A German Life

Brunhilde Pomsel worked as a stenographer for Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. The documentary rests on a long interview with her. Pomsel tells those years in her own words; she says what she knew and what she did not. The film’s case is that the danger of fascism has not been left behind; that assessment is the work’s own. The account carries a testimony without judging it and without defending it. How ordinary people go on working inside an order is the real subject. There is one name in the cast: Pomsel herself. The hundred and nine minutes rest on that interview. It was made as the joint work of four directors. The film, a joint German and Austrian production, was completed in 2016.