From the "People" Archives:

Hitler as a Human Monster; Andre Heller Talks About "Blind Spot"

by Erica Abeel

Traudl Junge in Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer's "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary." © 2003 Sony Pictures Classics

Watching "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary" is a cinematic experience unlike most others. In fact, it's defiantly non-cinematic. In 2001, directors Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer persuaded 81-year-old Traudl Junge to sit before a camera and recount her experiences from 1942 to 1945 as Hitler's private secretary. The resulting document offers no cinema-friendly embellishments, no varied camera angles, fast cuts, or exterior shots to boost its entertainment quotient. We see only a talking head, with periodic switches to Junge watching herself talking on video. The viewer becomes an eavesdropper on a combined spoken confessional, reminiscence, and mea culpa. If not for the need to read German subtitles, you might almost be tempted to close your eyes, the better to absorb the impact of Junge's journey.

And it's some journey. Though originally hoping to become a dancer, at age 22 Junge's typing skills landed her a job as Hitler's secretary, work that appeared the career-opportunity of a lifetime. Offering ironic/grotesque details about Hitler, her testimony disturbingly humanizes history's greatest criminal. She remembers her employer as a courtly, if aloof father figure, with none of the public ferocity; a man who disliked physical contact and seemed indifferent not only to love, but anything that didn't serve the glory of Germany. The admirer of classically ideal physiques was embarrassed by his bony white knees. He feared death to the extent he couldn't tolerate the presence of flowers; loved his dog Blondie, yet fed her cyanide to test its efficacy the last day in the bunker. The fascination of "Blind Spot" comes from the knowledge that this woman was there, up close and personal -- at the Wolfsschanze in Obsersalzberg, on his prviate train, and in his bunker. A twenty-five minute single take records the final hours in the bunker as Russian artillery thundered outside. Junge fed bread and jelly sandwiches to Goebbel's children while the Fuhrer had himself shot. Throughout, she proves her own harshest judge, returning to a single question: how could she not have known?

The man filming this woman's tale is the son of a Holocaust survivor, with bitter memories of a father who self-destructed after the war. Heller is also a thorn in the side of the Austrian government's resident anti-Semites and supporters of Jorg Haider. The film's minimalist format is in striking contrast to the exuberant large-scale art works -- including a mammoth Bamboo Man for Hong Kong harbor -- Heller has created throughout the world. Heller shot 26 hours of conversation, in Junge's tiny apartment in Munich and at his villa on Lake Garda, which he and cameraman Schmiderer then whittled down to 90 minutes. Frau Junge died of lung cancer just hours before the film's February premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. From the hospital she told Heller, "I have finally let go of my story. Now I feel the world is letting go of me."

indieWIRE: How did you persuade Junge to film her story?

Andre Heller: [Austrian journalist] Melissa Muller told me she'd met the private secretary of Adolf Hitler, but she'd never related her entire story in public for fear all the old Nazis would come asking for her autograph. When Melissa told me the woman now hated Hitler and couldn't forgive herself for being his secretary, I was curious to meet her.

At first we just talked, with no plans to make a film. I told her my father had been forced by the Nazis to clean the streets of Vienna with a toothbrush. He was a man unable to forgive himself for surviving the Holocaust. And there opposite me was a woman who couldn't forgive herself for having been that naïve, opportunistic, cowardly little woman of 22.

I learned that after the war she got cancer and never again had a love affair -- she thought herself a person not worthy of being loved. She fell into a deep depression and couldn't work for years. She was in a battle with herself to find an exit from this permanent self-hatred. After hours of conversation, I suggested we make a tape or video of her story for her own personal use, and invited a cameraman to her tiny flat. It's significant that we didn't intend the video for the public because she was never forced to say anything diplomatic.

I invited Mrs. Junge to my house in Italy, where she corrected and amended the original video, and I created a three-hour version. You should know that out of the thirteen hours, at least five were intense declarations of hate toward herself.

iW: Why did you cut those parts?

Heller: We left in only eight or ten minutes, because either you believe it or you don't, but you wouldn't believe it more if you heard it for 60 minutes.

iW: And then you went public with the video?

Heller: I showed it to historians and opinion makers, including Simon Wiesenthal, and they found it very credible. They thought it important that the account came from a woman, because she has a different kind of sensitivity, noticing things that might not sound important, such as Hitler's phobia about flowers and his erotic problems.

Frau Junge then agreed to a public showing -- on the condition she be out of Europe, because she didn't want to end up a media story. So I gave her a ticket for Australia, where she had a sister.

iW: How did you transform a private conversation into a film?

Heller: The producers told us to bring in additional material. I refused. I come from a Jewish storytelling tradition, where you shut up and listen -- this is what I owed the story. I didn't need any Hitler footage or Eva Braun or the dog -- it's much more interesting to see just the face. Above all, I didn't want an MTV effect with hysterical cutting, shots of Goebbels, legs walking in the bunker. You have to concentrate on the story's slowness, and if it doesn't interest you, leave.

iW: Out of so much film, how did you decide what to cut?

Heller: That long monolgue at the end of the film, where she tells the story of the bunker, I wouldn't dare to touch. It's like Shakespeare. Then I went about mixing her personal story with some of the things she'd witnessed.

I thought it would be shown at universities. Then suddenly we got invited to the Berlin Festival, and it won the audience award. I was shocked -- I thought the jury members would like it, but the public actually preferred it to Halle Berry and "Monsters Ball." Then came reviews from all over Europe, it was in movie houses from Mexico to Tokyo, and it started to live its own life. Mrs. Junge died on the day of the first screening in Berlin. Her last words to me: "I think I can start to forgive that little girl now."

iW: How did making the film affect you?

Heller: It stirred up hundreds of things. I had to deal again with the story of my father, and had discussions with my mother. I wasn't of the Jewish religion -- my father had converted to Catholicism in 1918. Hitler said, I don't care if you're Catholic, to me you're a Jew. All these things came up.

I thought Mrs. Junge had transformed herself through learning much more than people from the other side. I would have liked my mother to have thought about her life as much. At first I traveled with the film -- but I had to face the fact that once again you're traveling with this Hitler energy.

iW: What do you want viewers to take away from this film?

Heller: That we're all somehow connected with this monster. Because he was a human monster. One of the points of Mrs. Junge's story is that Hitler was not an alien from another planet. He was one of us who turned into Hitler. And it can happen again today or tomorrow, with a different face and style. It's important when she says that this guy was a charming operator, who kissed the hands of the industrialists' wives, who then convinced their husbands to invest in Hitler. Because if we consider people like Hitler as monsters with two heads that you recognize immediately when you enter a room, then it's much easier. She teaches us that we have to be really aware and look closer.

iW: Do you see parallels today?

Heller: Millions of people in America and all over the world believe that Saddam is a monster from another universe. But the fact is that he's somebody who was sponsored by the same people who are now proclaiming him the biggest enemy of all time.

iW: What's been the reaction to your film in Austria and Germany?

Heller: Viewers agreed that while there's not much new in the film, the authenticity is somehow breathtaking. After all, Mrs. Junge was with Hitler six hours every day during the critical years. And of course we had the luck that she's a good storyteller, a handsome woman, and very sympathetic. And the film does deliver revelatory details that aren't known. For example, she says they had to close the curtains of the Fuhrer's train, so he wouldn't see the destroyed landscape. That tells me much more about him than millions of pages in a book -- someone who doesn't have the nerve to see what he's doing to the world. Also, when she says that during the last days in the bunker, we started smoking in the presence of Hitler -- when 10 months earlier, no one was allowed to smoke within one kilometer. Somehow you know that Hell has ended.

iW: Did any Austrian rightwingers weigh in?

Heller: I'm one of the prominent fighters against Haider and the rightwing movement here -- yet we heard not one word from them. Because they're in the government. If they had said anything against that film, it would have created an incredible scandal. This is a country, remember, where Haider praises Hitler's labor policy.

iW: To me the prime issue raised by the film is the issue of personal responsibility. To what degree was Junge responsible for her past?

Heller: She thought she was completely responsible. At one point in the film she said, "I really did not know." Then she stops for a second: "or I did not want to know." That makes all the difference. I think she knew more than enough. And still, even at eighty she had trouble admitting that her problem was not what she hadn't known, but what she had known. And she could not forgive herself. She herself brought up the case of Sophie Scholl [a student in the Resistance executed by the Gestapo.] She said, I thought for years I might have an excuse, and then I realized that Sophie Scholl was my age when I went to work for Hitler. This statement has enormous import for Europeans -- that someone who has worked for Hitler said, "I had no excuse. Nothing is an excuse."

iW: What was the crucial difference between a Junge and a Scholl?

Heller: Scholl was educated. For Junge, Hitler was the most important guy in the world -- she thought it was like becoming the secretary for Eminem. Hitler was like a pop star for her generation. Millions of women wrote him love letters and sent him their bras.

iW: Do you judge Traudl Junge?

Heller: I'd be happy if people understood that this is a person who transformed herself through learning.

iW: But do you forgive her?

Heller: I'm a person who is able to forgive. And I'm able to forgive if I see that a person is really fighting to learn and change a way of thinking. You can have two points of view: Who am I to forgive? and Who am I not to forgive? I think I was encouraging her to forgive that girl. I respect her -- and that's more than we can say of most people in our lives.