Word: speer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Abigail H. Zoba '00, a counselor with Harvard'sPeer Relations and Date Rape Education (PRDRE),said she was "shocked" to learn of the incident...
...rambling psychobiography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (Knopf; 757 pages; $35), Austrian-born journalist Gitta Sereny examines her subject's troubled life and problematic writings in microscopic detail. Sereny extensively interviewed Speer and his wife Margret at their retirement home in Heidelberg and talked with dozens of acquaintances. Her conclusion: emotionally crippled by an unhappy childhood, Speer was a frustrated romantic whose reciprocated love for Hitler--a sublimated, nonsexual but homoerotic devotion--blinded him to dark realities he chose not to see or hear. In effect, Speer existed in what the Dutch Protestant theologian Willem Visser 't Hooft...
Nonetheless, Sereny believes that by 1943 Speer had certain knowledge of Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews. Thus began what some have called the Great Lie of Speer's life: by continuing to serve the Fuhrer despite his awareness of this abominable crime he became a criminal himself. Even Speer's bravely traitorous effort at war's end to countermand Hitler's scorched-earth policy for Germany was insufficient expiation...
...Speer is a longer book than it should be. Protracted quotes from Sereny's interviews, while fascinating in their own right, lead to a wobbly, repetitive narrative that often lurches down bootless byways. A meeting with a Swedish diplomat, for example, provides Sereny with the excuse for a four-page diversion on Kurt Gerstein, the conscience-stricken SS lieutenant who tried to tell the world about death-camp gassings he had witnessed. Gerstein's saga has been told better elsewhere...
Such longueurs flaw the book, but not fatally. Sereny has probably captured Speer's aloof, elusive persona as well as any writer could. She also usefully reminds that Hitler, for all the evil he inflicted, was not a cartoon monster but a man with immense charisma and even some charm. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth has a rightful place in any library of writings about the Third Reich...