Review: Blind Spot - Im toten Winkel
German DVD Movie Reviews
BLIND SPOT: HITLER'S SECRETARY
2002 AUSTRIA 90 MIN COLOR 35 MM
DIRECTORS: André Heller, Othmar Schmiderer
GENRE: Documentary
US THEATRICAL RELEASE: January 24, 2003
In German with English subtitles
US DVD RELEASE: October 28, 2003
In German with English, French, Spanish subtitles
Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary
Im toten Winkel: Hitlers Sekretärin
Before viewing BLIND SPOT in Los Angeles at AFI Fest 2002, I had heard that it consisted of nothing but talking-head shots of Hitler's former secretary explaining her role as a minor cog in the vast machinery of the Third Reich. But such a description is a little like saying that “Casablanca” is the story of a bunch of European émigrés trying to escape from exile in northern Africa. It doesn't begin to capture the true impact of the film.
Traudl Junge in BLIND SPOT,
filmed in her Munich apartment.
Photo: DOR Film/Piffl Verlieh
The Austrian André Heller, best known for his music, performance, and landscape art, is the first to admit that he's no filmmaker. Although Heller worked with documentary filmmaker Othmar Schmiderer to produce BLIND SPOT, it is far from exciting cinematically. There's no historical Nazi footage with voice-overs (haven't we seen it all before anyway?), no background music, no still shots a la Ken Burns, none of that. All of the impact and power of Heller's film exudes from its subject. It was Heller's and our good fortune, that Traudl Junge, who some 60 years ago worked as one of three private secretaries serving Hitler, has an extraordinary ability to communicate to others what it was like to be one of the minions who had unparalleled access to the Führer. It is her mesmerizing narrative that turns BLIND SPOT/IM TOTEN WINKEL into much more than your average talking-heads documentary. Junge is a riveting presence as she takes you from when she was hired to be one of Hitler's secretaries in 1942 to the bizarre horror of what it was like during the final days in Hitler's bunker in Berlin in 1945.
Some people will have a problem with this documentary's bare-bones, nothing-fancy approach to filmmaking. But Traudl Junge has a manner and a wealth of vocabulary that allow her to carry her own film. The viewer is drawn in not only by her words but by the amazing coolness and clarity with which she relates historical events that come alive through her unique eyewitness account. She also offers interesting personal details about Hitler's personal and sexual relationships, but there are few revelations that have not come out before.
As the chain-smoking Junge (YOONG-a) relates her story in her dispassionate but spellbinding way, we learn that her life as a secretary to Germany's chief Nazi was more often than not rather mundane and ordinary. Despite certain unusual aspects of her star association, Junge and her fellow secretaries rarely had face-to-face contact with their notorious boss. She seems genuinely not to have been aware of the historical significance of her employment at the time she was working for Hitler in Berlin, at the Wolf's Lair (in East Prussia), on his official train, and at the Obersalzburg complex in Bavaria. But it was Junge whom Hitler selected to join him and his retinue in his Berlin bunker and to whom he dictated his last will and testament prior to his suicide in 1945.
DVD: BLIND SPOT: HITLER'S SECRETARY
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But some time after the war, Junge had an epiphany concerning her role in German history. Junge describes how one day she saw a plaque commemorating Hans and Sophie Scholl's activities in resisting the Nazis (for which they were executed) and her resulting realization that she and Sophie had been the same age and living in Nazi Germany at the same time, but Sophie Scholl and her brother reacted to this situation in a very different way than Traudl Junge. While she was taking dictation and typing letters for the Nazis, the Scholls were distributing fliers against the Nazis.
After the AFI screening in Hollywood, André Heller spoke about how he happened to come into contact with Traudl Junge (through the writer Melissa Müller) and his own personal side of the interview (13 hours edited down to 90 minutes). He drew parallels between his own coming to terms with his Jewish background and his father's painful experiences as a Jew in Austria, and Junge dealing with the horror her former boss had caused. Heller feels that making this film has helped him come to terms with the tragic past that links him with Traudl Junge. In his film we see how the 81-year-old woman finds it hard to forgive the 22-year-old girl who so naively served the Führer, yet she seems to have come to terms with her past. After filming BLIND SPOT, she told Heller, “I have finally let go of my story. Now I feel the world has let go of me.” (“Ich hab den Film freigegeben, jetzt lässt mich das Leben frei.”)
Within hours of the 2002 world premiere of BLIND SPOT in Berlin, Traudl Junge succumbed to a long bout with cancer. Whether or not we choose to believe her or sympathize with her, we owe André Heller a debt of gratitude for the fact that her own oral, visual telling of the story did not die with her. The vicarious face-to-face encounter that Heller offers us is as mundane—and as extraordinary—as the role Frau Junge played in world history.
VIEWING TIPS: (1) Don't let the subtitles interfere with the impact of viewing this film! Concentrate on Traudl Junge's face and body language as much as possible. Listen to her! (2) It is interesting to compare Traudl Junge's attitude in this film to Leni Riefenstahl's in “The Wonderful Horrible Life of....”
Related DVD: Downfall with Bruno Ganz as Hitler and Alexandra Maria Lara as 22-year-old Traudl Junge. The final days of the Third Reich as seen through Junge's eyes. Based in part on Junge's book Until the Final Hour (Bis zur letzten Stunde, see German version below).
BOOK: Bis zur letzten Stunde
by Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller.
Claassen Verlag
Interesting Facts: Junge was born Gertraud Humps in Munich in 1920. Her typing and shorthand skills helped her land a job in Hitler's chancellory in 1942. In 1943 she married Hans Junge, one of Hitler's aides. He died in action in Normandy in 1944 and his widow never remarried. Of her unique job working for the German dictator, she said, "I thought I would be at the source of all information. But I was really in a blind spot." She was interrogated by Russian and U.S. authorities after the war, but they considered her a small fish and released her. (Junge had never joined the Nazi party.) She never had children, but there is a sister who lives in Australia. Junge published her memoirs as Bis zur letzten Stunde (with biographical supplements by Melissa Müller).
WEB > André Heller
WEB > Blind Spot - Sony Picture Classics
WEB > Im toten Winkel (official German site, includes German teaching materials in PDF format)
BOOK > Bis zur letzten Stunde (Junge's memoirs, Claassen Verlag)
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