A German Life

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. Brunhilde Pomsel’s life spanned the twentieth century. She struggled to make ends meet as a secretary in Berlin during the 1930s, her many employers including a Jewish insurance broker, the German Broadcasting Corporation and, eventually, Joseph Goebbels.