You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love, Jean-Noël Orengo, translated by David Watson, Penguin, £15

In Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995), Gitta Sereny’s mammoth study of Hitler’s personal architect and the Nazi Minister of Armaments and War Production, there is a telling moment when Speer’s wife, Margarete, describes the almost non-existent relationship between her six children and their father, who had spent most of their childhoods imprisoned for war crimes. ‘He only comes alive when he talks about the past,’ Margarete says of her husband, whereas the children longed only to speak of the future. ‘It’s just that whenever they tried to talk to him about anything but the past, his face glazed over or he’d just go away, so finally they gave up.’

Clearly, Albert Speer’s soul was not one sugared with empathy, and reading about him at any length invariably leads one to the conclusion that other people simply didn’t exist for him, not even his own children. During a conversation about the first time Speer attended one of Hitler’s speeches, Sereny asks Speer’s wife whether she would have liked to go with him. When Margarete answers yes, Speer is surprised: ‘You would?’ he says, and then explains: ‘Actually, it wouldn’t have been a good idea. Afterwards – I remember this well – I really needed to be alone. I had left our small car not too far away; I walked there, with crowds of people in the street… My head was ringing. I sat down in the car and drove out of the city, into the woods. And there I went for a long walk.’

Leaving aside Speer’s dubious claim that he went for a walk in the woods – at night, in December – turning a question about his wife into a dramatic anecdote about himself is what the French writer Jean-Noël Orengo, in his absorbing new novel You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love, describes as one of Speer’s worst traits: ‘his incredible egocentrism that made everything about him, his feelings and his suffering, and his lack of any sustained or deep empathy with his listeners’. It is a trait one encounters repeatedly, not only in Sereny’s great and complex book, but also in Speer’s two bestsellers: Inside the Third Reich (1969) and Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1975). In the latter, he at one point differentiates himself from the ‘repulsive bourgeois revolutionaries’ of Hitler’s inner circle, people like Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann, whereas he himself, Speer writes, belonged to the more ‘idealistic’ side of the regime without which, he claims, Hitler’s success with the German people cannot be grasped: ‘Hitler was sustained by the idealism and devotion of people like myself. We who actually were least inclined to think selfishly were the ones who made him possible.’

It is typical of Speer that a moment of apparent self-incrimination also serves as an occasion for self-inflation. In him, the two are never far apart, which lends even his most admirably forthright statements a suspiciously ersatz flavour. Yet the moral regeneration he claimed to have undergone during the 20 years of his imprisonment impressed intellectuals and journalists the world over, including the theologian Karl Barth, the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and the Buchenwald survivor Robert Raphael Geis. To historians, he became an invaluable resource for the inner workings of the Nazi war machine. ‘A master of design and armaments’, Orengo writes early in his novel, ‘[Speer] has put himself forward as key witness, simultaneously spectator and actor, with Adolf Hitler and his court in the foreground.’

In the background, meanwhile, were the horrors the Nazi regime perpetrated against Europe’s Jews, horrors Speer always claimed he’d known nothing about until confronted with the evidence at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, where he impressed the jury with his intelligence and composure. ‘Of all the accused’, Orengo writes, ‘he had come across as the most lucid, the most aware of what he was accused of, and his arguments had been quite convincing.’

You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love – Orengo’s fifth novel, but his first to appear in English – is a self-described ‘counter-fiction’, and the fiction it aims to counter is precisely the myth Speer designed and built up around himself: the myth of ‘the good Nazi’ who repented of his involvement in the Third Reich. The novel’s eye-catching title comes from a remark by the SS officer Karl Maria Hettlage, who once allegedly said to Speer: ‘Do you know who you are, Speer? You are Hitler’s unrequited love.’

Indeed, as Orengo’s novel recounts, Speer enjoyed a unique and privileged relationship with the Führer for much of the 1930s, when he was plucked from youth and obscurity to become Hitler’s personal architect. Together, they would pore over scale models of future projects, or else travel to Munich to look at art and dine at Hitler’s favourite restaurant. They saw ‘something in each other beyond prosaic ambitions or the competition for financial or personal gain’, Orengo writes. Hitler, a failed artist, was enamoured of art and needed, in his inner circle, an artistic corrective to the political scheming of Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann and Goering. Speer, meanwhile, was catapulted into a world where his artistic ambitions were given almost free rein.

Yet Speer’s later claim, in the Spandau Diaries, that ‘it was not power I wanted, but to become a second Schinkel’, was dishonest. ‘Architecture was the power of space’, Orengo writes. ‘All architects are authoritarian and perfectly aware that they dictate our living spaces with their constructions. More than painters, musicians or sculptors, and beyond compare with writers or dancers, modern architects played the role of “artists for politicians”.’ Virtually all of Speer’s designs between 1934 and 1939 confounded size with greatness. When his father, who’d also been an architect, was shown the designs for Hitler and Speer’s projected renewal of Berlin, the Welthauptstadt Germania, he told his son: ‘You’ve all gone completely insane.’

Yet Speer’s real power, it was eventually discovered, lay not in architecture but in organisation. As Minister of Armaments and War Production from 1942 on, he successfully placed the whole of Germany’s economy at the service of the war, with tens of thousands of highly specialised workers, engineers and technicians working under him. He oversaw the building of factories that produced the Junkers Ju 88, one of the Luftwaffe’s major combat aircraft. In some quarters of the army, some began to see him as a credible successor to the Führer. Over time, even the Allies came to recognise him as ‘an outstanding technocrat, the kind of man who would succeed in any place at any time, whatever the regime, a useful, polite, efficient, and determined man, on top of his brief, never bogged down, a virtuoso handler of numbers and human resources’. Some historians believe Speer’s efforts may have prolonged the war by as much as two years.

As all the above indicates, You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love is a historical nonfiction novel, one that calls to mind other recent contributions to the genre, all of them, oddly enough, by French authors: Lauren Binet’s HhHH (2012), Érich Vuillard’s The Order of the Day (2017) and Olivier Guez’s The Disappearance of Josef Mengele (2017). Of these, Orengo’s novel is less concerned with telling a story than with demythologising one; at times it reads more like a historical or investigative essay. It’s a livelier achievement than this sounds. Affirming the novel form’s ability to ‘distort facts by suggesting parallels’, Orengo makes us see familiar historical images in new, often striking constellations, like his description of Hitler ‘as an atonal creature […] an expressionist creature, a character drawn from the paintings and musical scores of his time, he who hated expressionism and atonality and persecuted the painters, musicians and poets belonging to these movements’.

At other moments, Orengo pulls sceptically at the thread of the historical record. Take Speer’s oft-repeated story about the first time Hitler invited him to lunch. On that day, Speer had got some plaster on his suit at a building site and was worried about looking presentable. Hitler told him not to worry and sent for one of his own jackets, which he let Speer wear to lunch. Seeing the young architect wearing the Führer’s insignia, Goebbels made a bit of a fuss until Hitler shut him up. Orengo clearly doesn’t buy Speer’s story, sensibly observing that the height difference between the two men was ‘not inconsiderable’: ‘One metre eighty-two and one metre seventy-five are not the same thing. So, it is odd that Hitler’s jacket fitted Speer so well. In his memoirs, the jacket fitted him like a glove and, symbolically, anointed him as the Führer’s successor. By 1969, all the other witnesses to this lunch were dead. Speer was alone with his memories.’

In this way, bit by bit, You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love picks apart Speer’s story, which Orengo claims historians and biographers have taken too much at face value. It culminates in the novel’s somewhat clumsy final pages, where Orengo spells out what his novel, until then, was doing a fine job demonstrating: ‘[Speer] lied at Nuremberg. He had known about the extermination of the Jews of Europe. He had even participated in it in his capacity as minister of armaments.’ Deep down, Orengo speculates, everyone must have known that he was lying – even the judges at Nuremburg, even Simon Wiesenthal and Raphael Geis. ‘How could we have ever imagined that he didn’t know?’ Orengo asks. ‘Why had we thought that? Did we prefer his version of the facts to those produced by so many historians over successive generations?’

Gitta Sereny, who passed away in 2012, inevitably enters the narrative, though here Orengo can do little more than redescribe the most extraordinary episodes from her 700-page book – like the drunken phone call Speer made to Sereny a few months before his death, or the long-awaited moment when she finally says to him: ‘I think I know what you knew about the Jews.’ Yet even more than Sereny, who carried on a kind of friendship with Speer, Orengo is horrified by the cosmic injustice that life worked out so well for a man who made a lucrative career as ‘the star of German guilt’ despite not telling the truth at Nuremberg. Even Speer’s death of a brain haemorrhage in 1981 – while staying at a hotel in London with the thirty-something woman he’d recently started an affair with – was ‘fortunately sudden’.

Faced with such pitiless and overwhelming injustice, Orengo concludes that ‘pessimism is the only wisdom’. And yet You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love ends not in despair but with the provocative enjoinder to view Speer’s books as ‘the most radical aesthetic and political autofiction ever written’. Only in this way, Orengo suggests, can we hope to outmanoeuvre Speer’s manipulations: by restoring the fictive status of what he claimed to be the truth.