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Also this issue: Outside Tension Screen Picks |
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March 20-26, 2003
movies
 THE DICTATORâS STENOGRAPHER: Traudl Junge, who served as Hitlerâs private secretary from 1942 to 1945. |
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Hitler’s secretary confronts her past.
If "Hitler’s secretary" doesn’t have the same ring as, say, "Hitler’s handmaiden," the derisive title often affixed to propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, Traudl Junge’s experience certainly makes up for her less zippy moniker. For four years, from 1942 until his death, Junge was one of a handful of private secretaries for the leader of the Third Reich, a man whose name history has so encrusted with the weight of his awful deeds that it’s become all but impossible to conceive a human heart beating beneath it. Even the attempt to conceive Hitler as human meets with protest -- a CBS miniseries about his life was attacked on concept alone. (It’s now planned to air in May, recast as a "political thriller.") But Junge, who was interviewed by filmmakers André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer in the spring of 2001, saw a Hitler that was more mundane than monstrous, a "kindly old man" who never used the word "Jew" (or, for that matter, the word "love").
By her own account, Junge was equal parts naive and "curious! when she accepted the job, an apolitical German who viewed Hitler as a "paternal" figure, one who might countenance the lack of responsible older men in her life. The fact that a German could, in 1942, consider herself to have no interest in politics seems unbelievable, not to say flagrantly disingenuous, but Junge’s words are tinged with guilt, not self-justification. Junge, whose last words in the movie are "I think I’m starting to forgive myself," was 80 when she consented to be interviewed for the first time, and died the night of the film’s premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, as if she’d been waiting for release.
Blind Spot
is made up of three interviews, all conducted in Junge’s apartment. Though she wears three changes of clothes, she sports the same orange-and-white scarf with two of them, as if it’s a comfortable talisman to smooth her journey into the unthinkable past. The shelves over her shoulders are cluttered with bric-a-brac. If you let your mind wander, or flipped past the documentary on TV, you’d take her for anyone’s grandmother, or perhaps your own.
Heller and Schmiderer wisely keep the focus entirely on Junge, never cutting away to stock footage or explanatory photographs. The effect is to restrict our focus to Junge’s, to re-create the (at times literal) bunker mentality inside Hitler’s camp. It’s doubtful we’ll ever "understand! Hitler in any meaningful, psychological sense, and perhaps the fact of his existence is less important than the existence of a nation willing to follow him -- not just the militants and the Jew-haters, but those, like Junge, who let ignorance and moral shallowness blind them to the consequences of their actions. Listening to Junge, the attitude sounds uncomfortably familiar, in outline if not in degree. You can’t help but wish the movie’s timing was a little less apt.
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