Arts & Entertainment

TI MES GONE BIT

Detroit Film Theatre screens two works that illuminate

True Confessions

In a riveting documentary, filmmaker Andre Heller
captures an eyewitness account of life with Hitler.

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

I

was the secretary of Anne's
murderer." So began a strange
letter written in 1988 to Melissa
Mueller after the publication of
her best-selling Anne Frank: The
Biography (Owl Books; 1999).
The secretary was Traudl Junge, who
served as one of Hitler's personal assis-
tants from 1942 until his suicide in
1945. In the final days of the war, she
took down his last will and testament
before he shot himself in his Berlin
bunker. Fearing retaliation, she refused
to tell her story for the next 53 years.
But now, remorseful and suffering
from terminal breast cancer, she
seemed ready to talk.
Mueller immediately called her
friend, internationally renowned mul-
timedia artist Andre Heller, who is the
son of a Holocaust survivor.
"I was interested in how someone
had changed from Hitler's assistant to
an anti-fascist," Heller said in an inter-
view from his hometown of Vienna.
"Was it believable or not?"
The result is his riveting documentary,
Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, culled from
1.3 hours of interviews conducted with
the chain-smoking Junge in her spare,
one-room Munich flat in spring 2001.
The documentary will be shown at the
Detroit Film Theatre March 28-30.
Essentially a series of close-ups with-
out stylistic embellishments, the 90-
minute film is part confession, part
fascinating memoir.
Junge, then 81, describes how she
grew up fatherless and craved the affec-
tion of a boss who called her "child";

3/28
2003

70

how Hider practically never used the
the Hellers were wealthy industrialists
word "Jew"; how he disliked flowers
who had converted to Catholicism
because he hated dead things around;
"because they thought it would help
and how he numbly sat with a puppy
them rise through Viennese society;
in the days before his own suicide.
but, of course, it helped not at all.
"Blind Spot is an intriguing film
"When. the Nazis arrived in 1938, my
because Frau Junge is probably the last
father was promptly arrested and forced
intimate of Hitler who will speak before to clean the streets with a toothbrush as
a camera," said Princeton University
onlookers jeered," said the filmmaker.
history professor Anson Rabinbach.
While the family fortune helped him
"From a historical point of view, there flee to England, the murder of a large
is little that is really new [here].
part of his family in concentration
However, as a film about Hitler's secre-
camps and his survivor's guilt left him.
tary, which is really the subject, there
a broken man, Heller said of his father.
are fascinating moments, especially her
"He became addicted to opium, and
repeated attempts to come to
terms with her own behavior."
As such, Blind Spot joins a grow-
ing body of work on more "ordi-
nary" Nazi perpetrators, emerging
after years of intense focus on the
victims of the Holocaust.
For Heller, however, the focus
was more personal.
Initially he worried about what
his late father, the Holocaust sur-
vivor, would have thought of the
film. Apparently, the elder Heller
had hated the Nazis so virulently
that he once forced a neighbor
to eat the swastika-shaped thread
embroidered on his pillow.
"Why should I be taking a con-
fession from a woman who worked
for my father's greatest enemy?"
Heller asked himself "But in the
end, I felt [vindicated] because I
knew I was speaking to a person
who had transformed herself."
Junge's survivor guilt remind-
Top:Traudl lunge in "Blind Spot: Hitlers Secretary.
ed the filmmaker of his own
father's experience.
Above: Filmmaker Andre Heller: "I knew I was
Before Hitler came to power,
speaking to a person who had transformed herself"

by the time I was born in 1947, he
was already a wreck."
Eleven years later, Heller's father com-
mitted suicide by locking himself in the
family library while suffering an embolism.
Subsequently, young Andre was sent
to a boarding school in the Austrian
district of Styria. "On the first day of
class, the teacher told everyone, This
is Heller; don't sit beside him because
he has bad blood in his veins.'"
When his classmates sang anti-
Semitic songs in the streets, Heller,
then 15, took the train to the district
capital and tried to complain to the
governor — unsuccessfully.
"That was the beginning of my
political awakening," he said.
Heller became a prominent activist
on the anti-fascist front, for which he at
times received threatening letters and
even sacks of excrement in the mail.
When he began interviewing Junge
with cameraman Othmar Schmiderer
in 2001, Heller discovered that Junge
feared similar kinds of retribution.
Ten minutes into the interview, he said
he realized "this was an impoverished
woman who was widowed young, never
remarried, never had children, who had
punished herself for years with cancer
and with total isolation. She couldn't for-
give herself, just as my father also could-
n't forgive himself for his survival."
Apparently, Blind Spot proved cathar-
tic for Junge. She died hours after the
film's 2002 premiere in a Berlin theater
less than 56 feet from the bunker where
she had jotted down Hitler's will.
"I don't consider her one of my
heroes," Heller said. "But I had a kind
of respect for what she went through
not to hide the truth from herself." ❑

Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary will
be shown 7 and 9:30 pin. Friday
and Saturday and 4 and 7 p.m.
Sunday, March 28-30, at the
Detroit Film Theatre at the
Detroit Institute of Arts. $6.50.
(313) 833-3237.

.MNBATk.\\\

\,W ,

'k\'0% `,\1•&\VIRWM\a."\WW