It is an astonishing thing to see Maggie Smith hold an audience in the palm of her hand. Alone on stage for an hour and 45 minutes, never leaving her chair, speaking quietly and without any overly dramatic emphasis, she brings a woman and a world to life. You lean forward to hold the nuance and meaning of what she is saying. And what you hear is terrifying. The woman is Brunhilde Pomsel, who died in 2017 at the age of 106. Before her death, she recorded a filmed interview with Christian Krönes and Florian Weigensamer, shot in graphically simple black and white, in which she recalled growing up in Germany between the wars and how she came to work as a secretary for the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, from 1942 until his suicide in May 1945. Christopher Hampton has turned that testimony into a skilfully-shaped monologue, and Jonathan Kent has directed a production of absolute simplicity, dispensing with the documentary footage suggested in the text, and instead concentrating on Smith, talking confidentially to us, sometimes uncertain, sometimes funny – her first Nazi rally is "a crowd of men with BO" – sometimes regretful ("not that that excuses anything") but always persistently finding her way to her own truth. Returning to the stage after a 12-year absence at the age of 84, Smith barely moves, but Anna Fleischle's brown, dully-domesticated set slides slowly forwards and day turns to night as she reveals the ways in which an ordinary girl from an ordinary family can slowly become trammelled in the deepest reaches of evil, without ever realising where she is residing. Her precise, detailed memories have the advantage of being rooted in their time not in the easy comforts of hindsight. Looking back, she is clear in her condemnation of the Nazi regime. Searching for her Jewish friend, Eva Lowenthal, long after the war, she finds her name in the list of Holocaust deaths. The knowledge makes her pause. "I don't know whether God exists, probably not, but what certainly does exist is evil. And there's no justice." Yet she doesn't allow this emotion to colour her reminiscences. She is resolutely apolitical, she insists; at one point in the early 1930s, she worked for a Jewish businessman in the morning and a Nazi in the afternoon. But she both notices and doesn't notice things. Her conversation is peppered with little bombs of shock: her brothers wearing brown shirts, her delight in voting for the first time, and her memory that "like everyone" she voted for the National Socialists, the gradual disappearance of Jewish businesses from her daily life. She is clear sighted enough to liken a Hitler rally, at which she went to cheer, to a football match though "I wasn't tactless enough to tell the poor Jews at the office I had been there." She notes the contrast between the elegant Goebbels she knew, a man who had a manicure every day, and "the demented midget" who could rouse a crowd to a frenzy that she found frightening. But she is more excited by the amount of her wages and the kindness of Mrs Goebbels who lends her a fine wool suit, than she is ostensibly concerned by trying to help her Jewish friend when she is persecuted. Above all, she refuses to apologise for her actions, arguing that people like to think they would have done more for "the poor persecuted Jews…but they wouldn't have had." It's this that makes her such a telling witness to horror; in the very ordinariness of her descriptions where faking casualty figures in the battles on the Russian front carry the same weight as her memories of swimming a lot in the summer when the Third Reich came to power, she throws the question of moral responsibility back out into the ether. What would you do in her situation? How much would you remember you knew? How willing would you be to take a stand? Her words have a chilling power and an uncomfortable resonance for today. Yet this strength in the play is also its weakness. It is a monologue of detail, where great swirling events are less important than Pomsel's ability to mend a pair of laddered stockings. It is revelatory only in its ordinariness. But Smith holds us every step of the way, in her pauses, her little hesitations, and silences as much as in her speech. She has a way of rubbing her hands over her face that says as much as any words. The aching sadness she finds as she describes how conscientiousness held her in post and as she describes her own personal trauma is all the more remarkable because Smith doesn't seem to be acting, just speaking from the heart. Her greatness illuminates, even as the darkness closes around her.<doc-sep>How helpful are warnings from history? Two years ago, in February 2017, Amazon briefly sold out its entire stock of Hannah Arendt’s 500-page treatise, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In it, the German-born philosopher surveys the conditions that gave rise to Nazi rule, charting fascism’s incremental creep. Social shifts are slow, sometimes too slow to spot, let alone stop. Liberty gets lost, bit by bit, as if to longshore drift. To arm ourselves against any repetition, we must remain alert to the telltale signs. Art can act as an alarm call. Christopher Hampton’s play “A German Life” wants to be just that. It even breaks out Maggie Smith in case of emergencies, deploying the 84-year-old to pull in a crowd to hear a history lesson that chimes, alarmingly, with our own times. She plays Brunhilde Pomsel, an elderly German woman who, in her youth, wound up working as a secretary for Joseph Goebbels at the Ministry of Propaganda. Her shorthand skills led her there, rather than any ideological sympathies — or so she says. She was, indeed, an “apolitical youth”; another ordinary German carried along on unstoppable socio-political currents. Hers is an on-the-ground, eyewitness account, a first-person recollection of the way Nazism took hold. Hampton’s script streamlines the testimonial Pomsel committed to camera, aged 104, for German filmmakers Christian Krönes and Florian Weigensamer. If it’s largely linear, following a familiar trajectory from WWI through to the Third Reich itself, it’s set apart by privileging the personal over the political. Pomsel glances off significant historical events — forgetting the name of Kristallnacht, for instance, or handling the hyperinflation of the 1920s in a single sentence — to elevate her own experiences: friendships, family crises, first jobs and first loves. It’s a reminder that history only coheres in hindsight. In the moment, it is always uncertain and up for grabs and, while we spot glimpses of the gathering storm — Pomsel’s brothers stomp off in their brown shirts — she remained fairly oblivious herself. Totalitarianism seems to hide in plain sight, just visible but unstoppable, a new uneasy norm. Right now, it’s a reminder we need: contemporary echoes — a hounded press, thuggist mobs on the street, open and unchallenged anti-Semitism — ping off the stage. British theater’s been here before, of late, and with far more theatrical flair. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s “Winter Solstice” watched a war criminal throw off his sheep’s clothing, while “Effigies of Wickedness” made a cabaret of curiosities out of songs the Nazis banned. “A German Life” largely states its case rather than showing it, bar Anna Flieschle’s design: a parquet floor that shifts underfoot like tectonic plates, as Jon Clark’s lighting dims to a chilly darkness, wrenching an elderly woman out of her homely context and into an abstract void — an example to us all, perhaps, or else the epitome of the banality of evil. Indeed, Smith plays Pomsel as she might one of Alan Bennett’s “Talking Heads” monologues: wryly ironic and wanly gossipy. It’s a performance that combines the knowingness of hindsight with the naivety of youth, blasé enough to catch you off-guard when the magnitude of events suddenly cuts through. “Isn’t it funny,” she muses, stroking her silk scarf. “The things you can’t remember and the things you’ll never forget.” All of which makes “A German Life” more elegant than it is engaging. It’s best watched, like an eclipse, by looking to one side. Seen in that way, it becomes a meditation on memory and history, each as unreliable as the other. A reminder never to forget the past, Pomsel’s lapses prove just how easy that is. Indeed, history leaves gaps of its own. Hers is an unusual perspective, largely written out: a female lens on the Fatherland. Nazism excluded women from public and political life and its ideological is rigidly masculine. Pomsel remains (at least ostensibly) unseduced by it, resisting the rush of testosterone at rallies that, to her, consisted of “a load of men with B.O.” Goebbels himself she cuts down to size: good-looking but too short to be attractive, a “demented midget” when at the podium. The question, left hanging by director Jonathan Kent’s production, is whether we believe her. When Pomsel pleads naivety as an excuse for complicity, or denies all knowledge of the Holocaust, is she telling the truth? What about the moments her memory misses out? It’s here that the difference between a recorded testimony and a reenacted one makes itself felt. To what extent is Pomsel performing? Is she sticking to a script? “A German Life” remains uneasily ambiguous. It contains contradictions and leaves out key details until the very last. Pomsel was, don’t forget, a professional propagandist. How often do they tell the truth? As a direct warning, however, there’s not a lot we don’t already know, either from aphorisms or from Hannah Arendt. Fascism doesn’t turn up in fancy dress. “The sad truth,” Arendt wrote, “is that most evil is done by people who never make up their mind to be good or evil.” Brunhilde Pomsel is a case in point. Any one of us could be, even now.<doc-sep>★★★★★ She sits before us, an ordinary looking woman of indeterminate old age at her kitchen table. “I’ve forgotten such a lot,” she tells us, her hand running through grey bobbed hair, looking suddenly bemused. She says that sometimes she can’t remember what she read a minute ago. “Then, all of a sudden, things from long, long ago surge up into my mind. Things I can remember in the minutest detail.” Sponsored This is Brunhilde Pomsel, talking to us from Munich at age 102, about her life, an account studded with tantalising detail, providing glimpses of what it was like to be young and carefree in Germany in the 1930s, about her family, her Jewish friend, Eva, her Nazi boyfriend, Heinz, and working as a secretary<doc-sep>Absent from the stage for 12 years, Maggie Smith returns in triumph. But this is no barnstorming performance. She plays, with just the right verbal hesitancy and moral evasiveness, a woman who worked in Joseph Goebbels’ ministry of propaganda during the second world war. Based by Christopher Hampton on an Austrian documentary shot when the woman in question, Brunhilde Pomsel, was 102, the play is a record of a life rather than a form of judicial enquiry. Pomsel found herself at the centre of events almost by chance. Through her shorthand skills, she quickly moved from work with an insurance broker to a job at the German Broadcasting Corporation before becoming part of Goebbels’ propaganda machine. What comes across is her apolitical naivety. Instructed by the radio company to become a member of the party, she takes a Jewish female chum along to the requisite office. Even when she was a secretary in Goebbels’ office, she suggests that she had no notion of the horrors being perpetrated by the Nazis. But, in a revealing moment, she says of the terrible things that were happening “we didn’t want to know about them, we really didn’t”. What Smith captures brilliantly is the way, in old age, vagueness of memory co-exists with moments of piercing clarity. Rather than sit in judgement on the character, Smith also presents her from her own point of view. She is unapologetic about her delight in Weimar Berlin or about her initial impression that Goebbels was “damn good looking”. At the same time, Smith’s voice chokes as she recalls Kristallnacht and her features pale as she searches, in the post-war world, for information about her Jewish female friend. Above all, Smith suppresses her irony as, seated for 100 minutes, she relives one woman’s extraordinary experience. But, as always, those expressive Smith hands do their work whether tugging at a scarf in moments of grief or ramming home points with firmly clasped spectacles. It is left to the audience to decide whether there is something culpable about Pomsel’s innocence. But, while watching Jonathan Kent’s production and Smith’s superb performance, we surrender to the power of the moment and the evocation of a time when lies became truth.<doc-sep>
Maggie Smith gives a turn of naturalistic brilliance as Joseph Goebbels's secretary Brunhilde Pomsel Twelve years after she retired from the stage, Dame Maggie Smith, 84, has returned. But anyone expecting a valedictory yee-haw of a performance – a last big flexing of the dramatic muscles to one-up peers like Glenda Jackson or Ian McKellen, still doing Shakespeare in their eighties – will be taken aback. This is something very different. ‘A German Life’ is a monologue translated and edited by Christopher Hampton from the videotaped testimony of Brunhilde Pomsel. Personal secretary to Joseph Goebbels, Pomsel only spoke about her experiences at the end of her very long life – she died aged 106 in January 2017. Jonathan Kent’s hyper-naturalistic production feels less like a contrived work of drama, more like watching Pomsel’s testimony in some sort of unnaturally vivid translation. For an hour and 40 minutes, Smith sits in a chair in Anna Fleischle’s neat Munich apartment set, and simply talks to us, sharing Pomsel’s memories in pointedly hesitant fashion. Is it a brilliant performance? Yes: it is a totally brilliant performance, just don’t expect fireworks. Smith’s Pomsel – an altogether less imposing personality than Smith herself – is a woman who seems to constantly be wrestling with something: a struggle to remember? Guilt? Guilt at her lack of guilt? Horror at what previously uninterrogated memories of the Third Reich really signified? Often she stumbles over words or slightly loses her thread: maybe some of this is Smith stalling for time slightly, or perhaps each hesitation or repetition is immaculately scripted. Either way the effect is the same – low-key magic, and a remarkable performance. Smith’s Pomsel haltingly tells the story of her life in Nazi Germany, and often stresses its harmless banality or how little she knew about the bigger picture. But it’s the little slips of information, the minor corrections, the small contradictions that tell. She says the Jews weren’t persecuted in the early Nazi days, when she was personally happy, then remembers that they were; she says she didn’t know about the concentration camps but then qualifies herself: she did, but – and despite the number of people she knew who disappeared into them – she didn’t know what happened in them. Is Pomsel a villain or an antihero? The key point about both play and performance is that she is neither. ‘The banality of evil’ is an overused phrase, and perhaps not one that exactly applies here: it is perhaps more accurate to say that in ‘A German Life’ evil is something vast and disorientating, something nation-sized, so big that it is difficult for a single individual to perceive it with clarity. And yes, denial is a big part of it. Despite her many Jewish friends, Pomsel’s lack of real anger at the persecution of the Jews somewhat damns her. But ultimately she is alarmingly relatable: her lack of outrage counts against her, but the world isn’t made up of heroic people who take a stand: she was just a woman who tried to keep her head down until Hitler was gone. Evil doesn’t so much happen because good people don’t oppose it, as because regular people don’t fully comprehend it, and just want to get on with their lives. Smith has done no interviews to support ‘A German Life’ and has given no indication as to what her motivation for returning to theatre might be. But it feels like a very specific project: it’s hard to imagine it was this or something else. To say there are contemporary political situations the play might relate to is an understatement, but ‘A German Life’ doesn’t strain desperately for relevance because it doesn’t need to. The forces of rightwing populism are on the march again and the facts are eloquent enough. Maggie Smith has used what is surely her final stage role to try and tell us something. We should listen. ‘A German Life’ is sold out but £15 day-seats are available in person from 10am each day of performance. There are also £20 lottery tickets available via the TodayTix app.