Documentary “Speer Goes To Hollywood” in the cinema: One epic, please! – Culture

It just shouldn’t be a documentation, says Albert Speer at the beginning of the conversation: the further away from it, the better. The young man he has just received agrees with him. No documentation. A feature film. Or rather: not photography, but painting. Speer is thrilled. Painting. Like in a Van Gogh painting, Speer enthuses, he wanted to come over. That would come closer to the truth than a sober presentation would allow.

The year is 1971. The young man’s name is Andrew Birkin. He will later write the scripts for “The Name of the Rose” and Tom Tykwer’s “Perfume”, but at the moment he is still twenty-six years old, brother of the actress and chanteuse Jane Birkin and protégé of Stanley Kubrick, whom he is in the process of preparing for assisted his (never realized) “Napoleon” project. At the same time, Birkin is working on a screenplay for the film adaptation of Speer’s “Memories”, an international bestseller to which Paramount has secured the rights. Hitler’s architect, who was supposed to build a Germanic world capital for the “new Napoleon” Hitler, as he once called him, now wants to capture his own life in a great work of art. From a Van Gogh, or at least a Kubrick. As long as it doesn’t become documentation that comes too close to the truth, or too far removed from its own.

Speer and Birkin meet in Speer’s villa in Heidelberg and go through what Birkin has written, scene by scene. Birkin asks, Speer comments, a tape is playing. Forty hours of previously unpublished sound recordings have come together in this way. Now the Israeli filmmaker Vanessa Lapa has dug them up and made a film about them, “Speer Goes Hollywood”: a documentary about Speer’s attempt to cement his legend of the “good Nazi” with his “memories” through a Hollywood film. has justified.

Lapa’s film begins with the appearance of Speer’s book, which was made during his imprisonment in the Spandau war crimes prison. He tours worldwide through talk shows in which he effortlessly switches between German, English and French. Most of all, he is remorseful. Yes, conscience. This burden that will always be on him. Yet. Like Sophocles’ Oedipus, he did not know what crimes he was committing.

Lapa illustrates the conversations between Birkin and Speer with old archive material. It goes straight through Speer’s life. Speer was first general building inspector for the conversion of Berlin into the “world capital” Germania, and later Reich Minister for Armaments and Ammunition. Lapa is particularly focused on the Nuremberg Trials, in which the extent of Speer’s responsibility becomes clear, but also Speer’s successful defense – instead of the strand, he only gets twenty years imprisonment. Speer also sticks to his portrayal to Birkin. The Holocaust? The exploitation, mistreatment and murder of slave labor? He couldn’t have known anything about it. Or wasn’t there at the moment. Or can’t remember.

The spear myth, which has long persisted in Germany, has now been thoroughly dealt with – most recently in the works of Isabell Trommer, Magnus Brechtken and Wolfgang Schroeter. The post-war FRG contributed diligently to him, especially in the form of the later FAZ editor Joachim Fest, through his collaboration on Speer’s publications and his own Speer biography published in 1999. Matthias Schmidt published the first critical study back in 1982, Heinrich Breloer’s docudrama “Speer und Er” with Sebastian Koch and Tobias Moretti in 2005 brought about a definitive turnaround in Speer’s reception.

Millions of forced laborers? The author imagines the picture as a long shot

However, Lapa’s film is not just another documentary about Speer. In a broader sense, it is a documentary about the attempt to fictionalize history on film. Speer proudly tells of the millions of slave labor he needed and got. Birkin says he sees it in a long shot, a broad shot. Lapa illustrates this with some kind of photo of prisoners dragging themselves down a dirt road in front of the Germans’ weapons. At first glance, the sheer illustration appears vulgar, arbitrary and problematic. But precisely because of this, Lapa’s approach proves to be a sound strategy. On the one hand, the superficial, illustrative character of the pictures reveals the insubstantiality of the narrative that the two men tinker together along the various stages of Speer’s life. On the other hand, these images are a real archive of the deported, murdered and victims of National Socialism. In this way they resist – as images – the attempt, negotiated on the soundtrack, to cover up or colorize the crimes that Speer had committed with the alleged story of an “important man”.

Albert Speer with Adolf Hitler in a documentary from Vanessa Lapa’s film “Speer Goes To Hollywood”.

(Photo: Salzgeber Film)

This is also important because Birkin does not raise this resistance. Among other things, he suggests to Speer that the number of slave laborers who died in the film should be corrected downwards, and he is upset about the “Paramount and their Jewish Brigade”, who criticize Speer’s too “positive” portrayal in the script. Lapa’s ironic commentary on the relationship between Speer and Birkin consists of short excerpts from Murnau’s “Faust” film that she plays. Seen in this way, we witness the seduction of Faust-Birkin by Speer-Mephisto, and, in a broader sense, the seduction of the documentary through fiction, the seduction of history through the cinema. But the skeptical voice that Birkin warns of Speer also comes from film history itself. Birkin speaks regularly on the phone with Carol Reed, the director of “The Third Man”, who explains to the young writer that his script is good, but unfortunately pure “whitewashing” of a war criminal.

Ultimately, the Speer film was never made, and with Lapa, the Speer documentary finally beats Speer fiction. Nevertheless, it is not without irony that this film about an attempted fake itself sounds partly like a, well, fake. Because in “Speer Goes To Hollywood” we never hear the (allegedly too badly damaged) original recordings, the voices of Speer and Birkin, but the wooden voices of two speakers who – in Speer’s case with a strong German accent – read out the English transcripts of the recordings .

In addition to the reality of the archive images, one would have wished for the reality of the voices, however damaged the tapes might have been. It sounds as if the “real” spear could have hidden again behind the voice of a speaker. In written biographies, facts are reproduced and falsified in the medium of writing. In the film, this medium is, in addition to the image, the materiality of the voice, which nothing can replace.

Speer Goes To Hollywood, Israel 2021. – Director: Vanessa Lapa. Book: Lapa, Joëlle Alexis. Editor: Alexis. With Albert Speer, Andrew Birkin. Edition Salzgeber, 97 minutes. Theatrical release: November 11, 2021.

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