Four Austrian documentary filmmakers, while researching a project, found 105 year-old Brunhilde Pomsel living in an old people's home in Munich and decided they had to commit her memories to film. It is lucky they did as Pomsel died the following year. Their film A GERMAN LIFE, was well-received and Pomsel's memories have now been dramatized by Christopher Hampton and is now playing a sold out run at The Bridge Theatre. His play, a 100 minute monologue without interval, marks Maggie Smith's return to the London stage after 12 years under Jonathan Kent's direction; three theatrical greats combine to deliver an unforgettable experience.
Although the moral quagmire that ordinary Germans who lived under Hitler's Nazi regime had to face in later years has been explored in documentaries and books, it is a situation that never fails to intrigue us today - the implicit question asked by those in the spotlight, "What would you have done in our place?" hangs unanswered, and in a world where right-wing parties across the world are gaining power, it's a question that might be asked again.
Brunhilde sits alone at her table, and as her small flat darkens around her while night falls, she recalls her life in the first half of the 20th Century, all the time explaining that her memory is not what it was. Her earliest memories are of the lead-up to World War 1 and her authoritarian father's absence, his infrequent return visits usually resulting in another baby brother. After the war her father curtailed her education, not wanting to pay out for it, but thanks to her mother she learnt typing and shorthand so was able to get a job - again, against Father's wishes.
She remembers how much she loved her secretarial work: her first job with a Jewish fashion merchandiser ended when her father demanded she ask for more money, but she was soon employed again, working two jobs as at night she took dictation from a WWI pilot writing his memoirs. It was through him that she managed to secure work at the main Broadcasting Centre when he was offered a contract, he was soon dumped but Brunhilde thrived there, she happily remembers how exciting 1920s Berlin was, so many things to do and see although most of it was only really affordable to "rich Jews".
It is in those throwaway statements when Brunhilde refers, with emphasis, to Jews that her frequent disclaimers of knowing nothing really about what was going on around her politically hit you as disingenuous. Her work at Broadcasting House led to a new job offer in 1942: working at the Propaganda department under the Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels. Her experience in preparing scripts for radio was a natural fit for rewriting the news for the Propaganda department such as altering the numbers of fatalities, downplaying the Allied forces advances, etc.
There was one condition of her job: she had to be a member of the Nazi party. Showing a blindness to the situation, she went to register accompanied by her best friend, a Jewish musician called Eva whose life was becoming more prescribed which Brunhilde blithely ignored until it was too late and a weakening Eva was reduced to living in a single room with her family. By then, Brunhilde had become friendly with Magda Goebbels who gave her one of her own tailored outfits when Brunhilde's only smart clothes were ruined, and she remembers with joy when the Goebbels children would visit the office and she let them play on her typewriter.
Despite all of this, she was also expected to 'freshen up' Goebbels' penthouse apartment after yet another visit from one of his many actress mistresses. By then Brunhilde had attended the mass rally at Berlin's Sportpalast in 1943 to see her boss declare Total War on the Reich's enemies: his cry for every German to fight the enemy was seen as a warning that the war was being lost; but Brunhilde was so bored by it all, it was only after an officer warned her that she started to clap.
And so it continued until the end; any relief over Hitler and Goebbels' suicides quickly replaced by shock on hearing that Magda had killed herself after participating in the poisoning of their six children. Brunhilde was interviewed by the Red Army after the German surrender and told them everything she knew, expecting to be treated as a 'friendly witness'; she was jailed for five years, ironically in several of the concentration camps that were still standing, including Buchenwald. After her release, she returned to West Germany and anonymity, working again as a secretary for broadcasting companies - well, she had all that experience.
Not having seen the documentary it is hard to know where her actual words stop and Hampton's input begins but his play made for a riveting evening, aided by Kent's masterly direction, Anna Fleischle's utilitarian set and Jon Clark's slowly dying light.
But we were not there for Hampton's new play, Kent's new production, or Fleischle's set design; it was to see Maggie Smith, back where she shines best, on a stage with a live audience to hypnotize and delight. Solitary, testy, guarded, Maggie's Brunhilde constantly has you guessing; every pause, every backtracked comment, every evasive 'um...' could suggest either self-preservation or the weary toll of assumed guilt loaded on her by those who were not there.
Humorous, rueful, only occasionally emotional, it was Brunhilde Pomsel filtered through Maggie Smith - her trademark expressive hands and arms conducting our attention and always that voice... cracked but swooping still, she gave us a woman who asked for no sympathy but found it with her subdued response when, years after the event, she asks at the Holocaust education centre what happened to her best friend and learns she perished in Auschwitz. The play ends with her reminiscence of having an abortion by a Jewish lover who had escaped to Amsterdam as it would have physically endangered her life - one suspects that Brunhilde's life under the Nazis would have been endangered had she had it.
Maggie was quoted once as saying "I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost – it’s there and then it’s gone". She will be haunting me with her performance in A GERMAN LIFE.
