A German Life Read online

  CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON

  A German Life

  drawn from interviews with

  BRUNHILDE POMSEL

  (1911–2017)

  Christopher Hampton’s play is drawn from the testimony Pomsel gave when she finally broke her silence in the documentary film A German Life to filmmakers Christian Krönes, Olaf Müller, Roland Schrotthofer and Florian Weigensamer, produced by Blackbox Film

  Contents

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Premiere Production

  Characters

  A German Life

  The Play

  About the Author

  Also by the author from Faber

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  I first became aware of Brunhilde Pomsel when Jonathan Kent introduced me to the documentary film Ein Deustsches Leben, directed by the Viennese collective, Christian Krönes, Florian Weigensamer, Roland Schrotthofer and Olaf S. Müller. Presented in an aesthetically beautiful black-and-white format, shot to highlight a 102-year-old face craggier than W. H. Auden’s, interspersed with clips from contemporary films and images from the death-camps, it leaves an impressively sombre aftertaste, but not necessarily an easy route for a dramatist to follow. Nor was the book based on the film (called in English The Work I Did) very suggestive in this respect. So, fascinated as I was by Ms Pomsel, I was more or less at a loss as to how to proceed, when Christian Krönes gave me the 235-page transcript of the conversations he and his team had held with her in 2013.

  Suddenly 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. Whereas, after watching the film, it’s scarcely possible to believe her claims that she knew nothing of the Final Solution, even though she was working in Goebbels’s office, I found myself half-convinced by the transcript, particularly her majestic indifference to what might be happening in the outside world. Anxious to think well of everyone – anyone not described as sehr nett (very nice) is clearly a complete bastard – proud of how pflichtbewusst (conscientious) she was in her work and properly sceptical of the bizarre and irrational imperatives of politics and men (which she regards as synonymous), she belongs to that constituency so familiar to us today: the person who thinks well of the authorities. The irony is that it was precisely the office in which she found herself working – Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry– that invented and perfected the techniques, so cynically used by today’s politicians to mislead, exploit and blatantly lie to people very like herself.

  To put it simply, I have no idea to what extent she is telling the truth; and it was this central ambiguity that finally most attracted me to the subject. In general, I’ve always preferred to leave judgements and conclusions to the audience: the case of Brunhilde Pomsel seems to me particularly finely poised.

  *

  This is the first time I’ve written a one-person show. Writing for actors, which is how I usually describe my profession, is an essentially collaborative process, and writing for one actor all the more so. Those of you who have watched the play would not have to be especially eagle-eyed to notice a good many differences between text and performance. In particular, the text is around twenty per cent longer than the performance script. If you’re lucky enough to be working with the incomparable Maggie Smith, you’re well-advised to pay close attention to her suggestions and instincts and to do everything you can to play to her many strengths. I think of this piece therefore as raw material, through which any future performer can carve their own passage.

  At the Royal Court Theatre, where I began my career, the text was held to be sacred, fierce battles were fought over commas, and any thought of asking a writer to ‘develop’ his or her script would have been regarded as a heresy and contemptuously dismissed. I’m still marked by that training; I prefer, on the whole, for my plays to be performed as written – but I must admit that the process of deconstruction, analysis and distillation undertaken with Maggie Smith and Jonathan Kent has been immensely enjoyable; and I’m extremely grateful to them.

  Christopher Hampton

  March 2019

  A German Life was first presented at the Bridge Theatre, London, on 6 April 2019. The cast was as follows:

  Brunhilde Pomsel Maggie Smith

  Director Jonathan Kent

  Designer Anna Fleischle

  Lighting Jon Clark

  Sound Paul Groothuis

  Design Associate Liam Bunster

  Props Supervisors Marcus Hall Props

  Costume Supervisor Eleanor Dolan

  Character

  Brunhilde Pomsel

  A GERMAN LIFE

  A suggestion of a quite small domestic kitchen in Munich. A plain table covered with a gingham cloth and a simple wooden chair on which, nursing a bowl of coffee, sits Brunhilde Pomsel, a compact woman with heavy black-rimmed glasses, a lined, craggy face and a confident air. She’s 102, although there’s nothing in her lively demeanour or obviously sharp intelligence to betray this fact.

  As the lights come up, she acknowledges the audience, takes a sip of coffee and reflects for a moment.

  Brunhilde Pomsel I’ve forgotten such a lot. Most of it, really. Certain things stick of course, although I’ve no idea why. I don’t understand how it works. I read something and then I go across the room to check what’s for dinner and completely forget what I’ve just read. I think, wait a minute, I’ve only just read that: I read it with my eyes wide open, I digested it – and now it’s gone. And then, all of a sudden, things from long, long ago surge up into my mind. Things I can remember in the minutest detail.

  She looks up at the audience.

  So you’ll have to … Anyway, let’s see how we go.

  Pause.

  I can remember the outbreak of the First World War, that’s probably as good a place to start as any. I was three, we were staying with my grandmother in the country and my father sent a telegram to say he’d been called up, one of the very first batch. So we travelled back to Berlin and took a hansom cab, which was an unheard-of luxury, my mother, my baby brother and me, to the Potsdam station, to see him off. And I remember she bought pears, a bag of pears.

  After that we didn’t see much of my father, he was in Russia all through the war, although he must have come home on leave a few times, because by the end of the war there were five of us, I had four little brothers. When he came back we kept saying to each other who’s this strange man in the flat? The first thing he did was he abolished the use of chamber-pots, so that if we had to get up in the middle of the night, we had to creep through the building in the dark, past all the witches and the evil spirits.

  I suppose it was a happy childhood, whatever that means, God knows. They were always complaining about having no money, but we paid the rent and we never went hungry. My dad was a painter and decorator, so he was always in work, even during the inflation. He was very quiet, he never talked about his childhood, or the war, or anything very much. All the same, our whole world revolved around him. We were brought up very strictly, a clip round the ear or a thrashing with the carpet beater if you did anything wrong. And being the eldest and the only girl, everything was always my fault: you were there, why didn’t you stop it happening? But all the same, it was fine, we were a normal German family. If you’re crowded together in a small flat, love doesn’t necessarily conquer all: no, the main thing is obedience – plus a few fibs and a bit of shifting the blame on to other people.

  I was good at primary school and the teacher said to my mother: she’s bright, she needs to stay in school. My mother started trying to squeeze the money out of my dad, but then the teacher got the secondary school to give me a free place for a year and
I moved up – but then I wasn’t quite so good any more, geography, maths, chemistry, I couldn’t do any of those; and my reports started saying ‘Brunhilde’s disruptive’, ‘Brunhilde never stops chattering in class’ and so on. And I was hopeless at games, I was a clumsy little thing, I’d been wearing glasses since I was nine, I was terrified of ball-games and in the gym I’d get stuck on the horizontal bar and they’d have to help me down. What I wanted was to be an opera singer, like my friend Ilse’s mother. I used to go round to help Ilse with her homework – her parents were very rich, there was always coffee and cake and her mother was Italian, they had a beautiful piano and she used to sing arias for us, Carmen, all sorts. But that was obviously out of the question. Or a hairdresser, I wouldn’t have minded being a hairdresser, they get trips to Paris, any number of perks. But my father said: that’s enough, I’ve paid out enough, out you come. So I left school when I was fifteen.

  At first I was supposed to stay at home and help my mother with the housework, that was never going to go well. (She laughs.) It was a catastrophe. Especially in the kitchen, where I got everything wrong. So I looked in the paper and found this job they were advertising, secretary in a fashion house, Gläsinger and Co., in a very chic part of town, and I saw they were interviewing for it that very day. I jumped on the S-Bahn and just got there in time, a beautiful place, red carpet all the way up the stairs, I thought they’d throw me out right away. But no, I was interviewed by this severe-looking man with a white goatee, Herr Bernblum, yes, a Jew, pretty impenetrable, but he turned out to have quite a personality. And he said he’d take me on as a sort of trainee for the princely sum of 25 Marks a month, and I’d have to get my parents’ permission as I was only sixteen. There was hell to pay when I got home – outrageous, where did I get the train fare, et cetera and so on: but finally Mother came in with me and we signed a two-year contract. I’d always wanted to work in an office. It was bliss.

  The employees had to use the back entrance, which meant you had to come upstairs through Dispatch, the Sewing-room and the Pressing-room – and a wonderful room, always kept very warm, with thick carpets and gauzy curtains and the mannequins, or models I suppose you’d call them, running around in their smalls. Made coming to work a real experience. And I got all this training in the evenings: typing, basic book-keeping and shorthand, where I really hit the bullseye. I was determined to shine at that, because I was desperately in love with the instructor. Unrequited, needless to say, although he was very complimentary about the shorthand. I was great at it. Trust me to be best at something no one needs any more. I loved it there. I mean, sometimes Herr Bernblum would ask me to make tea for him, which I found a bit … you know, I wasn’t the tea-lady, but otherwise I felt really at home there.

  When the two years were up, they offered me a permanent position at 90 Marks a month. I had to get my parents’ agreement as I was still under twenty-one – and my father said no, not enough, you have to demand 100. I said, but … and he said not a penny less than 100! So I told Herr Bernblum and he said, I’m sorry, in that case we’re going to have to let you go. And they did. So I had to go to the labour exchange. It was 1929, the year of mass unemployment; and the jobs I was sent for were just the dregs. For example, there was a margarine factory up in the most sinister part of North Berlin, you could smell it three streets away. I just made an excuse, told them I had some sort of wasting disease. Finally, they sent me to a bookshop and I was offered a job right away at 100 a month. It was rather a … it was a Jewish business.

  Very nice man, but he was hardly ever there. Otherwise there was an elderly clerk, an accounts lady who only ever ate bread and dripping and a repulsive youth who fortunately always arrived late. All I had to do was handle subscriptions, fill out forms and do bank transfers.

  The winter of ’29 was bitter, absolutely bitter, we weren’t allowed to wear trousers or boots, tights hadn’t been invented and the youth kept letting the stove go out. I kept thinking this isn’t what I trained for, it was all so stupid and ugly.

  Luckily, my father ran into a neighbour and ex-customer in the street, an insurance broker, Herr Dr Hugo Goldberg, my dad always had a few Jewish customers, he liked them, they always paid best. They chatted and he said, what’s your Hilde up to? And my father said, you know, this and that. And Herr Goldberg said, you know what, one of my secretaries is getting married, why don’t you send your daughter along, she always seemed like a smart girl, and maybe, maybe … So I went round the next day, said hello and curtsied; and he said you’re very young, but why don’t we give it a whirl? So he gave me a four-week trial. Complicated, the insurance business, but I fitted in, I did quite well. Dr Goldberg was up to all sorts of rackets, they did a lot of business with oil tankers from Constin … Constan … You know, Istanbul, and they had a system for fiddling the dates and they’d make a packet, you know how it works … (She rubs thumb and forefingers together.) Not that any of it came my way, no, I was back down to 90 a month.

  Around that time, I met my first boyfriend, Heinz, at a tea-dance. His father owned a factory in Königsberg, a porcelain factory, lavatories, bidets, that sort of thing. Heinz had a bust-up with him, because he didn’t want to take over the factory, he wanted to be a journalist. And his father said: all right, go, see how you get on in Berlin!

  Pause. Her expression softens.

  Berlin. At that time, it was such a marvellous city.

  Light change. Projections: a panorama of Berlin in the early thirties, in stills and film.

  It had everything you can think of on offer, everything that could possibly be important to people: theatres, concerts, huge, beautiful cinemas, cabarets, a wonderful zoo and ultra-fashionable restaurants, obviously too expensive for mere mortals. A lot of it was for people with money, rich Jews, there were plenty of them in Berlin. My parents couldn’t afford to go to the theatre: but there were choirs, dance festivals, my dad’s bowling club … and we lived in a very quiet part of town. There were hardly any cars on the streets, there were markets where the food was fresher and cheaper – and there was peace and harmony. I never saw a single demonstration, all that sort of thing happened in other parts of the city. And when my brothers put on their brown shirts, they’d travel out of the area.

  As the projections end, Brunhilde is on her feet. When the lights go up, there’s a secretarial desk with a typewriter, behind which she eventually sits.

  But I was telling you about Heinz. He was very poor. He wrote articles for a magazine called Motoring and Sport. I used to type them for him and improve them quite a bit as well, if the truth be told. He wrote incomprehensible pieces for something called, what was it, the League, the ‘Militant League for German Culture’, a Nazi publication, as it turned out, although I had no idea of that at the time. One day he dragged me along to that huge stadium, the Sports Hall … no, the Sports Palace. Turned out to be a crowd of men with BO, a lot of hanging about, some terrible loud music and then this fat man in uniform arrived: Goering. I’d never heard of him and I must say he gave a completely uninteresting speech. I said to Heinz: don’t you ever take me to anything like this again! And he didn’t. Yes, he was a Nazi, finished up in the SS. But he never tried to talk politics to me, never said there’s this new party which is going to free Germany from the Jews, nothing like that. I was a girl, you see, he thought I was far too stupid and immature, it never crossed his mind a woman could understand these things. God, nowadays, when I see some schoolgirl giving her opinions on TV, I think, what an unbelievable difference, makes me feel three times as old as I am.

  Heinz had a friend, a flight lieutenant from the First World War who wanted to write his memoirs, but he was having trouble with his typewriter, he wasn’t what you’d call a very bright spark. His name was Wulf Bley, and he was a really nice man with a terribly nice wife and little boy. Heinz suggested I could help him and he hired me to take dictation at a Mark an hour. He’d had a good war, he wore some kind of gold badge, didn’t mean anything to me – and h
e’d joined the Nazi Party very early on, they liked him. It was a godsend, because after three very happy years with Herr Dr Goldberg, he’d called me in to say things weren’t going so well for him and he’d have to ask me to work mornings only, on half-pay. So from then on, I had two jobs: Jew in the morning, Nazi in the afternoon.

  Politics was never discussed at home. I mean, I don’t think my mother even knew which way Dad voted. Or vice versa. But in 1932, I turned twenty-one and I was very excited about finally being able to vote. I’ve no idea who I actually voted for; but it was a lovely day, a Sunday, and there were banners and music and posters all over Berlin, forget the politics, it was fantastic … Yes, I suppose I must have voted Nazi, like everyone else.

  I certainly didn’t vote for the Nazis when they won, in 1933. But who did I vote for? Can’t remember. I think I probably voted Nationalist, I liked the colours on their banners, black, white and red. On January 30th, when Hitler was made Chancellor or something, on that famous evening, Heinz dragged me on a pilgrimage to the Brandenburg Gate, where Hitler stood in the window with all those people cheering and yelling, it was like a football match, and they all felt really pleased with themselves, because they’d taken part in a historical event.

  Projection of 30 January 1933. Brunhilde raises her arm in the Nazi salute.

  I was cheering as well. I admit it. Of course, I wasn’t tactless enough to tell the poor Jews at the office that I’d been there. Not that I was taking any of it seriously. I couldn’t have been less interested. But I went along with Heinz because I was young and in love and that was what was important to me. And I also went with him that day in Potsdam when Hitler shook hands with old Hindenburg in front of the church.