Only a Little
We’re acutely conscious right now of the role propaganda plays in war. The deployment of information — or misinformation — can be tantamount to taking up arms. Christian Krönes’s portrait of Brunhilde Pomsel, Ein deutsches Leben, released in 2016, when the protagonist was 105 years old, makes for timely, challenging viewing. For having been Goebbels’s secretary from 1942 until April 1945, Pomsel regarded herself, after a lifetime’s pondering, as having been purely incidental to the drama of war. She owned no responsibility. ‘There is no justice’, she remarked, still indignant at having been interned by the Russians in 1945: ‘After all, I’d done nothing except type for Herr Goebbels. Of what lay behind it all, I knew nothing — or only very little. No, I would not see myself as culpable.’ Her long monologue, shot in black and white, shows (by way of counter-witness) what courage it takes to stand aside from the crowd. Only exceptional individuals are naturally courageous. For most of us, courage requires cultivation. On such cultivation the notion of the ‘free world’ depends. Pomsel said: ‘For my part, I am one of the cowards.’
