the essential
With “You are the Führer’s unhappy love”, Jean-Noël Orengo delivers a fascinating novel centered on the relationship between the architect Albert Speer and the German dictator. The work is still in the running for the Goncourt Prize for high school students. To discover Saturday at Ombres Blanches.
La Dépêche du Midi: The title of your work says a lot about its content…
We are at the end of 1939, having just left a meeting on the redevelopment of the future Berlin. The architect Albert Speer was in charge of this project wanted by Hitler. He expanded the project, he oversized it and one of his subordinates, Karl-Maria Hettlage, seeing them together, said to him: “You are the Führer’s unhappy love.” What struck me is that it implies implicit homosexuality. But it is something very strange and which says everything about the relationship, even beyond the relationship to Hitler, to a not necessarily intellectual side of the ideology of politics but to the affect of the relationship to the body, to the impulse. All this ties in with the psychology, the fury, the enthusiasm of the masses for a political leader, for an ideology. And what’s more, we are in a true novel, not fiction.
Why do the chapters of the book resemble the unfolding of a love story?
I think it’s a love story between two men, not on the level of sexuality but on that of mutual fascination. One is a man of power and the other, in the most extreme characteristic, is a man of art, in his most ambitious dimension, and one is a reflection of the other. Hitler always had dreams of being an architect, Speer discovered a passion for power. With them, it is the last time that a political regime will consider art as an essential means of governing and, above all, of appearing in the eyes of its contemporaries, the future and history.
Is this why you use the term counter-fiction?
I use it at the end of the novel because it seemed to me that, given that the book was built, particularly in the first part, on the resumption of the scenes with Albert Speer which he talks about in his memoirs or which we had heard about it, one could realize the sometimes implausible nature of this information. And so it is counter-fiction which allows, through fiction, to defuse fake news, from an individual who claims to be telling the truth. But we see that it is too good to be true. These are people who put their history into the abyss, into the essence of the term. At the beginning, in the aspect of construction and, as the war progresses, in the parties and crimes that they provoke and for which they know that they will have to pay in the face of the specter of defeat. For them, in any case, history only remembers the great facts, the strong and not lukewarm gestures. Whether in the scale of monuments or crime, they have left their mark on human history.
Yes since these abject figures are still present…
We make post-mortem tyrants. We are no longer in the “damnatio memoriae” of Antiquity, a very strong notion which means that when a tyrant is recognized as a tyrant, his name is written on the stones, his face and the sculptures disappear. There is an iconoclasm of tyranny which would therefore be a punishment through oblivion, therefore a sort of double death for its powers. For us, this is not at all the case, we are in a logic of memory but in fact, as we come across a logic of celebrity, Hitler has become the most famous mythical character in the world. Deep in an Indonesian village, people know who Hitler is, know the Hitler salute. It’s inevitable and it brings us back to how we make our celebrities. Gandhi had his quarter of an hour of fame on the scale of history but it was Hitler who had his day of fame on the scale of time. Gandhi is almost better known elsewhere than in India, he is not very popular in India and the West and in other countries he is not much.
With Speer, art has come closer to extreme power…
Yes, through him architecture is a power. A power over space, over large-scale memory. There is the idea of Speer taking control of the urban space of Berlin to satisfy his power and that of Hitler’s fascination with Speer, with the architect, with the arts. He then knows that he occupies an astonishing place. He has a Dorian Gray side with this element of seduction that he exerts. He then remembers it when he is in prison, he reinterprets his life in the light of literature and manages to seduce his victims such as the historian Gitta Sereny, Rabbi Raphaël Geis and even Simon Wiesenthal (Austrian Nazi hunter, editor’s note). ).
