Taken from the book "Inside the Third Reich." Which is the memoires of Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments. pp. 2-12
Origins and Youth
Some of my forefathers
were Swabians, some came from poor peasants of the Westerwald, others from Silesia
and Westphalia. They belonged to the great mass of those who live quiet,
unnotable lives. There was one
exception: Hereditary Reich Marshal Count Friedrich Ferdinand zu Pappenheim 1
(1702-93), who begot eight sons with my unmarried ancestress Humelin. He does
not, however, seem to have worried much about their welfare.
Three generations later
my grandfather Hermann Hommel, son of a poor forester in the Black Forest, had
become by the end of his life sole owner of one of the largest machine-tool firms
in Germany and of a precision-instrument factory. In spite of his wealth he
lived modestly and treated his subordinates well. Hard-working himself, he knew
how to let others work without interfering. A typical Black Forest brooder, he
could sit for hours on a bench in the woods without wasting a word.
My other grandfather,
Berthold Speer, became a prosperous architect in Dortmund about this same time.
He designed many buildings in the neoclassical style of the period. Though he
died young, he left enough to provide for the education of his four sons. The
success of both my grand- fathers was furthered by the rapid industrialization
of Germany which began in the second half of the nineteenth century. But then,
many persons who had started out from a better basis did not necessarily
flourish.
My father s mother,
prematurely white-haired, inspired in me more respect than love in my boyhood.
She was a serious woman, moored fast to simple notions about life and possessing
an obstinate energy. She dominated everyone around her.
I came into the world
in Mannheim at noon on Sunday, March 19, 1905. The thunder of a spring storm drowned
out the bells of nearby Christ Church, as my mother often used to tell me.
In 1892, at the age of
twenty-nine, my father had established his own architectural firm. He had since
become one of the busiest architects in Mannheim, then a booming industrial town.
He had acquired a considerable fortune by the time he married the daughter of a
prosperous Mainz businessman in 1900.
The upper-middle-class
style of our apartment in one of his Mannheim houses was commensurate with my parents'
status. It was an imposing house, built around a courtyard guarded by elaborate
wrought-iron gates. Automobiles would drive into this courtyard and stop in
front of a flight of stairs which provided a suitable entrance to the richly
furnished house. But the children— my two brothers and I— had to use the back stairs.
These were dark, steep, and narrow and ended unimpressively in a rear corridor.
Children had no business in the elegant, carpeted front hall.
As children our realm
extended from our bedrooms in the rear wing to a vast kitchen. We had to pass
through the kitchen to enter the elegant part of the f ourteen-room apartment.
From a vestibule with a sham fireplace faced with valuable Delft tiles guests
were conducted into a large room full of French furniture and Empire
upholstery. The glittering crystal chandelier particularly is so impressed on
my memory that I can see it to this day. So is the conservatory, whose
appointments my father had bought at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900: richly
carved Indian furniture, hand-embroidered curtains, and a tapestry-covered
divan. Palms and other exotic plants suggested an exotic world. Here my parents
had their breakfast and here my father would make ham rolls for us children of
the kind that were eaten in his native Westphalia. My recollection of the
adjacent living room has faded, but the paneled, neo-Gothic dining room has
kept its magic for me. The table could seat more than twenty. There my baptism
was celebrated; there our family festivals take place to this day.
My mother took great
pleasure and pride in seeing to it that we belonged socially to the leading
families of Mannheim. There were surely no more—but no less-thah twenty or thirty
households in the city that enjoyed comparable luxuries. A large staff of
servants helped meet the requirements of status. In addition to the cook— whom
for obvious reasons we children were especially fond of-my parents employed a
kitchen maid, a chambermaid, a butler frequently, and a chauffeur always, as
well as a nanny to look after us. The maids wore white caps, black dresses, and
white aprons; the butler, purple livery with gilt buttons. The chauffeur was
dressed most magnificently of all.
My parents did their
best to provide a happy childhood for us. But wealth and status— social
obligations, the large household, the nanny, and the servants— stood in the way
of their doing as they wished in this respect. To this day I can feel the
artificiality and discomfort of that world. Moreover, I often had dizzy spells
and sometimes fainted. The Heidelberg physician whom they consulted, a
distinguished professor of medicine, diagnosed the cause as "weakness of
the vascular nerves/' This disability was a considerable psychological burden
and early made me conscious of the pressure of external conditions. I suffered
all the more because my playmates and my two brothers were more robust than I,
so that I felt inferior to them. In their rough and tumble way they often made
it clear that this was how they thought of me, too.
An inadequacy often
calls forth compensating forces. In any case these difficulties made me learn
how to adjust better to the world of other boys. If I later showed some
aptitude in dealing with difficult circumstances and troublesome people, I
suspect that the gift can be traced back to my boyhood physical weakness.
When we were taken out
by our French governess, we had to be nattily dressed, in keeping with our social
status. Naturally, we were forbidden to play in the city parks, let alone on
the street. All we had for a playground was our courtyard— not much larger than
a few of our rooms put together. It was surrounded by the backs of tall
apartment houses. This yard contained two or three wretched plane trees,
starved for air, and an ivy-covered wall. A mound of tufa rocks in one corner
suggested a grotto. By early spring a thick layer of soot coated the greenery, and
whatever we touched was bent on transforming us into dirty, dis- reputable
big-city children. My favorite playmate, before my school days began, was
Frieda Allmendinger, the concierge's daughter. The atmosphere of sparse
simplicity and the close-knit quality of a family living in crowded quarters
had a curious attraction for me.
I attended the primary
grades at a distinguished private school where the children of leading families
were taught reading and writing. After this sheltered environment, my first
months in the public Oberrealschule (high school), amid rowdy fellow pupils,
were especially hard for me. I had a friend named Quenzer, however, who soon
introduced me to all sorts of fun and games. He also persuaded me to buy a
soccer ball with my pocket money. This was a plebeian impulse which horrified
my parents, all the more so since Quenzer came from a poor family. I think it was
at this time that my bent for statistics first manifested itself. I recorded
all the bad marks in the class book in my "Phoenix Calendar for
Schoolchildren/' and
every month counted up who had received the most demerits. No doubt I would not
have bothered if I had not had some prospect of frequently heading the list.
The office of my father’s
architectural firm was right next door to our apartment. That was where the
large renderings for the builders were made. Drawings of all sorts were made on
a bluish transparent paper whose smell is still part and parcel of my memories
of that office. My father’s buildings were influenced by the neo-Renaissance:
they had bypassed Jugendstil. Later on, the quieter classicism of Ludwig
Hoffmann, the influential city architect of Berlin, served him as a model.
In that office I made
my first "work of art" at the age of twelve. A birthday present for
my father, it was a drawing of a sort of allegorical 'life clock," in a
highly ornamented case complete with Corinthian columns and intricate
scrollwork. I used all the watercolors I could lay hands on. With the help of
the office employees, I produced a reasonable facsimile of an object in Late
Empire style.
Before 1914 my parents
kept a touring car for summer use as well as a sedan for driving around the
city in winter. These automobiles were the focus of my technological passions.
At the beginning of the war they had to be put upon blocks, to spare the tires;
but if the chauffeur were well disposed to us, we children were allowed to sit
at the steering wheel in the garage. At such times I experienced the first
sensations of technical intoxication in a world that was yet scarcely
technical. In Spandau prison I had to live like a man of the nineteenth century
without a radio, television set, telephone, or car and was not even allowed to
work the light switch myself. After ten years of imprisonment I experienced a similar
rapture when I was allowed to run an electric floor polisher.
In 1915 I encountered
another product of the technical revolution of those decades. One of the
zeppelins used in the air raids on London was stationed in Mannheim. The
captain and his officers were soon frequent guests in our house. They invited my
two brothers and me to tour their airship. Ten years old, I stood before that
giant product of technology, clambered into the motor gondola, made my way
through the dim mysterious corridors inside the hull, and went into the control
gondola.
When the airship
started, toward evening, the captain had it perform a neat loop over our house,
and the officers waved a sheet they had borrowed from our mother. Night after
night afterward I was in terror that the airship would go up in flames, and all
my friends would be killed (In 1917 heavy losses made it necessary to call off the attacks).
My imagination dwelt on
the war, on the advances and retreats at the front, on the suffering of the
soldiers. At night we sometimes heard a distant rumble from the great battle of
attrition at Verdun. With the ardent sympathies of childhood, I would often
sleep for several nights running on the hard floor beside my soft bed in order
to be sharing the privations of the soldiers at the front.
We did not escape the
food shortages in the city and what was then called the turnip winter. We had
wealth, but no relatives or acquaintances in the countryside. My mother was
clever at devising endless new variations on turnip dishes, but I was often so
hungry that in secret I gradually consumed a whole bag of stone-hard dog biscuits
left over from peace- time. The air raids on Mannheim, which by present-day standards
were quite innocuous, became more frequent. One small bomb struck a neigh- boring
house. A new period of my boyhood began.
Since 1905 we had owned
a summer home in the vicinity of Heidelberg. It stood on the slope of a quarry
that was said to have supplied the stone for the nearby Heidelberg Schloss. Back
of the slope rose the hills of the Odenwald with hiking paths through the
ancient woods. Strip clearings provided occasional glimpses of the Neckar
Valley. Here every- thing was peaceful; we could have a fine garden and
vegetables, and the neighbor owned a cow. We moved there in the summer of 1918.
My health soon
improved. Every day, even in snowstorms and rain, I tramped for three-quarters
of an hour to and from school, often at a steady run. Bicycles were not
available in the straitened early postwar period.
My way to school led me
past the clubhouse of a rowing association. In 1919 1 became a member and for
two years was coxswain of the racing fours and eights. In spite of my still
frail constitution I soon became one of the most diligent oarsmen in the club.
At the age of sixteen I advanced to stroke in the school shells and took part in
several races. For the first time I had been seized by ambition and was spurred
to performances I would not have thought myself capable of. What excited me was
more the chance to direct the crew by my own rhythm than the prospect of winning
respect in the small world of oarsmen.
Most of the time we
were defeated, to be sure. But since a team per- formance was involved, each
individual's flaws could not be weighed. On the contrary, a sense of common
action arose. There was another benefit to such training: the requirement of
self -discipline. At the time I despised those among my schoolmates who were finding
their first pleasures in dancing, wine, and cigarettes.
On my way to school, at
the age of seventeen, I met the girl who was to become my wife. Falling in love
made me more studious, for a year later we agreed that we would be married as
soon as I completed my university studies. I had long been good at mathematics;
but now my marks in other subjects also improved, and I became one of the best
in the class.
Our German teacher, an
enthusiastic democrat, often read aloud to us from the liberal Frankfurter
Zeitung. But for this teacher I would have remained altogether nonpolitical in
school. For we were being educated in terms of a conservative bourgeois view of
the world. In spite of the Revolution which had brought in the Weimar Republic,
it was still impressed upon us that the distribution of power in society and
the traditional authorities were part of the God-given order of things. We remained
largely untouched by the currents stirring everywhere during the early
twenties. In school, there could be no criticism of courses or subject matter,
let alone of the ruling powers in the state. Unconditional faith in the
authority of the school was required. It never even occurred to us to doubt the
order of things, for as students we were subjected to the dictates of a
virtually absolutist system. Moreover, there were no subjects such as sociology
which might have sharpened our political judgments. Even in our senior year,
German class assignments called solely for essays on literary subjects, which
actually prevented us from giving any thought to the problems of society. Nor
did all these restrictions in school impel us to take positions on political
events during extracurricular activities or outside of school. One decisive
point of difference from the present was our inability to travel abroad. Even
if funds for foreign travel had been available, no organizations existed to
help young people under- take such travel. It seems to me essential to point
out these lacks, as a result of which a whole generation was without defenses
when exposed to the new techniques for influencing opinion.
At home, too, politics
were not discussed. This was all the odder since my father had been a convinced
liberal even before 1914. Every morning he waited impatiently for the
Frankfurter Zeitung to arrive; every week he read the critical magazines
Simplicissimus and Jugend. He shared the ideas of Friedrich Naumann, who called
for social reforms in a powerful Germany. After 1923 my father became a
follower of Couden-hove-Kalergi and zealously advocated his pan-European ideas.
Father would surely have been glad to talk about politics with me, but I tended
to dodge such discussions and he did not insist. This political indifference was
characteristic of the youth of the period, tired and disillusioned as they were
by a lost war, revolution, and inflation; but it prevented me from forming
political standards, from setting up categories on which political judgments
could be based. I was much more inclined to detour on my way to school across
the park of the Heidelberg Schloss and to linger on the terrace looking
dreamily at the ruins of the castle and down at the old city. This partiality
for tumbledown citadels and tangles of crooked old streets remained with me and
later found expression in my passion for collecting landscape paintings,
especially the works of the Heidelberg Romantics. On the way to the Schloss I
sometimes met the poet Stefan George, who radiated dignity and pride and a kind
of priestliness. The great religious preachers must have had such an effect
upon people, for there was something magnetic about him. When my elder brother
was in his senior year, he was admitted to the Master's inner circle.
Music meant a good deal
to me. Up to 1922, 1 was able to hear the young Furtwangler in Mannheim and after
him, Erich Kleiber. At that time I found Verdi more impressive than Wagner and
thought Puccini "frightful." On the other hand, I was ravished by a
symphony of Rimsky- Korsakov and judged Mahler's Fifth Symphony "rather
complicated, but I liked it." After a visit to the Playhouse, I observed
that Georg Kaiser was "the most important modern dramatist who in his
works wrestles with the concept of the value and power of money." And upon
seeing Ibsen's The Wild Duck, I decided that we could not find the
characteristics of the leaders of society as other than ridiculous. These
people were "farcical," I wrote. Romain Holland's novel Jean
Chrisiophe heightened my enthusi- asm for Beethoven.
It was, therefore, not
only in a burst of youthful rebelliousness that I found the luxurious life at
home not to my liking. There was a more basic opposition involved when I turned
to what were then the advanced writers and looked for friends in a rowing club
or in the huts of the Alpine Club. The custom in my circles was for a young man
to seek his companions and his future wife in the sheltered class to which his
parents belonged. But I was drawn to plain, solid artisan families for both. I
even felt an instinctive sympathy for the extreme left— though this inclination
never assumed any concrete form. At the time I was allergic to any political
commitments. That continued to be so, even though I felt strong nationalistic
feelings— as for example, at the time of the French occupation of the Ruhr in
1923.
To my amazement my
Abitur essay was judged the best in my class. Nevertheless I thought,
"That's hardly likely for you," when the head of the school in his
farewell address told the graduates that now "the way to highest deeds and
honors" was open to us.
Since I was the best
mathematician in the school, I had intended to study that subject. But my
father presented sound reasons against this choice, and I would not have been a
mathematician familiar with the laws of logic if I had not yielded to his
arguments. The profession of architecture, which I had been absorbing naturally
since my boyhood, seemed the obvious choice. I therefore decided, to my
father's delight, to become an architect, like him and his father before him.
During my first
semester I studied at the Institute of Technology in nearby Karlsruhe.
Financial reasons dictated this choice, for the inflation was growing wilder
with each passing day. I had to draw my allowance weekly; by the end of the
week the fabulous sum had melted away to nothing. From the Black Forest where I
was on a bicycle tour in the middle of September 1923, I wrote: "Very
cheap here! Lodgings 400,000 marks and supper 1,800,000 marks. Milk 250,000
marks a pint." Six weeks later, shortly before the end of the inflation, a
restaurant dinner cost ten to twenty billion marks, and even in the student
dining hall over a billion. I had to pay between three and four hundred million
marks for a theater ticket.
The financial upheaval
finally forced my family to sell my deceased grandfather's firm and factory to
another company at a fraction of its value in return for "dollar treasury
bills/' Afterward, my monthly allowance amounted to sixteen dollars—on which I
was totally free of cares and could live splendidly.
In the spring of 1924,
with the inflation now over, I shifted to the Institute of Technology in
Munich. Although I remained there until the summer of 1925 and Hitler, after
his release from prison, was again making a stir in the spring of 1925, I took
no notice of him. In my long letters to my fiancée I wrote only of how I was
studying far into the night and of our common goal: getting married in three or
four years.
During the holidays my
future wife and I with a few fellow students frequently went on tramps from
shelter to shelter in the Austrian Alps. Hard climbs gave us the sense of real
achievement. Sometimes, with characteristic obstinacy, I managed to convince my
fellow hikers not to give up a tour we had started on, even in the worst
weather— in spite of storms, icy rains, and cold, although mists spoiled the
view from the peak when we finally reached it. Often, from the mountain tops,
we looked down upon a deep gray layer of cloud over the distant plain. Down
there lived what to our minds were wretched people; we thought we stood high
above them in every sense. Young and rather arrogant, we were convinced that
only the finest people went into the mountains. When we returned from the peaks
to the normal life of the lowlands, I was quite confused for a while by the
bustle of the cities.
We also sought
"closeness with nature" on trips with our folding boats. In those
days this sport was still new; the streams were not filled with craft of all
kinds as they are today. In perfect quiet we floated down the rivers, and in
the evenings we could pitch our tent at the most beautiful spot we could find.
This leisurely hiking and boating gave us some of that happiness that had been
a matter of course to our forefathers. Even my father had taken a tour on foot
and in horse carriages from Munich to Naples in 1885. Later, when he would
drive through all of Europe in his car, he used to speak of that tour as the
finest travel experience he had ever had.
Many of our generation
sought such contact with nature. This was not merely a romantic protest against
the narrowness of middle-class life. We were also escaping from the demands of
a world growing increasingly complicated. We felt that the world around us was
out of balance. In nature, in the mountains and the river valleys, the harmony
of Creation could still be felt. The more virginal the mountains, the lonelier
the river valleys, the more they drew us. I did not, however, belong to any
youth movement, for the group quality of these movements would have negated the
very isolation we were seeking.
In the autumn of 1925,
1 began attending the Institute of Technology in Berlin-Charlottenburg, along
with a group of Munich students of architecture. I wanted Professor Poelzig for
my teacher, but he had set limits to the number of students in his drafting
seminar. Since my talent for drawing was inadequate, I was not accepted. In any
case, I was beginning to doubt that I would ever make a good architect and took
this verdict without surprise. Next semester Professor Heinrich Tessenow was appointed
to the institute. He was a champion of the spirit of simple craftsmanship in
architecture and believed in architectonic expressiveness by severely delimited
means. "A minimum of pomp is the decisive factor." I promptly wrote
to my fiancée:
My
new professor is the most remarkable, most clear-headed man I have ever met. I
am wild about him and am working with great eagerness. He is not modern, but in
a certain sense more modern than all the others. Outwardly he seems
unimaginative and sober, just like me, but his buildings have something about
them that expresses a profound experience. His intelligence is frighteningly
acute. I mean to try hard to be admitted to his "master school" in a
year, and after another year will try to become his assistant. Of course all
this is wildly optimistic and is merely meant to trace what I'd like to do in
the best of cases.
Only half a year after
completing my examination I became his assistant. In Professor Tessenow I had
found my first catalyst— and he remained that for me until seven years later
when he was replaced by a more powerful one.
I also had great
respect for our teacher of the history of architecture, Professor Daniel
Krenkler. An Alsatian by birth, he was a dedicated archaeologist and a highly
emotional patriot as well. In the course of one lecture he burst into tears
while showing us pictures of Strassburg Cathedral and had to suspend the
lecture. For him I delivered a report on Albrecht Haupt's book on Germanic
architecture, Die Baukunst der Germanen. But at the same time I wrote to my fiancée:
A little racial mixture
is always good. And if today we are on the down- ward path, it is not because
we are a mixed race. For we were already that in the Middle Ages when we still
had a vigorous germ in us and were expanding, when we drove the Slavs out of Prussia,
or later transplanted European culture to America. We are going downhill
because our energies have been consumed; it is the same thing that happened in
the past to the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. There is nothing to be done
about that.
The twenties in Berlin
were the inspiring backdrop to my student years. Many theatrical performances made
a deep impression upon me—among others Max Reinhardt's staging of A Midsummer
Night's Dream, Elisabeth Bergner in Shaw's Saint Joan, Pallenberg in Piscator's
version of Schweik. But CharelTs lavishly mounted revues also fascinated me. On
the other hand, I took no pleasure in Cecil B. De Mille's bombastic pomp—never
suspecting that ten years later I myself would be going his movie architecture
one better. As a student I thought his films examples of "American
tastelessness."
But overshadowing all
such impressions was the poverty and unemployment all around me. Spengler s Decline
of the West had convinced me that we were living in a period of decay strongly
similar to the late Roman Empire: inflation, decline of morals, impotence of
the German Reich. His essay "Prussianism and Socialism" excited me
especially be- cause of the contempt for luxury and comfort it expressed. On
this score, Spengler s and Tessenow's doctrines coincided. But my teacher, in contrast
to Spengler, saw hope for the future. He took an ironic tone toward the "cult
of heroes" fashionable at the period.
Perhaps there are
really uncomprehended "super" heroes all around us who because of
their towering aims and abilities may rightly smile at even the greatest of
horrors, seeing them as merely incidental. Perhaps, before handicraft and the
small town can flourish again, there must first come something like a rain of
brimstone. Perhaps nations which have passed through infernos will then be
ready for their next age of flowering.
In the summer of 1927,
after nine semesters, I passed the architect's license examination. The
following spring, at twenty-three, I became one of the youngest assistants at
the institute. In the last year of the war, I had gone to a fortuneteller at a
fair, and she had prophesied: "You will win early fame and retire
early." Now I had reason to think of this prediction; for it seemed
evident that if only I wanted to I could some day teach at the Institute of
Technology like my professor.
This post as assistant
made it possible for me to marry. We did not go to Italy for our honeymoon, but
took faltboats and tent through the solitary, forested chain of lakes in Mecklenburg.
We launched our boats in Spandau, a few hundred yards from the prison where I would
be spending twenty years of my life.
