A German Life

by Christopher Hampton

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 8 April 2019

Maggie Smith plays Brunhilde Pomsel in this dramatic monologue directed by Jonathan Kent and designed by Anna Fleischle. It is 'drawn from the life and testimony' of Brunhilde Pomsel and based on a film of the same name, constructed from 30 hours of interviews with her and released in 2016.

An elderly lady in a bland flat reminisces about her life - Pomsel had just turned 106 when she died in 2017. At first there are some ripples of knowing laughter in the audience, expecting perhaps another Maggie Smith performance of an eccentric woman with a wandering mind. But this is no elderly lady in a van causing havoc in the life of Alan Bennett. On the contrary, this is someone determined to remember what she can, and to speak frankly with courteous apologies when she gets sidetracked or absently loses her thread. Her story soon commands rapt attention, and the laughter when it comes is in response to barbed wit, or to uncomfortable observations which may sometimes be too near the bone.

Pomsel recalls a happy if strict childhood entirely typical of her time - she was three and a half when the first world war broke out, an occasion which she presents as her first clear memory. Later, in the 1920s, her father refused his permission for her to stay on at school despite her intelligence, but she did not happily fit the role of mother's help as the only girl and eldest child of the family, and she soon found employment and was trained in secretarial work. This eventually led to a job in the state broadcasting company, and to co-option to the Nazi propaganda department under Joseph Goebbels. At the end of the war she was imprisoned for five years by authorities in the Russian occupation zone, and on her release moved to West Germany, eventually to Munich.

A German life indeed, but one of extraordinary interest due to her closeness to the highest echelons of the Nazi government. But her point is that she had little interest in politics, and no awareness of the horrors being perpetrated by the regime. Jews, including neighbours, friends and employers, were vanishing, but their ultimate fate was concealed through ignorance and indifference. But Maggie Smith perfectly conveys the strange collision between the certainty of 'not knowing' in general terms, and the sudden realisation that the daily experience of disappearances can only in retrospect be seen as the first stage of a ghastly progression. Personal events are deeply troubling, but public policy is only vaguely apprehended.

For nearly two hours Maggie Smith adopts the easy conversational style of an elderly raconteur, self-deprecating about her political naivety, but firmly convinced that her generation of ordinary citizens (as opposed to party zealots) was not to blame for its tacit complicity, and certain that judgemental liberals of a later generation would, in the circumstances, have done no better. She does not feel guilty and refuses to have guilt thrust upon her. She is horrified to realise that the showers she and her fellow prisoners in the late 1940s so looked forward to took place in the same blocks where gas rather than water had poured from the nozzles a few years before; but equally her assertion that the murder of the six Goebbels children by their own parents was the worst crime in the war carries a profound moral outrage. 

All this is presented in a relaxed meandering delivery as if spilling unformulated from a mind full of memory and long decades of rumination, beguilingly sidetracked by new thoughts or occasionally disrupted by forgetfulness. It's a masterful achievement of impersonation, completely riveting as slowly this fascinating woman is projected forward on the thrust stage configured for this production in the versatile Bridge space. She never moves from her seat at a round dining table, but the whole floor gradually slides forward so that instead of being a solitary figure isolated in an old people's apartment, she is an everywoman chatting with us about the inescapability of evil and the absence of justice in the world.