A German Life | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

Australia’s Robyn Nevin delivers a defining moment in her acting career as Nazi Party propaganda secretary Brunhilde Pomsel.

Adelaide Festival 2021. Robyn Nevin in A German Life. Picture: Andrew Beveridge

A German Life

Theatre / AUS

FESTIVAL

Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre

Until March 14

Was it just last month that former President Trump brooded about the 2020 US election while his supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington DC?

World-shaking events such as these spring out of seemingly innocuous circumstances.

It was such for Brunhilde Pomsel, who worked alongside leaders of wartime Nazi Germany.

She was an unknowing cog in a mighty machine, a shorthand specialist in the propaganda division of the Nazi Party, a secretary to the “nice” (quote unquote) Joseph Goebbels.

Her memories, recorded when she was 103 in 2014 have been adapted by British playwright Christopher Hampton and turned into a bravura performance by Australia’s Robyn Nevin.

It is directed by Neil Armfield, with a retirement home setting that serves as a screen for scraps of documentary film of the era. A cellist, Catherine Finnis, is on stage making a contemplative dialogue.

These are mostly prosaic memories by a woman caught up in forces seemingly beyond her comprehension and it is for Nevin to give us a finely understated appreciation of such a life.

How much was Pomsel compromised or culpable? She did believe her own fake news. She thought Germany would win the war, right up to her final days stranded in a bunker as the Russians arrived in Berlin. Hitler and Goebbels were ending their lives in a similar bunker just across the courtyard.

The Russians imprisoned her in former Jewish death camps such as Buchenwald, but only after she emerged in 1950 did she hear of the Jewish Holocaust. Only in 2005 would she learn the fate of her Jewish friend, Eva Lowenthal, who had disappeared in 1943.

That is the crux of this monologue, and a superb, defining moment in Robyn Nevin’s acting career. For an ordinary woman looking back on her 100 years, it is the summary of a life.