#RivetingReviews: Tom Taylor reviews YOU ARE THE FÜHRER’S UNREQUITED LOVE by Jean-Noël Orengo, translated by David Watson

The title of Jean-Noël Orengo’s latest novel is a quote from a remark allegedly made by SS officer Karl Maria Hettlage, who, with a discernible note of jealousy, is said to have once told one of Adolf Hitler’s favourite courtiers: ‘You are Hitler’s unrequited love.’ That favourite was Albert Speer, an historical figure irreducible from his myth, parsed from a vast archive of meticulously curated falsehoods and fabulations. What we do know is this: born into an upper-middle-class family in Mannheim, Speer followed in the footsteps of his paternal lineage and became an architect. His monumental neo-classical designs typified the Third Reich’s architectural aesthetic, but as Germany’s position in the war deteriorated, his duties were shifted. As Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, he became instrumental in exploiting slave labour to enhance the war effort – and, though he claimed that he ‘was inescapably contaminated morally’ and was ‘responsible in a wholly personal sense’ for the Holocaust, he categorically denied knowledge of the Final Solution when serving as minister. This is highly implausible. Whilst Speer was found guilty of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and sentenced to twenty years in prison, he maintained the veneer of the ‘good Nazi’. Seen to have atoned for his sins, he escaped the opprobrium meted out to fellow high-ranking officials, earning celebrity status for his revealing memoir, Inside the Third Reich. 

Good-looking, charming, and intellectual, Speer cut a singular figure among Hitler’s coterie of thuggish outcasts, inciting their ire as much as their master’s admiration: here was a man who embodied the aesthetic ideal of Nazism, the homoerotic but prurient ideation of the Nazi death cult that Susan Sontag studied in her essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’. As the book’s title indicates, the author is particularly interested in the psycho-sexual dynamic that undoubtedly fomented between Speer and the Führer. From sun-kissed strolls in Munich to Hitler’s dying days in the bunker, Orengo portrays a lover’s tryst, replete with jealous misgivings, petty quarrels and reunions. 

In the first half of the book, Orengo essentially offers an abridged history of events between 1933 and 1945. It’s fascinating because Speer is fascinating, but it is really just a perambulation before the main event – did Speer know about the Final Solution? Enter Gitta Sereny, the Austrian British historian and journalist who charmed her way into over a hundred hours of recorded conversations with Albert Speer, culminating in her 1995 biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. These passages are electrifying, tense, boldly confronting the euphemisms, aporia and impasses that pockmarked the first half. What emerges between interviewer and interviewee is a dramatic reprise of Speer’s masterful manipulation of the world under the guise of the ‘good Nazi’. Sereny is intrigued by Speer – impressed, even. A friendship flourishes. But she ultimately sees through his web of lies, revealing to the world an egotistical and jealous social climber whose artistic credentials belied the malicious technocrat within. 

At the end of the book, Orengo finally explains his reasons for writing this unconventional, marginalia-like book on the lives of Albert Speer. He regards Speer’s memoir as ‘the most radical aesthetic and political autofiction ever written’ – and provocatively positions his own book as a ‘counter-novel’ written to disentangle fact from fiction. Ultimately, he sees Speer as some precursor to our own post-truth era, in which figures of authority are twisting every notion of truth. ‘Who writes history, and above all, how do they write it?’ he asks. If the post-truth era is destabilised by a postmodern multiplicity of possible realities, Speer’s autofiction is its inversion. Speer doesn’t destabilise truth; he occupies it. Autofiction can be an instrument of radical honesty, as in Knausgård or Ernaux, or of radical self-exculpation, as in Speer. The form is morally neutral. The self-wielding of it is not.

Reviewed by Tom Taylor

YOU ARE THE FÜHRER’S UNREQUITED LOVE

Written by Jean-Noël Orengo 

Translated by David Watson

Published by Penguin (2026)

June 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Tom Taylor is a literary scout and writer based in London.

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