Prisoner Games
In Spandau Prison Albert Speer and Rudolph Hess show what the brain needs and doesn't need.
Geoffrey Hamilton
Blog, March 7, 2006
A new documentary on Albert Speer called
SPEER & HITLER
played on HistoryTelevision this week. In it we are shown reenactments
of Speer's time in Spandau Prison with among other prisoners
Rudolph Hess. The key events of that time in prison were Speer's particular kind of
activity and Hess' peculiar non-activity.
More exactly Speer's games in a reduced context and Hess' lethargy.
This situation is important because it illustrates what happens in reduced
contexts to anyone. A context here is what is typically and usually defined as a context, but it is moreover
a game that an individual plays with as a reference point for
all actions and thoughts. The context as reference point can be a cultural norm like a national constitution, for example. A reduced
context is the above cultural norm that is made smaller in some way.
In Spandau prison
the options and norms are minimized and in a very documented way, so the context reduction
of Speer is a useful example for understanding this important aspect of human psychology.
Albert Speer was a talented architect and manager who willingly led the constructive
side of the Nazis and so was jailed for 20 years. During his first few years in jail Speer was
unable to accept his newly reduced context and slowly had a psychological meltdown.
Finally he gave up his thoughts of a grand past,
stopped relating his games to the whole world and instead made his small context the whole world. He
built a stone garden with temporary stackings of brick that looked like skyscrapers.
He would surround a green space, which was the size of a bed, with these faux buildings
and lie down. Then he would imagine a city growing up around himself.
He used his imagination like a child, but unlike a child, who can't actually make cities as
he can, he was not allowed to use his
manifest skills and build the real thing.
When he got over his middle age highbrow pomposity and accepted his reduced context he was
able to be satisfied with practicing this architecture game however it was to be accomplished. This
playing like a child was not about learning, it was about creating new meanings, happy meanings.
Speer's other reduced context game illustrates the same point but
involves Hess. Speer would sometimes walk laps in the prison yard. One day he said to Hess that he was
going to walk east around the world. He measured the laps and said seven laps equaled a kilometre.
Hess suggested that Speer use a yard tree's seeds to count laps by putting a handful in one pocket and
transferring one to the other pocket for each lap completed. Speer could keep track afterwards
in his cell.
Speer immediately got into the spirit of the game and traveled via his imagination
and his knowledge of geography as far east as Mexico before being released in 1968. Even in his
letters he maintained this game and had his friends outside prison interested in all his adventures.
Speer was mentally healthy after jail as a result of all these games and went on to write
his memoirs which made him a rich man for a second time.
Hess, in contrast, never did more than mope around. After helping Speer to begin his
faux journey he just munched on the tree's seeds, or stared at walls and waited to get out. That
day finally came for Hess after forty years - but only through his own suicide.
The reduced context of a prison may seem like an unusual situation in which to discover a common
human nature, but, as with brain damage people whose actions indicate what a missing brain part does, the
study of prison life indicates what is missing and what is still there. What is missing in Spandau are
big goals and grand designs. What is there is the satisfaction that can still be found in the smallest
of goals and tiniest of playing fields and that they feel the same and are the same.
Let's, for the sake of being fair, do a mind-experiment. Think of the future as an
expanded, gigantic, huge, spectacular context and make it as the normal for today (with
its futuristic teleportation and
telepathy) and
think of what you have now in your real life (with your primitive cars and cell phones) as
a reduction of that futuristic setting.
By thinking this way it turns out you may live in a kind of prison life today. If you now act like Speer you too can be as equally contented as you were before you realized it was a prison. Really, it turns out all eras are
prisons that cut us off from greater possibilities.
All nations, cultures and cliques are prisons that cannot be seen because of our ignorance of what is better. So if we can forget the 'what is better' it amounts to the same thing. You can travel to your imaginary Mexicos and toy skyscrapers and be as
happy and healthy as Speer in Spandau.
GRH
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