“On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Life and Tumultuous Times of Sir Christopher Wren”, by Lisa Jardine

624 pages, Harper Perennial, ISBN-13: 978-0060959104

“Reader, if you seek his monument – look around you”.

Thus is Sir Christopher Wren’s greatness embodied in St Paul’s cathedral, an architectural masterwork that took 40 years to complete and his final resting place. Lisa Jardine’s biography, On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Life and Tumultuous Times of Sir Christopher Wren, puts that stunning but singular achievement in a much richer perspective. He was born to a life of privilege that evaporated when Charles I was deposed and executed (his father was a Knight of the Order of the Garter). Suddenly, Wren’s family was in danger of losing life as well as property. These were Wren’s student years, and during this time he became pragmatic – and he survived. It was the Restoration of Charles II to the throne of England that likewise restored the fortunes of the Wren family, too late for the father, but at precisely the right moment for the son. Charles II restored the monarchy, and restored the fortunes of Wren.

Fortunately, much of the painstaking research which drives this biography is not painful to the reader. We learn as much – in some cases, more – about other scientific “virtuosi” and “club-men”, and the braid of political machinations that entangled them, than we do about Wren; a bonus, this. Jardine has taken a considerable risk as far as a popular readership is concerned. Her multi-subject narrative moves backwards and forwards through time and place, not always in reader-friendly synchromesh. Wren was a Renaissance man, best known for his architecture, but he also “mapped moons and the trajectories of comets” and “pursued astronomy and medicine during two civil wars.” But how did he learn to be an architect? Why, by being so fearfully clever that he turned the mind that had made him Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford (look it up) to questions of structure and aesthetics.

In our age of nerdy specialisms, Wren’s rapid progress reminds us that a fully inquisitive brilliance can grasp many subjects to a high level. His ability to understand architecture was based on science; he knew how perspective worked, in great detail, and his geometric abilities meant he could examine drawings of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia mosque – which, incidentally, gave him the idea for St Paul’s hemisphere within a dome – and know implicitly how the structural forces deployed themselves. So, too, did Robert Hooke, Wren’s closest friend and a key figure in the network of scientists without whom Wren could not have blossomed so fully. Thus, once Wren got the Big Job (which included restoring 51 churches in the City damaged by the Great Fire) their work was often indivisible. Wren was the conceiver, Hooke the detail man, who designed experiments to find out if Wren's structural innovations would work.

Jardine has written a great intellectual biography, complete with great slabs of 17^th Century prose that are slammed down, for good or ill, in the text like hunks of uncooked meat. She tends to lurch from subject to subject, sometimes repeating things, and the nationalism of her interpretation keeps her from allotting much space to Wren’s international links in astronomy and architecture. All told, she has given us something rich and bold, and a biography that illuminates such a towering figure of a man.

“Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs”, by Albert Speer, translated by Richard Winston & Clara Winston, introduced by Eugene Davidson

595 pages, Macmillan Publishers Ltd, ISBN-13: 978-0517385791

Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer is probably the most famous of all WWII memoirs, and in many ways this is perfectly justified, but my opinion of this book changed since my initial reading after I read Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny – but more on that in another post.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect and, later, Minister of Armaments, wrote this book during his 20-year prison term following the Nuremburg trials. Speer’s reflections on his own absorption into the Nazi regime and the unfolding of the greatest war in history reveal the men who ruled Nazi Germany with general sincerity and enlightening insight. Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and even Eva Braun are each highlighted by Speer’s keen evaluations, and for the most part found wanting. Hitler himself emerges from Speer’s portrait as a man whose megalomania was always clear to anyone who cared to notice, but whose sheer charisma and force of will swept the German people inexorably into the inferno.

Speer takes much of the blame for Germany’s war effort and admits that he and his cohorts – even if personally ignorant of Hitler’s concentration camps – were nonetheless accomplices in crime. The book does demand some historical awareness on the reader’s part, as Speer focuses mainly on the rather closed-in, often literally subterranean world of the Nazi leadership, so that references to important military events often come with little or no elaboration (Speer apparently assumed his readers would already be well acquainted with the historical record, and this is required for a full appreciation of his text).

The book naturally begins with Speer’s upbringing and education in Manheim, though he spends little time here and, within the first 25 pages of the memoir, we read how Speer casually became a Nazi party member (as did his mother) and how he first began to interact with the Nazis. Here we have to be a little skeptical of his account of the story as he says quite emphatically that he did NOT join the party for through any political motivation – yet, in 1930 when he joined, the NSDAP did not have the extreme power it held a few years later (it seems rather unlikely that an architect who claimed to have little political motivation would go out of his way to join a self-described “worker’s” party).

Whatever his motivations were, Speer joined the Nazis and before long he went from being an officer in the National Socialist Motor Corps to taking on a few architectural projects for the party, including redoing Goebbels’ office and the decorations for Hindenburg’s 1934 funeral. By this time he was traveling with Hitler and realizing how captivated with architecture the Fuhrer was. His biggest achievement during these years was the building of the rally grounds at the zeppelin fields outside of Nuremburg. Hitler was extraordinarily pleased with Speer’s work and by this time he was within his inner circle and required to wear a party uniform in public.

It is around this time that he begins creating his expansive plans for “Germania”, Hitler’s megalomaniacal new capital for his thousand-year Third Reich. Naturally the plans never resulted in any buildings but this plan became Hitler’s hobby and made enforced Der Führer’s affinity for Speer. As peace became tenuous and war became inevitable Speer still holds on to the fact that he wasn’t aware of the big picture, yet within a few years he is named Minister of Armaments and certainly by this time he is aware. Eventually, realization comes, but often far later than it would have if they had not been totally embroiled already.