Inside the Third Reich

I'm currently putting the final touches to my Speerography and I've moved into what I prefer to call a virtual minefield of emotions, as the discussion over Speer's guilt can be continued into oblivion and beyond.
But that is a discussion that I in this "little essay" will have with myself more or less. I'll twist and turn the Speerian problem until I'm satisfied, but within a reasonable time limit, of course.

No the reason of this little rant, although Speer-related, is different.
It concerns his autobiography, Erinnerungen (Inside the Third Reich) and its Swedish translation.



The first book about Speer, was his own Secret Diaries of Spandau. I read it in Swedish and liked it very much. It was an epiphany to me, as an allegied anti-Nzi, to come across a man who had been very close to Hitler, but was so clearly intelligent and owned a great deal of talent as an author as well. So I was certain I wouldn't be disappointed when I picked up his autobiography, in Swedish.
Guess what? The translator had decided to abridge the version I got my hands on. It irked me some as I read the translator's foreword, but I decided I should give it a go. The translator's reasons for cutting in the text had been that he'd just cut out bits considering things in Speer's life that he deemed to be of lesser interest to Swedish readers.
I can safely say I didn't like this book nearly as much as I'd liked the unabriged "Secret...". I knew it wasn't because of the author himself; the text flow had been good enough. But the content of it had seemed very patchy at intervals and made little sense. I decided to put this down on the translator.
I recently bought an American version of Inside the Third Reich, making sure it wasn't abridged and guess what? What I've read so far makes a lot more sense and there is much more flow to the text than before, despite it being translated to English, a language that is more different from German than Swedish is.

Personally, I hate when books are released as abridged versions. What is the prupose of them? I mean, people don't go cutting out entire acts out of a Wagner opera or a Shakespeare play, do they? What would Hamlet be without its famous soliloquy? Or Das Ring der Niebelungen without the first part: Das Rheingold? Nothing, that what.
So, when I pick up a book, I expect to get the whole thing. I don't want some translator to decide what I should or should not be able to read. Let me decide that for myself, thank you very much. I mean, I decided to read the memoirs of one of the 20th century's most controversial men. I am prepared for controversy in the book, damn it! I don't want to open it and read and discover that some git translator has been fiddling wih it! It all gets a feeling of those stickers you see on CDs about Explicit Content. Well, what else is to be expected from a band named Cannibal Corpse or Slayer? So stop defacing perfectly good album covers with those eechy stickers.

In the end, one only has to wonder who's the bigger Nazi; Albert Speer who wrote his memoirs or the translator who decides what parts of it I get to read?

Till next time!

--Tallyho!

PS I think this can be classed as another one of those Industrial World problems... My mother had no understanding of my criticism when I told her about this. Though I can understand if she's getting tired of hearing about Speer. I haven't talked about much else these last 1.5 years.