Career in Weimar and Nazi Germany
One of her early drama teachers told Thiele "Either you'll have a great stage career or nothing at all. You have a Botticelli face but one which suggests depravity". Thiele began her professional acting career in 1928 as a stage actress in Leipzig. In 1931, she was given the lead role in Gestern und heute, the film adaptation of a play she had done there, but now called Mädchen in Uniform , a tale set in a Prussian boarding school for girls. The film had an all-female cast, and Thiele played Manuela, a 14-year-old schoolgirl deeply infatuated with her teacher Fräulein von Bernburg, played by Dorothea Wieck. Mädchen in Uniform was distributed internationally and briefly made Thiele a star. She received thousands of fan letters, mostly from women.
In 1932, she starred with Ernst Busch in Bertolt Brecht's Kuhle Wampe . In 1933, Thiele had a leading role in Kleiner Mann, was nun? and reunited with Dorothea Wieck in Anna and Elizabeth , another lesbian-themed film that was banned by the Nazis soon after it opened and which she later said was the most important work of her career. She also continued to work in theatre during the early 1930s, including productions with Max Reinhardt (Harmonie, 1932) and Veit Harlan (Veronika, 1935).
Her career was thwarted when the Nazi government approached her with repeated requests to assist in the production of National Socialist propaganda. During one meeting with propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who advised Thiele to "familiarise" herself with National Socialism, she replied "I don't blow with the wind each time it changes directions". Although she made efforts to reach a workable understanding with Goebbels, the Nazis had come to view her work as mostly subversive, and she was excluded from the Reichstheater and Reichsfilmkammer. In 1937, she left Germany for Switzerland. It was another five years before she was able to find acting work in Bern.
Later fame in East Germany
Hertha Thiele returned to East Germany after the war but was unsuccessful in her efforts to begin a theatre. She returned to Switzerland and worked as a psychiatric nursing assistant during most of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, Thiele again returned to the GDR, working in stage productions in Magdeburg and Leipzig. During the 1970s, she was often seen on East German television acting in sundry series and television films which were virtually unknown in West Germany, including the popular Polizeiruf 110 . In 1975, Thiele's work was featured in the television documentary Das Herz auf der linken Seite and in 1983 a monograph on her life and work was published by Deutsche Kinemathek.
Thiele reportedly married more than once. One of her husbands was actor Heinz Klingenberg.
Toward the end of her life, Western feminists researching the history of Mädchen in Uniform sought her out, and she enjoyed a small measure of renewed cult celebrity before she died in 1984.
In 1998 German film historians Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramman noted "her acting success may well have been based upon her image which met the homo-erotic desires of both men and women, though perhaps more those of women", and that Hertha Thiele "told us she would have liked to have played a 'proper love scene' with a man, once in her life: her image, moulded by men, didn't allow her the expression of this desire".
Hanns Eisler was an Austrian composer. He is best known for composing the national anthem of East Germany, for his long artistic association with Bertolt Brecht, and for the scores he wrote for films. The Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" is named after him.
Irmgard Keun was a German novelist. Noted for her portrayals of the life of women, she is described as "often reduced to the bold sexuality of her writing, [yet] a significant author of the late Weimar period and die Neue Sachlichkeit." She was born into an affluent family and was given the autonomy to explore her passions. After her attempts at acting ended at the age of 16, Keun began working as a writer after years of working in Hamburg and Greifswald. Her books were banned by Nazi authorities but gained recognition during the final years of her life.
Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Busch was a German singer and actor.
Leontine Sagan was an Austrian-Hungarian theatre director and actress of Jewish descent. She is best known for directing Mädchen in Uniform (1931).
Mädchen in Uniform is a 1931 German romantic drama film based on the play Gestern und heute by Christa Winsloe and directed by Leontine Sagan with artistic direction from Carl Froelich, who also funded the film. Winsloe also wrote the screenplay and was on the set during filming. The film remains an international cult classic.
Christa Winsloe, formerly Baroness Christa von Hatvany-Deutsch, was a German-Hungarian novelist, playwright and sculptor, best known for her play Gestern und heute, filmed in 1931 as Mädchen in Uniform and the 1958 remake. Winsloe was the first to write a play on female homosexuality in the Weimar Republic, yet without a "radical critique of the social discrimination of lesbian women."
Dora Gerson was a German cabaret singer and stage and motion picture actress of the silent film era who was murdered with her family at Auschwitz concentration camp.
Kuhle Wampe is a 1932 German feature film about unemployment, homelessness and left wing politics in the Weimar Republic produced by Prometheus Film. The script was conceived and written by Bertolt Brecht. He also directed the concluding scene: a political debate between strangers on a train about the world coffee market. The rest of the film was directed by Slatan Dudow. The film music was composed by Hanns Eisler.
Slatan Theodor Dudow was a Bulgarian born film director and screenwriter who made a number of films during the Weimar Republic and in East Germany.
Erwin Geschonneck was a German actor. His biggest success occurred in the German Democratic Republic, where he was considered one of the most famous actors of the time.
Therese Giehse, born Therese Gift, was a German actress. Born in Munich to German-Jewish parents, she first appeared on the stage in 1920. She became a major star on stage, in films, and in political cabaret. In the late 1920s through 1933, she was a leading actress at the Munich Kammerspiele.
Theo Lingen, born Franz Theodor Schmitz, was a German actor, film director and screenwriter. He appeared in more than 230 films between 1929 and 1978, and directed 21 films between 1936 and 1960.
Dorothea Wieck, born Dora Bertha Olavia Wieck, was a German theatre and film actress.
Das häßliche Mädchen is a German comedy film made in early 1933, during the transition from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, and premièred in September that year. It was the first or second film directed by Hermann Kosterlitz, who left Germany before the film was completed and later worked in the United States under the name Henry Koster, and the last German film in which Dolly Haas appeared; she also later emigrated to the US. A riot broke out at the première to protest the male lead, Max Hansen, who was supposedly "too Jewish." The film's representation of the "ugly girl" as outsider has been described as a metaphorical way to explore the outsider existence of Jews.
Mezhrabpomfilm, from the word film, and the Russian acronym for Workers International Relief or Workers International Aid (Russian: Международная рабочая помощь, was a German-Russian film studio, formerly Mezhrabpom-Rus, from 1922-1936. Currently “Gorky Film Studio”
Gerhard Max Richard Bienert was a German stage and film actor.
Carmen-Maja Antoni is a German actress.
Anna and Elizabeth is a 1933 German drama film directed by Frank Wisbar and starring Dorothea Wieck, Hertha Thiele and Mathias Wieman. The film reunited Wieck and Thiele who had starred in Mädchen in Uniform together two years earlier.
The "Solidaritätslied" is a revolutionary working song written between 1929 and 1931 by Bertolt Brecht, and set to music by Hanns Eisler. It was written against the background of the Great Depression, the Great War (1914–18), and the social issues caused by the Industrial Revolution that were explored in Brecht's 1932 film Kuhle Wampe in which the song also appeared.
Walter Husemann was a German communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. As a young man, Husemann trained an industrial toolmaker, before training as a journalist. He became interested in politics and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). With the arrival of the Nazis in 1933, he became a resistance fighter and through his wife, the actor Marta Husemann, he became associated with an anti-fascist resistance group around Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo. Along with John Sieg whom he met in the KPD and Fritz Lange, Martin Weise and Herbert Grasse he wrote and published the resistance magazine, The Internal Front Die Innere Front.
