The Work I Did Read online

  I remember constantly hearing that we had no money. Papa was a decorator and had a job, and that in itself was a luxury in those days. So we always had enough. We almost never went hungry, unlike so many other people after we lost the First World War. There was always something to eat. It was simple and plain, but it filled you up. A lot of vegetables. My mother made wonderful vegetable stews; I sometimes long for them even today. Whether it was Savoy cabbage or white cabbage with caraway or green beans with tomatoes, it was a real luxury. And we still had enough for a goose at Christmas, which we just had to have. And Papa had to have his little glass of beer too. And Mama always got something nice to wear for Easter.

  When I was about fourteen, my friends were getting suits or coats. I wasn’t. I got hand-me-downs, which were altered for me. They were made to fit, and I wasn’t exactly spoilt. I knew we didn’t have very much money, and if you got something everyone else would want it as well – that was the principle. They were always talking about how there wasn’t any money, but we could always pay our rent, and when I’d finished compulsory education and the teacher said, ‘The child absolutely has to go to a higher school, she’s gifted,’ money was spent on that as well. So my mother got money out of my father for middle school. And I stayed there for a year. Then that was the end of middle school. If you wanted to do the Abitur you had to go to the Lyzeum.2 That was out of the question. Studying? Who studied ninety years ago? Only a very select group. Not us, anyway.

  When I was still at school I wanted to be an opera singer or a teacher. I was such a good pupil that a rich lady asked my mother, ‘Frau Pomsel, couldn’t your daughter do her homework at our house, with my Ilse? I can’t do it, and she’s not making any progress; she needs support.’

  Ilse was a friend of mine, and I was happy to do it. We did our homework together, which isn’t to say that I let her copy from me; I really helped her and explained things to her. She made considerable improvement, just because I was patient with her and liked going there. They were a very wealthy family. I always got a cup of coffee or tea straight away, and of course there were cakes as well, and the mother was an Italian, a former opera singer. They also had a wonderful piano, and she always sang – she sang us opera arias, and we sat there entranced and listened. It was a lovely time, and it was better for me too, because it was always noisy and busy in our flat. I could never do my homework in peace. And I wanted to become an opera singer, but there wasn’t enough money for that.

  And then at our middle school you could also attend a housekeeping school. But my father said, ‘That’s enough: I’m not paying for that as well. She’ll learn housekeeping at home, not at school. School’s over.’ So after my first-year exams I left middle school.

  At first I stayed with my mother as an assistant housekeeper. But that didn’t work. It was terrible. I couldn’t stand working in the kitchen, and Mama was relieved to send me off around the flat dusting, because I got everything wrong in the kitchen anyway, so it was all a terrible disappointment. My mother always wanted me to do a proper apprenticeship. But at the time I just wanted to work in an office, it didn’t matter where, it just had to be an office. For me the ladies who worked in offices – secretaries, office managers or business representatives with an insurance company – were very attractive, and that struck me as something definitely worth striving for.

  And then I found myself a job in the Berliner Morgenpost, which already existed back then: ‘Hard-working young female volunteer wanted for two years.’ I took a closer look: Hausvogteiplatz. That was a very smart area at the time. I knew that was where the upper class of the country lived, a posh area. I was to present myself at one o’clock. I immediately got on the train and travelled to the firm of Kurt Gläsinger and Co., which was on Mohrenstrasse. It was all very elegant: an amazing house with red carpets and a lift. I went up the stairs, which had soft carpets. I stepped inside a very beautiful big office, and there sat Herr Bernblum, a Jewish confidential clerk, severe, but a real personality. And there were three or four ladies sitting there. One of them was reaching the end of her contract. He gave me a good going-over. He asked this and that, and suddenly he said, ‘Yes, fine – here’s your volunteer’s contract. I just need one of your parents to sign it, since you’re still underage. Can you come back with your father or your mother?’

  I went home in great excitement and told my family straight away. I got a terrible telling-off at first: ‘The impudence of it, without asking, and who paid your fare?’ But then Mama came with me and signed a two-year contract, for the princely volunteer income of twenty-five marks a month.

  Then I did everything that needed to be done at Kurt Gläsinger and Co.: shorthand, typing, and in the evening I took courses at business school and learned the basics of bookkeeping. But at Gläsinger’s they didn’t need my knowledge of shorthand, which would later enable me to get into broadcasting and the Ministry of Propaganda. Even before my internship I was brilliant at shorthand; I was always first to finish, only because at school I was in love with my teacher. But he wasn’t in love with me.

  I worked there for two years. The best bit was always the journey to work. I took the suburban train from Südende to Potsdamer Ringbahnhof. Then I had to walk to Leipziger Platz. That was always a half-hour walk. And if I went via Leipziger Strasse rather than Mohrenstrasse I passed by lots of lovely shops. Wonderful fashion shops with unattainably beautiful things. But it was always lovely to see the clothes and dream.

  And the business, the daily work itself, was good fun as well. I learned everything properly, like a good girl, and probably made quite a good job of it. By the end I was even allowed to go on telephone duty. We had even had a telephone at home for some time – strictly forbidden to us children. We weren’t allowed near it. Who would we have called? We had no idea who you would have called. Who had a telephone in those days? Now Herr Bernblum said to me, ‘Fräulein Pomsel, put me through to Schulze and Menge.’ Then, as he watched, I had to find the number, my hands shaking, and then they would answer: ‘Südring exchange.’ And then I would say, ‘Please put me through to the Nordring exchange.’ And then someone else would answer, ‘Which number?’ Then I would say the number, and eventually the company would answer. And then I had to say again, ‘I would like to speak to Herr So-and-so, for Herr So-and-so.’ That was difficult for someone who had never done anything like that before. You can hardly imagine. These days it’s hard for me to cope with a mobile phone.

  But I was very industrious back then. I always was. I always was. It’s stayed in me. That very Prussian thing, that sense of duty. And a bit of self-subordination. It started in the family; you had to fit in or else it wouldn’t have worked. In those days there was always an element of strictness to everything; it meant you had to ask for everything, and you had no money at your disposal. There was no pocket money back then, like there is today, when children get pocket money from their parents from a certain age. We did get something. Well, I only got something because I had done the washing-up at midday every day, for the whole family. That wasn’t so easy in those days, not like just turning on the tap and rinsing the dishes. I had to heat up heavy pans, and then we had two basins: one in which you did the washing-up with soda, and a rinsing basin and then a drainer. It involved a lot of work. And I also got pocket money for that. I even think it was two marks a month. That was why the transition to the internship and my first money was very important for me.

  I stayed with Herr Bernblum for two years. After that they asked me to stay – for ninety marks a month. I had to discuss that with my parents because I wasn’t yet twenty-one. And my father said: ‘Ninety – no that’s not enough. You must ask for a hundred!’ And the next day I told Herr Bernblum my father insisted on a hundred. ‘I’m sorry, then – we’ll have to fire you.’ And then they fired me. My father said, ‘Quite right; find something else.’

  So I went to the labour exchange for the first time, registered as unemployed and was given a list of addresses wh
ere I was to go and present myself. For a short time I ended up in a bookshop. I absolutely loved reading. I hadn’t yet read very much, but reading was absolutely lovely, and they also paid the hundred marks without objection. It was that bitter cold winter of 1929, and by then I was eighteen years old. But it was a terrible job. They didn’t turn the heating on until very late, and the staff were cliquish and very unfriendly. I was desperately unhappy there.

  But then my father met a neighbour of ours in the street, Herr Doktor Hugo Goldberg, a Jewish insurance agent, and he talked to my father – ‘How are you; how’s business; what are the children up to?’ And eventually my father said, ‘Hilde’s grown up, and she’s working already.’ ‘So, what’s she doing?’ Then Herr Goldberg said, ‘You know what? My secretary’s about to get married, so she’ll have to stop working anyway. Send your daughter along to me, she always was a very clever girl.’

  So the next day I went to see Herr Doktor Goldberg at his house and introduced myself to him. I’d never seen him before and I greeted him with a curtsy and everything. So then he says, ‘Let’s give it a go. The world of insurance is very interesting. You can’t know everything, but you’ll learn a lot.’ And then I started working for him in the middle of 1929.

  After that came a calm and lovely time. For the first two years they often had parties at Herr Goldberg’s. They were all people with a lot of money. He lived on a huge floor of the villa. I remember a party for his wife’s fiftieth birthday. It was all supposed to happen against a medieval backdrop, and he had bought everything he needed for it. He used my father for the construction of the stalls; he helped him a lot. And when it was all finished, he said to my father, ‘We could use your daughter here as an orphan boy.’ I knew lots of his friends and acquaintances from the telephone. When my father asked me I immediately said yes. So I showed up as an orphan boy. The guests were all Jewish friends. Dr Goldberg was always having these fantastic ideas. Anyway, the party started in the late afternoon and lasted all night, and I was there until the morning. I had short trousers on and a little jacket with a feather on it, and I had my boots over my shoulder. It was wonderful.

  Over time I learned a lot about the insurance business there. There was always a lot of dodgy dealing going on – but still, there was a lot of money left over. Except not for me. I was getting ninety marks there again; that was the usual price for office girls at the time, but over the four years that I was there, in my last year, 1932, I went up to a hundred and twenty marks. Then, just before 1933, Dr Goldberg cut my working time by half, as his business wasn’t going so well. By then I had the feeling that he would soon be closing up his office and his flat in Germany. From then on I was only there from eight in the morning until one in the afternoon. And he had no money left and was very poor.

  At the time I had a boyfriend – Heinz, a student from Heidelberg. Not a great passion, but he was my first boyfriend. My girlfriends all had boyfriends already who they would meet up with, and I didn’t have one. We all went to a tea dance, and they had brought him along, and we were paired off. He had hardly any money because his father kept him very short of funds, because he didn’t want him to study but to take over the firm. And I had nothing either. Of the little that I had, I handed some over at home, even if it was only five marks. So there was very little left for me. And when I met Heinz, we actually only went walking. He didn’t take me to the cinema, because he would have had to pay. And I couldn’t have taken him out, because it wasn’t done in those days. When we went for a coffee, he had to pay. That was how it was; I would have insulted him if I’d said no. And anyway it wouldn’t have occurred to me. When you went for a meal or a cup of coffee or whatever with a man, he had to pay. It didn’t matter what he did or got in return. Crazy, all the rules in those days that you just unquestioningly obeyed.

  Then, and this was still before 1933, my boyfriend Heinz had two tickets for the Sportpalast, which was always an event in Berlin. Boxing matches, and then those wonderful skating displays that were typical of the Sportpalast. So I went with him. I was looking forward to it, because I didn’t know what to expect.

  He was waiting for me with a crowd of foul-smelling men, who were all sitting on benches and waiting for something. And we waited too. Suddenly there was music: a band, which played an exciting march. That was all very nice too, and then came a fat man in uniform – Hermann Göring. He delivered a speech that didn’t interest me at all. Politics. And why would it have done? I was a woman, and I didn’t need it. Afterwards I just said to Heinz, ‘Never make me go to anything like that again. It was incredibly boring.’ Then he said confidently, ‘I thought the same.’ He didn’t even try to persuade me that a party had been set up that would free Germany of the Jews, nothing like that.

  Before 1933 nobody thought about the Jews anyway; it was all invented by the Nazis later on. It was only National Socialism that made us aware that they were different people. Later that was all part of the planned programme for the extermination of the Jews. We had nothing against Jews. On the contrary: my father was very glad to have some Jewish customers, because they had the most money and always paid well. We played with the children of the Jews. There was one girl, Hilde – she was nice. And next door I remember a Jewish child my age, and I played with him sometimes, and then there was Rosa Lehmann Oppenheimer with her little soap business; I remember her too. So it never occurred to us that there was anything wrong with them. When we were growing up, nothing at all. And when National Socialism came closer and closer, we still didn’t understand what might come. And we waved at our beloved Führer. And why not? First people wanted work and money. We had lost everything in the war, and the Versailles Treaty defrauded us, we were later taught.

  None of us had any idea what was coming our way with Hitler.

  Brunhilde Pomsel carries on with her carefree life, not guessing that she will soon take a job in the centre of power of the National Socialist dictatorship, which will change her life for ever.

  For my friend Heinz, I was too stupid for politics, too immature. But there was no reason for us to fight about it. I just had somebody I could meet on Sundays. We would go somewhere on the S-Bahn, take a stroll, have a coffee, and afterwards go to his flat. It was very nice that we were able to be alone at last. Afterwards I often went to see my friends. Yes, I had friends. The boys were each more handsome than the next. One had a motorbike, and riding out of Berlin on the motorbike, into the surrounding area, that was an experience. It was all very harmless. But among themselves the boys were sometimes political, and we girls weren’t interested, we didn’t even listen. There was one who was a member of the KPD: the German Communist Party. He was still handsome. We liked him anyway. The others were certainly all Nazis or German nationalists.

  Sometimes I think, should I reproach myself for not having been interested in politics in those days? On the contrary, perhaps it was a good thing. Perhaps in youthful idealism you might have even found yourself on one side rather than another, and then you could have been killed. In those days I was easily influenced, but I had a different circle of friends. They weren’t all Nazis by any means: they were rich people’s sons, slumming it a little. None of them had jobs – they were about to go to university, or not. Their parents could afford it at least; most of them were big business people. They had their villas in Berlin-Südende, their sons were between about twenty and twenty-three, and none of them had thought about taking a job back then, or at least not so quickly. They were just bumming around really. They were my friends. Handsome boys, nice boys that you would have been pleased to meet. There were always these lovely occasions: parties, student parties. All the Gymnasien had some kind of anniversary party every year. They were often held in the Parkrestaurant in Südende. That was a wonderful meeting place for things like that in Berlin, by a lake, with a bit of forest around it, and rowing boats or dinghies.

  In the winter it was usually covered with ice, and then they turned it into a skating rink. And they had
this wonderful giant restaurant and a lovely party house, for big dances and smaller events. And even if you barely had any money for a beer, twenty pfennigs was enough, and then we drank together. The main thing was that we were sitting together in a pub. None of those young people was interested in politics. Not one. But of course there wasn’t a single Jew in the clique. Only my Jewish friend Eva Löwenthal, she was often there.

  Politics was largely uninteresting as far as we were concerned. When I see what schoolgirls get up to today, expressing their opinions and everything, I think to myself: my God, that’s a difference; that’s an incredible difference. Then I sometimes think: I’m not over a hundred years old, I’m three hundred years old. Their whole way of life is completely different.

  In late 1932 Brunhilde Pomsel meets the future radio announcer Wulf Bley. It is a crucial meeting that, after Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power, will smooth her path into broadcasting and later into Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda. The author and radio announcer Wulf Bley (b.1890 in Berlin; d.1961 in Darmstadt) joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) and the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party, in 1931. Bley was known to posterity chiefly for his observations about Hitler’s seizure of power, when on the evening of 30 January 1933 he commentated on the torch-lit procession of the National Socialists through the Brandenburg Gate and later on parts of the 1936 Olympic Games.

  Anyway, my boyfriend Heinz had an acquaintance – a writer, a flight lieutenant from the First World War. Heinz knew that I was going to have to halve my hours of work for the Jew Dr Goldberg. Heinz’s acquaintance wanted to write his memoirs and needed someone to type them up for him, and Heinz suggested that I write to him. And that was Wulf Bley, a very nice, friendly man, who didn’t live far away from us; he had a terribly nice wife and a nice son. When I turned up there was coffee and a bit of a chat. And then I put his thoughts down on paper. And it went on like that. Herr Bley had a friend, Captain Busch. He lived in Berlin-Lichterfelde. He wanted to write his memoirs as well, and could I perhaps help? He was very generous. So I went there every day and worked until dinnertime. Then one of his sons would drive me home. They had a lot of money, and he almost made me rich. And so at the end of 1932 I was working for the Jewish Dr Goldberg in the morning, and on some afternoons for the Nazi Wulf Bley. I was sometimes asked if I didn’t think it was a bit reckless, working for a Nazi and a Jew? No. At the time I was at least one of the ones who still had a job. There were huge numbers of unemployed in those days. Almost all my friends were unemployed. And I had been with Dr Goldberg for four years; that was lovely. That was before 1933. But then all at once everything changed.