Word: spandau
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DIARIES ARE USUALLY the accompaniment of a lived life. This one stand in place of a life." On that dramatic note, Nazi war criminal Albert Speer begins his chronicle of his twenty years in the Spandau prison run by the four Allied powers. Speer, after openly acknowledging his guilt, was convicted by the Nuremberg Tribunal for his role in the Nazi use of forced foreign labor in German factories. In his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, published four years after his release in 1966, Speer criticized his fellow Nazis for their refusal to admit any guilt, while professing anguish...
NONETHELESS, Speer insists on portraying himself in similar terms in Spandau. It seems Speer did not write these diaries to unburden himself or explore personal questions, but intended to publish them all along; as a result, he is circumspect about what he includes and no doubt even more careful about what he leaves out. He made most of his entries on scraps of toilet paper and smuggled them out through friendly guards. The best diaries are those that were never intended for publication: only those can provide access to the writers' most closely guarded secrets, their most revealing qualities. Spandau...
...SPANDAU: THE SECRET DIARIES by ALBERT SPEER 463 pages. Macmillan...
Reading provided a major outlet for Speer's mental energy. "Spandau was truly my education," he muses. Allowed to borrow from Berlin's libraries, Speer sometimes devoured as many as 50 books a month. He also became an enthusiastic gardener. "It became my salvation," he confessed last week. Terracing, weeding and pruning, he worked at the plot in the prison yard four or five hours daily. "I became something of a landscape architect, you might say," he says-a joking reference to the architectural skills that originally brought him to the attention of Hitler...
...book will be published in the U.S. by Macmillan next year under the title Inside the Walls of Spandau...