It’s fitting that among the survivors should be A German Life, British playwright Christopher Hampton’s one-woman play based on the recollections of Brunhilde Pomsel, a former secretary and stenographer to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who lived to the ripe old age of 106. In 2016, Austrian filmmakers interviewed Pomsel for a documentary. Thirty hours of transcribed interviews, rather than the film itself, provided the basis for Hampton’s play.

In 2019, after a twelve-year absence from the stage, it was Maggie Smith (who else?) who first incarnated Hampton’s wonderfully flinty creation. (Smith is currently filming Hampton’s screen adaptation.) Stepping into her not inconsiderable shoes for this Australian première, directed by Armfield, is Robyn Nevin, whose casting feels equally inevitable. Nevin is a touch younger than Smith, and isn’t gifted with the same marvellously craggy features (Pomsel’s face, shot in stark black and white in the documentary, was a veritable river system run dry), but she embodies Pomsel effortlessly. I was stunned to watch Nevin shed the character’s arthritic stoop and crablike movements for the curtain call, so convincing had these artifices been.

Robyn Nevin in A German Life at the Adelaide Festival (Andrew Beveridge)

Pomsel was one of the last surviving witnesses to the internal machinations of the Third Reich and makes for an intriguing subject. Her first job was as a secretary in a fashion house. After voting for the Nazis in 1932 at the age of twenty-one (‘Who didn’t?’ she asks rhetorically) and having become aware of the SS through her first boyfriend, Heinz, she is called upon to serve as a shorthand typist in Goebbels’s office, a role Pomsel insists she was not in a position to refuse. She does her job. She doesn’t ask too many questions, even when files come across her desk, like those on the executions of Sophie Scholl and her fellow anti-fascist resisters, that attest to the atrocities unfolding in the name of ‘The Party’ (which, Pomsel tells us, she had no choice but to join). Eventually she is seconded to the Broadcasting Corporation. Finally, the penny begins to drop. The Corporation’s founder, a homosexual, disappears. Kristallnacht happens.

All along, despite her increasing doubts, Pomsel remains dutiful, if ambivalent, and unashamedly impressed by her employer. She describes him as ‘handsome’ and, memorably, a ‘demented midget’ capable of bewitching crowds. There’s something quietly shocking about the way her sympathies appear stirred more by the deaths of Goebbels’s children, murdered by their parents in May 1945 as it became clear Germany could not win the war, than by the fate of Europe’s Jews. She is, for the most part, cynical almost to the point of nihilism. ‘There’s no such thing as justice,’ she growls at one point. In any case, Pomsel is sentenced to five years in jail and sent to Buchenwald where she discovers, to her horror, that the showers the prisoners are using are the same ones beneath which the Nazis gassed Jews to death with Zyklon B.   

Hampton’s script compresses these details to a tight ninety minutes while reminding us that Pomsel’s recollections are frayed and unreliable (‘It’s funny,’ she says, ‘the things you remember and the things you never forget’). It is, ultimately, less a moral reckoning than a detached eyewitness account. Pomsel’s complicity remains an open question.

Designer Dale Ferguson brings Pomsel’s Munich rest-home room to verisimilitudinous life, its faded decor and crisp white walls giving way to exposed stage on either side. Armfield’s unobtrusive direction makes effective use of projected historical footage. A live cellist (Catherine Finnis), drawing on the baroque cannon as well as Alan John’s simpatico compositions, provides additional ambience.  

It might reasonably be asked why audiences need to see this play now – both its story and its themes have been well trodden on stage and screen – but it’s not without contemporary resonance. Of the Nazi propaganda machine, Pomsel says: ‘I don’t think you would get all that hot air past people these days.’ Try telling that to the twenty-first century’s malevolent spin doctors who delivered Donald Trump and Brexit to all-too-credulous populations.

A German Life continues at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre, until 14 March 2021. Performance attended: February 23.

This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.