Brunhilde Pomsel: confessions of a Nazi insider
Brunhilde Pomsel worked for Hitler’s infamous propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. The guilt and culpability of the former Third Reich stenographer is being brought back to light.
Robyn Nevin has portrayed some of theatre’s most ferocious women, from Lady Macbeth to an abusive, pill-popping matriarch in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County. Yet there is a line uttered by her latest stage incarnation — real-life character Brunhilde Pomsel, who worked for Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels — that the veteran actress instinctively shies away from.
“It’s the most difficult line in the play for me to do when she says, ‘Buchenwald wasn’t so bad,’ ” Nevin says of the role she is performing in the one-woman play, A German Life.
Buchenwald was a notorious concentration camp in Weimar, Germany, where at least 56,000 Jews, political prisoners, gypsies and forced labourers were murdered by the SS. When it liberated the camp in 1945, the US Army filmed its naked, emaciated inmates, many of whom needed help to walk, as irrefutable documentary evidence of Nazi atrocities.
Pomsel, who was Goebbels’s secretary at the Ministry of Propaganda from 1942 until 1945, was imprisoned at this and other camps for five years after Germany’s defeat. “She was taken prisoner by the Russians but she (maintains she) didn’t suffer there,” says Nevin. “I think it would have been very, very difficult being imprisoned, but she says Buchenwald wasn’t so bad.” The theatre legend, who is 78, reveals that “every time” she encounters that line, “I sort of shrink away from it”.
In a half-murmured aside, she adds: “That’s Robyn, I’ll get rid of Robyn”, suggesting she needs to create a membrane between her ethics and the deeply ambiguous morality of her stage alter ego. How did the former secretary and stenographer, who witnessed Goebbels’s infamous 1943 speech attacking Jews and calling for Germany to engage in “total war”, and who was in a neighbouring Nazi bunker when her boss committed suicide, end up at the centre of a contemporary play?
Pomsel lived to be a centenarian, dying in Bavaria in 2017 at the grand age of 106. Four years earlier she had broken her long silence and given 30 hours of interviews to a team of Austrian filmmakers about her life and working in the Nazis’ inner sanctum. She was one of the last surviving witnesses to the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and her testimony formed the basis of the widely admired documentary A German Life.
Soon after, Oscar-winning British screenwriter and playwright Christopher Hampton (Atonement; Les Liaisons Dangereuses) turned the Pomsel transcripts into a carefully calibrated 90-minute play of the same name. Hampton’s play opens at the Adelaide Festival on February 19. Nevin — who is making her first stage appearance at the festival in four decades — is taking on the daunting task of bringing to life the memories of a woman who took dictation and typed documents and letters for the rabidly anti-Semitic propaganda chief, yet insisted she remained “a figure on the margins”.
In the documentary, Pomsel said defiantly: “I wouldn’t see myself as being guilty.” In other scenes, she castigated herself as “one of the cowards” and for being too “dumb”, “superficial” and naive to realise that some of history’s worst crimes against humanity were unfolding around her.
Nevin says that even after eight months of studying and memorising Pomsel’s words, “I still don’t fully understand” her motives in telling her story. “How can you?” she asks. “Because people are as evasive or as open as they feel they need to be on a particular day … All I know is that it’s a very, very troubling story that she tells and it’s a very human story. It’s complicated and that’s what makes it fascinating for an audience and for me … It’s my job to say the words and make sense of them; I don’t know whether they’re true or not.”
Nevin has run two flagship state theatre companies (the Queensland and Sydney theatre companies), and her stellar six-decade career as an actress and director has encompassed plays, feature films, television dramas and sitcoms. She agrees she cannot afford to write off Pomsel as a one-dimensional villain. “I’ve always believed very strongly in the need to be in service to the author, to the playwright, and it’s a harder-edged responsibility (with this play) because it’s a responsibility to speak the actual words of the actual woman who lived the actual life. It’s very important not to judge. There’ll be pain in there for a lot of people; I completely understand that, and that’s somewhat of a burden to carry.”
In an author’s note, Hampton admits he was “more or less at a loss as to how to proceed” with the play until the documentary-makers behind A German Life (Christian Krones, Florian Weigensamer, Roland Schrotthofer and Olaf Muller) handed him 235 pages of interview transcripts they had recorded with the 102-year-old Pomsel. “Suddenly,” he writes, “she came vividly to life: her liveliness, her humour, her descriptive powers and her evasiveness, often signalled by a fracturing of her normal easy fluency.”
Like Nevin, Hampton had “no idea to what extent she is telling the truth; and it was this central ambiguity that finally most attracted me to the subject”. The internationally celebrated screenwriter is adapting his play into a film that will star Maggie Smith, who starred in his play’s London outing.
Nevin agrees Pomsel is “quite a character. She’s forceful and she’s funny and she’s articulate and she’s got marvellous recall.” Echoing Hampton, she says that tellingly, “when she gets to the difficult things, then her language is fractured”.
Pomsel described herself as apolitical, but, while working in Goebbels’s office, she aided and abetted the Nazi war effort by writing reports understating the number of German soldiers dying in battle and exaggerating the number of German women raped by the Red Army.
She talks about attending Goebbels’s total war speech, but was not impressed. Says Nevin: “She found it extraordinary to see the transformation from the man she knew in the office to, as she describes him, the demented midget, giving this speech.” She also mentions Goebbels’s perfectly manicured hands. “She thought he was handsome; very good looking. I don’t share that view but then each to his own,” the actress quips.
Hampton’s play implicitly asks audience members: What would you have done, had you lived under the Nazis? Resisted them and risked your life, quietly conformed, or sought self-advancement and a well-paid job by signing up to their repugnant ideology?
Pomsel said she joined the Nazi Party to secure her job with Goebbels, yet the degree of her culpability remains elusive. Before she worked for the Nazis, she was employed by a Jewish insurance broker. She said that while working for Goebbels she had no knowledge of the Final Solution. And while she saw Jews being deported from Berlin, she claimed she didn’t know about the Holocaust until after the war ended.
The former secretary was “dumbstruck” when she learned that on the eve of Germany’s defeat, Goebbels and his wife, Magda, committed suicide and conspired to have their six children murdered. Explains Nevin: “She (Pomsel) was in an adjoining bunker, she was just across the courtyard in the Ministry of Propaganda’s bunker. Goebbels’s adjutant came across and broke the news. All of that’s in there (the play) and it’s very vivid and very powerful. Very moving actually. She had a relationship with Goebbels’s children and she didn’t have children of her own. A great sadness of her life” was that she never married or had children and had lost “the great love of her life”.
These events, says Nevin, “complicate the play for the audience, because you’ve seen her then as a whole person, not just as somebody who was an instrument for the Nazi administration”.
Nevin, who projects a no-nonsense, regal air on and off stage, is adamant she will not be impersonating the German centenarian. Such an approach would be “just silly. I don’t look 100. I look as old as I am. I am not taking it that far, but I will make some concessions to age … I will make some sort of effort to show age that is greater than my own, but not a lot.” As for wigs or “ageing” makeup, “that would be a travesty; bad decision. It’ll be pretty simple.”
This is not the first time Nevin, winner of a host of Logies and Helpmann, Green Room and Sydney Theatre awards, has starred in a one-woman play. In 2011 and 2014, she played a flinty Hungarian-Australian retiree in Lally Katz’s comedy Neighbourhood Watch for Belvoir Street and the Melbourne Theatre companies. She conveyed Joan Didion’s paralysing grief — the US writer’s husband and only child died within 18 months of each other — in The Year of Magical Thinking, in a 2008 STC production directed by Cate Blanchett. “That play was about acute grief and I know that was both painful and helpful to certain audience members who knew that grief personally,” Nevin recalls.
She says candidly that solo shows are “much more difficult than being part of a team, an ensemble, which is part of my preferred place in the theatre, and it’s lonely. You never get a breather. It’s just a constant focus on you and you’re constantly talking and emoting. It’s very challenging, but the rewards are great too.” She adds that “it’s great” working with director and Adelaide Festival co-artistic director Neil Armfield — the duo are long-time collaborators and previously have worked together on productions including King Lear and A Cheery Soul.
With screen credits that range from the Matrix films to the ABC sitcom Upper Middle Bogan, Nevin was still a teenager when she made her Adelaide Festival debut in 1962 in a production of Saint Joan. When I conduct this phone interview, she is holed up in quarantine in the city of churches. She is up to day four and has 10 days to go. “I have no complaints,” she volunteers. “I’m very fortunate; I’m in a rented apartment with a fully landscaped outdoor area with an in-ground pool … Not a negative sound will pass my lips.”
Because of COVID-19 restrictions, Armfield conducted the first round of rehearsals for A German Life on the NSW central coast and at Nevin’s home in Sydney. “It was a very odd rehearsal structure,” she says. “We’ve been pretty much on our own but we’ve done it. It’s been good. I’ve enjoyed it very much because I haven’t worked in the theatre for a long time, and I found myself really ready to return.”
Her last stage role, as Henry Higgins’s mother, Mrs Higgins, was in a 2016-17 Opera Australia production of My Fair Lady. “I’ve done a lot of screen work in the interim and I’ve really enjoyed that,” she says. She gave a deeply affecting performance in last year’s Relic, an Australian haunted house feature that was also a reflection on Alzheimer’s disease, and she plays a significant role in The End, a new Foxtel dramedy about euthanasia.
Launched this week, The End also stars Harriet Walter and Frances O’Connor, and centres on a British woman (Walter) who attempts suicide and is forced into a Gold Coast retirement home. Nevin plays a character who is “one of the prime movers, shall we say, in that community”. She chuckles as she says this character “is one of the few women who has a husband, who she’s got on a very tight tether, because the sexual politics in the community is very interesting and women with husbands have a certain status. She’s a very dominant personality.”
In late 2018, Nevin testified in the high-stakes Geoffrey Rush defamation case on behalf of the Oscar and Emmy-award winning actor. Rush won a record $2.9m defamation payout after The Daily Telegraph reported defamatory allegations that a younger co-star, later revealed to be Eryn Jean Norvill, had made a complaint of inappropriate behaviour against him.
Federal Court judge Michael Wigney found the allegations, which centred on a 2015-16 King Lear production also starring Nevin and directed by Armfield, to be defamatory and untrue. The Telegraph appealed, but a full bench of the Federal Court upheld the Wigney verdict.
Justice Wigney had excluded proposed testimony by Orange is the New Black star Yael Stone. Later, Stone accused Rush of behaving inappropriately towards her during a 2010 theatre production of Diary of a Madman, also directed by Armfield. Rush has said those allegations, reported by The New York Times and 7.30 Report, were “incorrect” or “taken completely out of context”.
When asked about testifying during the widely watched defamation case, Nevin responds firmly: “No, no, we’re not here to talk about that.” What about the #MeToo movement; how has it changed the theatre industry? “It changed everything,” she replies, adding pointedly: “I haven’t worked in the theatre since the new conditions have been established, so I can’t comment on what it’s like. I just don’t know. But yes, it’s had a widespread effect, of course, and I’m sure that will have some positive outcomes.”
She hints that A German Life may tour beyond the Adelaide Festival and argues the play is highly relevant to contemporary audiences, given its parallels with Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen US election and the resulting fallout. When she and the production team “were first speaking about this piece” — months before Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington — “it was like a warning, it was like a bullhorn. It was about the power of propaganda, and the propaganda being put out to the American public at that time was clearly leading to somewhere devastating.”
Energised by this theme, Nevin continues: “Look at America at the moment. It’s the power of propaganda that is the great evil. It’s the fake news and the alternative facts. That’s why this piece is so powerful and potent, because it’s speaking of today and because we know that history repeats itself and human beings don’t learn the lessons of the past, or their own history. We continue to make the same grave errors.”
A German Life is on at the Adelaide Festival from February 19 until March 14.
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