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<\/p>\nA nightmare informed by indifference, ignorance and opportunism<\/p>\n
Are we about to repeat the events of the 20th century?<\/p>\n
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Her face is furrowed with deep wrinkles. She sometimes closes her eyes, and every now and then she puts her hands on her cheeks and covers her face. Brunhilde Pomsel was born in 1911, and at the time of this interview, in which she breaks her 70-year-long silence and speaks with a faltering voice, she was 103 years old. For the best part of the 113 minutes of this movie, the viewer sits looking at the face as it has been carved during those 103 years. When the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, Pomsel joined the party in order to find employment, without having any particular political creed. Through a certain party member\u2019s connections she found work as a secretary at the national broadcasting office, before eventually acquiring the position of minister Goebbels\u2019s secretary at theReich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1942. As only one of several secretaries, she was blessed with a high-paying job, and handled the work she was entrusted with in a diligent and unquestioning manner.<\/p>\n
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\u00a92016 BLACKBOX FILM & MEDIENPRODUKTION GMBH<\/small><\/p>\n
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\u201cIdidn\u2019t do anything but type in Goebbels\u2019s office [\u2026] and I had no idea of what was behind all that. Well, very little, anyway.I don\u2019t think that I am guilty.\u201dDid she really have no idea? And what does \u201cvery little\u201dmean? One feels like probing. Pomsel knew about the Kristallnacht in 1938, and about the scheduled execution of Christoph Probst and Hans and Sophie Scholl for their involvement in the White Rose resistance movement in 1943. But even though the records of the Scholl siblings\u2019trial passed through her hands, she followed the instructions of her superior at the propaganda ministry \u201cnot to steal a glance,\u201dand stored the documents away without looking at them. \u201dThe most important thing was to prove worthy ofour superior\u2019s trust,\u201dshe recounts openly, adding that she was proud of herself doing so. While noticing that her Jewish friend Eva had disappeared all of a sudden, she didn\u2019t even try to find out why. When Germany lost the war, she was taken away by the Soviet troops, and imprisoned for five years in former concentration camps. She further explains that she learned about the Holocaust, and that Eva was killed in Auschwitz in 1945 only after her release.<\/p>\n
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\u00a92016 BLACKBOX FILM & MEDIENPRODUKTION GMBH<\/small><\/p>\n
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The movie is titled \u201cA German Life,\u201dwhich means that it tells the story of \u201cone German person\u2019s life,\u201dand evokes the idea of a German nation that was mostly just as \u201cindifferent and ignorant\u201das Brunhilde Pomsel at the time. Now that\u2019s a situation that certainly applies also to the majority of the Japanese people at the time when the Sino-Japanese War developed into the Pacific War\u2026\u201dPeople today often say this. \u2018If we had lived back then, we would\u2019ve done something.\u2019\u2018We\u2019d surely have rescued the abused Jewish people.\u201d[\u2026] But I think they would have done just the same. It was as if the whole country was under a glass dome at the time. We all were in a big concentration camp ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is no narration and no music added to communicate the directors\u2019subjective views, only footage that is entirely in black and white. The archival audio and video recordings that are interspersed between the shots of Pomsel\u2019s face project the naked fact of what occurred at the time. Audio recordings include parts of Goebbels\u2019s \u201ctotal war speech\u201don February 18, 1943, and Pomsel, who attended the speech, remembers being thrilled at the idea that one man can excite the enthusiasm of such a large audience. However she testifies \u2013not without memory lapses and contradictions \u2013that she was indifferent about politics, and only interested in love and a better income. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to see it, and I didn\u2019t want to know about it.\u201dEverything, including the contradictions, is exposed in the movie as it tries to convey to the viewer the weight of the words that broke the silence of seven decades: \u201dThis is not a matter of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u00a92016 BLACKBOX FILM & MEDIENPRODUKTION GMBH<\/small><\/p>\n
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