Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer
A third of the way through. The first time I thought of Speer was on a college trip to Berlin. We were chaperoned through the city for two weeks by an American who'd worked for NPR in the city for twenty years - and when a classmate threw a fit in a cafe because his water had bubbles in it, it fell to me to ask for *stille Wasser, bitte?*, because in two decades he hadn't learned enough German for that. At one point on the trip, we met the American ambassador to Germany; he loved the country, he said, and was working on learning the language. I later learned that he'd come from Goldman Sachs, and had donated a lot of money to the Obama campaign, and had lost his job in the aftermath of Wikileaks' publication of some diplomatic cables. He had not been very polite. He never did learn the language.
We had one free day. I walked through some parks. They had statues of great German(-speaking) cultural figures; I remember one of Haydn. Somehow I found myself at Speer's Olympic stadium. It was snowing. The air was still. Arno Breker's statues of victorious athletes, of lithe men and toned women, too beautiful for abstract-expressionist America, lined a great stone structure by Hitler's most notorious architect. The other Nazi buildings had been pointed out to me; they looked like ours in DC, tedious, forbidding monoliths, acts of aesthetic violence, to bludgeon all who saw them into brute submission. The stadium was different.
Ten years later, I saw Speer's memoirs for $2 in a used bookstore, and I had to buy them. After the fall of the Third Reich, he'd constructed himself as an apolitical careerist, a type you get by the truckload in any land of forbidding monoliths. Whether or not Speer was a true believer is a question for historians, but the type - the social climber from Mannheim or Iowa, the man awed by the access to power he lucked into - is real; if he was an authentic Nazi, he saw no shortage of inauthentic ones, as anyone would have.
It's mostly a self-defense, thus mostly tedious, but there are some funny anecdotes. In one, Hitler concocts a plan to forge Berlin into Germania, the world-capital of the Aryan race, with government office buildings on the most prestigious boulevards, and faces opposition from the mayor of Berlin. He starts making noise about forging a new capital; when the mayor drops his objections, he stops. Speer asks, "were you serious?", and Hitler says, no, purpose-built capitals are always miserable: just look at Canberra, or Washington.
If he said that, he was right - there are problems we have that even the nadir of European governance knew to avoid. Why shouldn't we have a capital on par with Paris or Berlin?
Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman
Changing tacks completely: a Jewish lesbian from NYC complains about suburbanites, the publishing industry, and Andrew Sullivan.
Anthropologically fascinating; highly recommended. Where Speer is an old man telling tales, Schulman is a *blogger*, from an era when in order to blog you had to convince a publisher to take financial risk on you. From an era when you respected this, as a fact about the world: tastemakers exist, and you must appeal to them. She complains in the introduction: "How ideas are allowed to be expressed has narrowed considerably in the current era." Publication date: 2012.
And if they're allowed to be expressed: "By the time the book is written, able to find a publisher, actually printed, possibly distributed, and finally available at the mall, about two to six years have passed. By the time those books are purchased and finally read, two generations of subsequent, newer discoveries have already taken place." In academic publishing, we have preprints, but we still have to wait for Elsevier.