In “You are the unhappy love of the Führer”, Jean-Noël Orengo probes the lies of Albert Speer – Libération

The French writer deconstructs the great work of Hitler’s architect: the “counter-fiction” which allowed him to save his head during the Nuremberg trials.

You are the Führer’s unhappy love : the title sounds good. Alliteration of “m” and “r”, with a shift from “ou” to “u”, inversion of “la” to “al”. And this incredible echo: “happy” / «Führer». It’s comfortable, you feel enveloped. In German, in the original text, it is barely less pleasant: Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and hero of Jean-Noël Orengo’s story, recounts in his Newspapers that after a visit from the “guide”, one of his collaborators told him “that I was his unhappy love”, “that I was his unhappy love”.

Away with the homoerotic hypothesis: what interests us in this book is seduction or “the seductions” as Orengo writes. Seduction of a cultured bourgeoisie (Speer) by a monster (Hitler), seduction of fiction and the readership by Nazi crimes: “With pornography, Nazism generates countless number of queries on search engines,” notes Orengo at the beginning of his story. Then towards the end, in a dizzying theoretical return to his business: “I am fully aware […] that to write about a Nazi is to bring him back to life, while so many Jews will have their name nowhere despite efforts to find them.” Seducein Latin, means “to lead aside.” Orengo mimes and undermines this age