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

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.