Before Hilde Schramm was nominated for the Moses Mendelssohn prize, few Germans even knew the prize existed. But suddenly, at the end of last year, the Jewish philosopher and his prize for "tolerance and reconciliation" were on everyone's lips. The German media were especially taken with the controversy over the prize ceremony, which was planned for one of Berlin's synagogues. When the identity of the winner was announced, the Jewish community refused point blank to host the ceremony in a synagogue. The community spokesman, Albert Meyer, stressed that Schramm was in no way an unworthy prizewinner - on the contrary.
Still, it was not possible. Not in a synagogue. To let the daughter of Albert Speer, one of Nazi Germany's best-known war criminals, into the most sacred of Jewish places: that would be going too far. Eventually the ceremony was held in a Christian church in Berlin.
"I fully respect their decision," says Schramm. "My presence in a synagogue could well have evoked strong feelings. One must remember that many individuals still live with horrible memories from the past. To some of them it can be very difficult even to think of my father," she says.
With a pot of tea and a few bowls of nuts and fruit, Schramm invites me to an evening snack in her home, a grand turn-of-the-century house in Berlin. She has lived here ever since she bought the place with two other families 40 years ago. The house is still shared, with joint kitchen and bathrooms. Her part of the house consists of three rooms. The walls in the study are covered in books, and sheets of paper, files and leaflets are scattered everywhere.
Ten years ago, Schramm inherited three paintings. It turned out her father had bought them for knockdown prices during the war. As Germany's munitions minister and Hitler's architect and closest collaborator, Albert Speer had easy access to impounded Jewish property. At first Schramm didn't want anything to do with the paintings, since they almost certainly once belonged to Jews who were forced to sell or give them away in order to survive.
But after consulting close friends, she decided to sell the paintings and use the money - almost £70,000 - to start up a new foundation, called Zurückgeben (meaning "giving back"). Since then she has been working hard with the foundation, whose purpose is to raise money to support Jewish women active in the arts or science.
The idea behind Zurückgeben is simple, Schramm explains. "It's about realising that the Holocaust casts its dark shadow over both time and generations, and all the way into the nuclear family of today's Germany."
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis gradually robbed the Jewish population of all their property. Each year, hundreds of thousands of tons of furniture and valuables from Jewish homes all over Europe was transported to Germany, to be sold at auction. In Germany alone, well over half a million Jews were pushed out of normal working life as "ordinary" Germans took over their jobs, shops and practices. The financial and social benefits provided by the ongoing genocide allowed the state-led atrocities to continue with minimal public outcry.
"That's why it is so important that Germans today raise questions about their own relatives and their belongings, and think about the origin of their houses, apartments, jobs, furniture, paintings and other stuff," says Schramm. "Where do all these things come from originally? Were they bought during the period 1933-1945? Well, in that case they are most likely governmental stolen goods.
"We who survived the war are not guilty. We did not inherit the guilt, but the consequences of the wrong-doing of the past. To that we have to try and act with responsibility, and one way to do that can be to try and give back in one way or another."
At the same time, guilt is a complicated concept. The line of argument about indirect profiting from the Holocaust inevitably raises the question: who has not profited? Can any Germans declare themselves entirely free of this original sin?
"Of course, I've thought a lot about these questions over the years. I've reached the conclusion that you can only be guilty of things you've done yourself, or not done, for that matter."
Schramm seldom does interviews, certainly not when the topic is her father and her childhood. Before the Holocaust Memorial day earlier this year, numerous journalists wanted to interview her. "I turned them all down. I am always happy to talk about my work with the fund and so on, but all journalists just want to talk about my father."
Schramm is well aware of the connection between her father and her work with Zurückgeben. The fact that Albert Speer's daughter is "giving back" to Nazi victims is a slant that not even the most conscientious reporter can ignore.
She also knows that the question of her own feelings of guilt is hard to bypass. "If anyone said that I do what I do to make up for the past and to process my own feelings of guilt, then I would strongly disagree. At the same time, there's probably some sort of force or will to make up, deep down inside me. But this I don't know, and I haven't been in psychoanalysis to find out."
On a conscious level, however, she refuses to feel guilt for what her father did during the Nazi period. "You know, I was only a child! How could I feel guilty for what he did or who he was at that time?"
When the war ended in May 1945, Schramm was nine years old. Little more than a year later, on October 1 1946, her father began serving 20 years' imprisonment in Spandau.
"Very early on in my life, I realised that in order to survive I had to allow myself to say: in that respect I'm not guilty. Since then I think I've managed to separate myself from all the things my father did. That was something that I really, really had to do."
It's difficult to say exactly when she came to this understanding. Perhaps it was in May 1953, when, just 17 years old, she wrote to her father in Spandau, asking him to explain some key issues that he had avoided talking about for so long: How could it happen? How could intellectual and culturally refined persons such as himself continue to be part of a system that was so evil?
Hilde was the second oldest of Albert and Margret Speer's six children. The family often stayed in Obersalzberg, where Hitler and other prominent Nazi officials, such as Bormann and Goering, had their country cottages.
Schramm seldom saw her father during this time. He was kept very busy as minister in Hitler's inner circle of power. But after the war, after the trials at Nuremberg and her father's imprisonment, the teenage Hilde started to write regularly to him in his cell. The correspondence continued during the whole of Speer's 20 years in prison. It was through the letters that Schramm really got to know her father.
Schramm has saved some 400 of the letters. The letter she wrote when she was 17, in which she asks about his guilt, is written in a polite and slightly precocious tone. Still, reading between the lines, there is no question that the letter is really a teenage daughter asking her father for help - help in understanding the horror, and perhaps in trying to marry this understanding with her love for him.
His reply is a long, somewhat jumbled and evasive answer. But at the end appear some of Albert Speer's most specific words ever on this subject: "And just to calm you: of the dreadful things, I knew nothing."
Since then this phrase has been frequently quoted, by the journalist Gitta Sereny among others. In her renowned biography, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, she describes her friend Schramm as "maybe the most moral person I have ever met".
The book also shows a photograph from 1943, of Hitler's birthday at Berghof in Berchtesgaden. The führer stands surrounded by the children of his co-workers. By his side, holding his left hand, stands a radiantly happy Hilde - seven years old, dressed in a white skirt and with flowers in her hair.
Sereny claims that Schramm lives in a sort of denial, which makes it difficult for her to address that particular part of her childhood. It seems a reasonable analysis at first. But having met her, that seems unfair. One simply can't ask a person to answer for or even remember details and feelings from 60 years ago. The fact that Schramm is unwilling to speak about her childhood in public is perhaps not an act of suppression, but rather a way of moving forward and getting on with her life.
"I'm tired of always being linked with my father and the past. But I'm also stuck in a dilemma. The more I appear in newspapers and TV, the more attention is given to Zurückgeben and the other work I do. At the same time, the fact that my father was who he was can send the wrong signal to some people, and make them think, 'With such a father, it's good that she does this work, she should do it,' while they themselves get an excuse to avoid thinking of their own part in history and the Nazi past.
"For me all this is a constant and difficult balancing act. The past 10 years' work with Zurückgeben has been about getting people to dig into their past and delve into their own hearts." Schramm finished digging into her own past many years ago, she says. "Instead of using guilt, there is a better word to describe my feelings, and that word is shame. I feel ashamed of what happened in the past, and of course I feel ashamed that it happened so close to me, in my own family. For that I still feel shame."
Her reluctance to talk about her childhood should not be mistaken for a fear of publicity; on the contrary. In the 1980s she entered politics as the leader of the Green party in Berlin, and later as vice-president of the Berlin city council. "I actually enjoy media attention. In that respect I'm no different from any other politician," she says, laughing.
"But unfortunately I'm forced to live with the fact that only a small part of my life gets the most attention; the part that has to do with my father. The rest takes a back seat. So I still feel a strong need to create my own biography."