About twenty years a dear friend told me about Gitta Sereny and her powerful biography about Albert Speer. In my attempt to understand man’s inhumanity to man, I read it – all 800+ pages of it. It is a masterpiece of patient, methodical and compassionate interviewing to discover how and why one man did what he did. The lies he told himself, the stories he hid behind, the ability to not see what he didn’t want to see or hear what he didn’t want to hear, how we can bury the truth deep in our subconscious, until we can’t bear to live with it any longer.
It is one of the most extraordinary biographies I have ever read. This book is a keeper.
But the other books by Sereny that I purchased around this time, do not need to stay. Although fascinating, they did not have the same impact.
Sereny aimed to show ‘the fatal interdependence of all human actions, and an affirmation of man’s responsibility for his own acts and their consequences.’ In many ways, this was her life’s work which she tried to conclude, or bring together in her final book, The German Trauma (2002).
In the section about Speer, she claims that ‘what Speer gave me was a new perspective on Hitler, on his personality, his actions and his goals; a new understanding of the significance, in political events, of human emotions.’ He also showed her the ‘potential for regeneration‘ and the possibility of recapturing ‘lost morality‘.
She summed up Into That Darkness (1974) with this observation:
I do not believe that all men are equal, for what we are above all other things, is individual and different. But individuality and difference are not only due to the talents we happen to be born with. they depend as much on the extent to which we are allowed to expand in freedom.
There is an as yet ill-defined, little-understood essential core to our being which, given this freedom, comes into its own…which separates us or even liberates us from intrinsic influences, and therefore determines our moral conduct and growth….
Social morality is contingent upon the individual’s capacity to make responsible decisions, to make the fundamental choice between right and wrong….this capacity derives from this mysterious core – the very essence of the human person.
This essence, however, cannot come into being or exist in a vacuum. It is deeply vulnerable and profoundly dependent on a climate of life; on freedom in the deepest sense: not license but freedom to grow: within family, within community, within nations, and within human society as a whole….the very fact of our existence as valid individuals – is evidence of our interdependence and of our responsibility for each other.
Thirty years later, she finished The German Trauma with ‘in any discussion of the problems in our world today, racism must rank high.’
…the poison which we hoped and believed had been eradictaed in our own time by the knowledge of the ultimate evil…is in fact still present, not in any one area of discrimination or racsim, or in a restricted number of specific rulers or governments, but in all humankind. I call it ‘Inner Racism’.
And so, history repeats.
(This) Authentic Life 