Audiences left to judge role in Nazi history

Sophie Roberts in the play Wolf's Lair. Photo / Andrew Kennedy

It was supposed to be a quiet night in, watching a video, but when Sophie Roberts and Willem Wassenaar rented a movie, it proved a documentary so compelling they created a play inspired by it. Now Roberts and Wassenaar, two of the founders of the Almost A Bird Theatre Collective, are bringing their production Wolf's Lair to Auckland.

The 45-minute play was devised after the pair watched the 2002 German documentary Blind Spot, about Traudl Junge who, in 1942, became Adolf Hitler's youngest personal private secretary.

Just 22, Junge dreamed of leaving home and becoming a ballerina. Instead, she ended up spending nearly three years serving Hitler, whom she said she found charming and enjoyed working for. She said she knew nothing about the genocide ordered by her boss until World War II ended.
"Willem and I thought she was fascinating," says Roberts, who plays three characters in the solo show. "What interested us was that she was a 22-year-old woman who served a mass murderer but she did not fit into the 'hero' or 'villain' model."

Unable to stop thinking about Junge, Roberts and Wassenaar began researching her. They read her book Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary, watched the German feature film Downfall and read widely about World War II.

No strangers to devising theatre - the pair have worked together for six years - they had to decide how to tell Junge's story. Rather than develop a historical biography, they chose to focus on questions about personal responsibility and the nature of truth.

Roberts says the aim was to stop the work from becoming a "museum piece" and keep it relevant to modern audiences. Mindful of the sensitivity of the subject, Roberts and Wassenaar tried not to make judgments about Junge, who died in 2002 aged 82. The process has reinforced for them the relative nature of truth, that events are never as black and white as they may seem.

"I find it hard to comprehend how she got herself into the situation that she did, but my job isn't to make a judgment but to open the question up for an audience to respond to in their own way," Roberts says.

"It is not an overtly political piece but a personal one and we have been quite specific about that. It is a show people definitely want to talk about afterwards."

Roberts acknowledges she doesn't know if Junge was ignorant of the atrocities carried out by the Nazi leaders she worked for. Answering that question is all the more difficult given that Junge changed her version of events throughout her life depending on what stage she was at and who she was with.

"She did spend the rest of her life trying to put her life right, to reflect on and be honest about her experiences. She said, 'We can't put our lives right in retrospect, we must go on living with the past, but we can, however, put ourselves right.'"

THEATRE

What: Wolf's Lair.
Where and when: The Basement, August 25-September 8.