Gitta Sereny and the truth about evil

The death of the author and journalist Gitta Sereny earlier this month drew some strangely critical notices. One piece even tried to blame her for a current cultural tendency to claim people are not responsible for their own actions. Though this was a dissenting view, there was a more general seam of criticism which ran through many obituaries. The claim was, essentially, that Sereny grew too uncomfortably close to her subjects and even ended up on occasions sympathising with them or excusing them.

It is probably on the basis of her biography of Albert Speer that most of the criticism has come. It is true that Sereny got close to Speer and liked him. It is also true that some revelations that have come out since her book was published in 1995 (and doubtless more still to come) suggest more complicity and guilt on Speer’s part than either he acknowledged or Sereny knew. But the resulting book remains a masterpiece, and even Speer’s caginess on certain subjects is more revealing in Sereny’s work than in others.

The second critical item on the charge-sheet was that Sereny paid money to the murderer Mary Bell for her cooperation on the book Cries Unheard: the story of Mary Bell (1998). That book, her second book on Bell, still rankles with many people. I suppose the rights and wrongs can never be settled. On the one hand, by paying for her co-operation, Sereny could be said to have helped Bell (by then an adult who had served her time in prison) profit from her crime. But against this can be put not only the minimal likelihood of anybody taking from this an idea that Bell’s path was one to follow, but the not inconsiderable fact that the result is one of the most penetrating books ever written on a criminal.