Keeping it real | 25 April 2019

It starts at a secretarial college. The stage is occupied by a dignified elderly lady who recalls her pleasure at learning shorthand in the 1920s. She lived in Germany and she took a job at a firm headed by a man named Goldberg. He was Jewish. These unremarkable disclosures are spoken by Brunhilde Pomsel, a woman of high intellect and modest ambitions, who was born in 1911 and died two years ago, aged 106. Her life story was turned into a documentary film, which Christopher Hampton has adapted for the stage.

Pomsel’s words are spoken by Dame Maggie Smith. What makes her fascinating is that she worked for Josef Goebbels and spent the entire war in the propaganda ministry in Berlin. Her acceptance of Nazism is gradual and semi-conscious. Following Hitler’s ascent to power she noticed that the Jewish firm was running short of clients and she was asked to work part-time. Her mornings were free and she found a job taking dictation from a first world war pilot who admired Hitler and had joined the party. She describes her schedule as ‘a Nazi in the morning, a Jew in the afternoon’. That’s the nearest thing the show gets to a contrivance.

One of her friends urged her to join the crowds in Berlin that gathered to celebrate Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. She recalls that she ‘waved’ like everyone else. She means ‘saluted’, of course. Or does she? Her claims are elusive. The prison camps were common knowledge, she says, but she was ignorant of the extermination programme, which came as a shock to her after the war. Even though she worked for Hitler’s chief spin doctor, she declares that she had no more understanding of the Reich than ‘the greengrocer’.