AUTHOR’S NOTE
Gitta Sereny’s Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth is a 720-page book, written with the utmost historical rigour, about a man whose long life was dominated by the defining event of the twentieth century. In order to write a stage play based on this work I have had to conflate characters, combine scenes and concentrate the incidents on which they are based.
As ever, the aim of this is better to reveal the truth. This is a vulnerable procedure in a play based on a biography in which the truth is pursued but also questioned. I am hugely grateful for the chance to retell the story Gitta Sereny has told so authoritatively in her book. For the consequences of doing so in a very different medium, I am responsible.
In addition to Gitta Sereny herself, I am indebted to Michael Eaton and Hilary Norrish for their contribution to the shape and content of the play as it developed through treatment into draft. As with our earlier stage collaboration, Nicholas Nickleby, Trevor Nunn had an immense influence on the structure, substance and meaning of the text, both before and during rehearsals.
Finally, two practical notes. In order to counter the notion that Nazism could only have happened in a foreign language, I’ve anglicised most of the ranks and titles in the play. The ones left in German are those for which an English translation is misleading: ‘Führer’ doesn’t mean the same as ‘Leader’, ‘Gauleiter’ implies something different from ‘Governor’, and while ‘Herr’ does mean ‘Mr’ it is often used in conjunction with other titles in a way which sounds odd to an English ear. Second, where lines are broken in the text, I have indicated the point at which the next character interrupts by a slash. The rest of the first character’s line does not have to be completed: it is there to provide some overlap but also to indicate to the actor where the interrupted sentence was going.