLER. Come, come.
SPEER. No.
HITLER. The best are dead.
SPEER. No.
HITLER. The dead are best.
SPEER. No.
HITLER. And now you can be best.
He looks at SPEER.
At last.
HITLER turns with his MEN and goes. SPEER is alone. His eyes are closed. But then looks back, to see a different group of people. HILDE, GEIS, CASALIS, ANNEMARIE, MARGRET. Maybe, behind them, the JEWISH FAMILY from the Nikolassee, and the DORA WORKERS from the mountains. He looks at them.
SPEER. Not yet.
Because, yes, I cannot admit what I have not admitted and remain alive.
But if I did, I could die the man I might have been.
To ‘us’.
Of course, it wasn’t that ‘I could have known’. That I was ‘blind’.
Because, yes, one cannot look into a void. If I ‘turned away’, I knew.
I knew. I helped to build a boneyard.
Yes. I knew.
And now, at last, I need never speak nor think nor dream of any of these things again.
Darkness. We hear MRS WINTERINGHAM’s voice, distraught.
MRS WINTERINGHAM. Please, you must call an ambulance. There’s a man, he must have had a stroke. Please hurry. I think he may be dead . . .
Light. SPEER’s body lies there. Suddenly, massively, HIMMLER’s face projected on all the surfaces of the set.
HIMMLER. And with this I want to finish. You are now informed, and you will keep the knowledge to yourselves. Later perhaps we can consider whether the German people should be told about this. But I think it is better that we – we together – carry for our people the responsibility – responsibility for an achievement, not just an idea . . . and then take the secret with us to our graves.
Darkness.
‘Since I am not going to go down in architectural history
for buildings, I might at least have defiantly won a place
for myself with grandly conceived plans. Am I, too,
lacking an original desire to give form to reality?
In the passion to produce something out of myself?
Was I, too, made creative only by Hitler?’
Albert Speer, The Secret Diaries
AFTERWORD
It was on the third day of rehearsal. Sitting round a huge table in the bowels of the National Theatre, actors about to play Hitler, Himmler, Eva Braun and the stage army of the Third Reich were debating the plausibility of Hitler’s Minister of Armaments not knowing about what was happening to Jews and others in the slave-labour and death camps of the Nazi empire. Suddenly, the argument escalated. Albert Speer was Hitler’s favourite. As his architect, he had been a vital part of the Nazi propaganda machine. As his armourer, he was responsible for millions of slave-workers kept in unspeakable conditions. He kept the war going for a year longer than it needed to, at the cost of untold suffering. Whatever he knew or didn’t know, did Speer have a case worth presenting? Was it worth us doing a play about this man at all?
This was not the first time this question had come up. It had been central to the discussions I had had with the play’s director Trevor Nunn during the development of the play. And for both of us there was a déjà vu: the same debate had raged around the production of a play I wrote about the rise of the National Front in 70s Britain (Destiny), which Nunn programmed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976. By seeking to understand people with dreadful opinions, or people complicit in crimes resulting from those opinions, is the writer (or director or actor) inevitably tending to condone?
The first immediate, instinctive response in this case was that the play Albert Speer is based on a well-reviewed, highly regarded and massively successful biography by Gitta Sereny, whose moral credentials and dignity of purpose were questioned by no one. However, this argument falls apart when the material is transferred to the theatre. However passionate its author, a work of history has an essentially magisterial relationship with its readership. Like the French legal system, the medium invites sober consideration of the evidence, the balancing of arguments and the disinterested search for truth. Like a British courtroom, a play tends to the adversarial, demanding that the jury identify with one side. In this case, there is no sober summing up of the evidence, many of the prosecution witnesses are dead, and the accused is conducting his own defence. And however critical we may be of him and it, are we not – by the very act of presenting it – implying that he has a case? Or – even more insidiously – that his moral anguish can be set against the suffering for which he has been held responsible?
Further, we were aware that we were telling this story at a moment when the history of the second world war is a matter of acute and current political contest. As we rehearsed the play, another drama was being played out in the High Court of Justice. However unambiguous Mr Justice Gray’s finding may have been, the David Irving trial reminded everyone how much of the darkest events of the second world war are subject to interpretation, how deep is the controversy about the aims and history of the holocaust, and how much of our knowledge of it is based on essentially circumstantial evidence.
And we are exploring the case for and against a leading Nazi at a time when the supposed effects of writing are subject to unprecedented scrutiny. Not only are works of fiction cited as inspiring if not causing real life crimes (the ‘go thou and do likewise’ theory of literary influence) but works of non-fiction are called to account for the harm or even distress they might cause. Following the publication of her 1998 book about the Mary Bell case, Cries Unheard, Gitta Sereny herself was accused by the parents of Mary’s victims of ‘bringing up all the bad memories’. From this understandable concern with the feelings of people involved in tragedies, it has proved a short step to the argument advanced by a reader protesting against the serialisation of Gordon Burns’ book about Frederick and Rosemary West in The Guardian on the grounds of the ‘suffering, despair and pain involved in the subject matter’, not for the relatives of West’s victims, but for everyone. And both Marcus Garvey’s painting of and Diane Dubois’ play about the continuing iconic influence of Myra Hindley were condemned on the grounds that it was inappropriate to treat of her in art at all.
And yet – of course – if the subject of evil was removed from the dramatic canon most of the great tragedies would disappear from the repertoire. From Clytemnestra and Oedipus via Richard III, Macbeth and Othello to the gangsters, gunslingers and Godfathers of twentieth-century cinema, great drama has always been obsessed with killers, natural born and otherwise. If it was really true that the purpose of drama is to encourage its audiences to imitate the behaviour of its protagonists, then the medium has a great deal to answer for.
But, sadly, the opposite view – that the point of drama is precisely to discourage such behaviour by showing how it will inevitably get its come-uppance – doesn’t really wash. ‘Don’t do this at home’ is as misleading a description of what drama counsels us as ‘go thou and do likewise’. The awful truth – and it is awful, in both senses of the word – is that the response most great drama asks of us is neither ‘yes please’ nor ‘no thanks’ but ‘you too?’. Or, in the cold light of dawn, ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.
When, understandably but sadly, the parents of Mary Bell’s victims wrote in The Sun that ‘Mary Bell is not worthy of consideration as a feeling, human being’, they were letting the rest of us off the hook. The notion that there
is a thing called evil which separates the wicked off from the rest of us is a comforting illusion. The uncomfortable truth is that to understand does involve recognition and even empathy. It does require seeing the world through the eyes of the wicked person, and thus finding those impulses and resentments and fears within ourselves that could – we have painfully to admit – drive us to commit dreadful acts under different circumstances.
Drama is a test-bed on which we can test and confront our darkest impulses under laboratory conditions; where we can experience the desires without having to confront the consequences. As Peter Brook writes in The Empty Space, ‘in the theatre the slate is wiped clean all the time’. Drama enables us us to peer into the soul, not of the person who has driven his father out on to the heath, but the person who has wanted to.
But that’s only the first shock. The second is that we enjoy the view. As critics from Aristotle onwards have noted, we don’t just learn but take pleasure from seeing the representation of things that in real life we’d regard as disgusting or repellent. Indeed, the pleasure is the thing that allows us to confront these unbearable aspects of ourselves. This is why children like fictional forms whose familiarity is distanced by their location in the mythic past, the animal kingdom or outer space. And despite the wealth of all-too-human examples of monstrosity, adult audiences too demand villains from other worlds, different species and indeed beyond the grave.
Since the late nineteenth century, the assumption has been that the closer drama is to the lives of its audience, the more powerful and painful it will be. But the problem with looking in a mirror is that you see what the world sees. Look into a picture, and you may see what you have disguised.
Finally, because we see ourselves in him, the tragic villain commands our sympathy (indeed, the difference between the tragic and the melodramatic villain is quite precisely that). At the end of Albert Speer a dying man thinks he sees his past self approaching him through the mist but discovers that what is really inside him is not his own past but the terrible reality of a man he had once admired and loved. Looking at him confronting that truth I hope that the audience will look through that refraction back at itself. Albert Speer was subject to a Faustian temptation, fell for it, and spent the rest of his life creating a past with which he could deal. To be one of his many victims is – thank goodness – unimaginable for a well-fed first-world audience in the year 2000. To give in to personal ambition, to realise a moral and ideological error too late, and to spend the rest of your life making inadequate sense of that failure is all too recognisable.
