Hertha Thiele

German actress Hertha Thiele (1908-1984) is noted for her starring roles in controversial stage plays and films produced during Germany's Weimar Republic and the early years of the Third Reich. Thiele later became a television star in East Germany. She began her professional acting career in 1928 as a stage actress in Leipzig where she had her breakthrough two years later with the play Krankheit der Jugend, a tale set in a Prussian boarding school for girls. She made her film debut in the adaptation, Mädchen in Uniform (1931, Leontine Sagan). Thiele played Manuela, a schoolgirl deeply infatuated with her teacher, played by Dorothea Wieck. Thiele became a star and received thousands of fan letters, mostly from women. She starred with Ernst Busch in Bertolt Brecht's Kuhle Wampe (1932, Slatan Dudow). Thiele had a leading role in Kleiner Mann, was nun? (1933, Fritz Wendhausen) and was reunited with Dorothea Wieck in another lesbian-themed film, Anna und Elisabeth (1933, Frank Wisbar), which 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 and Veit Harlan .

Her career was thwarted when the Nazi government approached her in 1933 to appear in the propaganda film Hans Westmar. She replied to propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, "I don't blow with the wind each time it changes directions." In 1936 she was excluded from the Reichstheater and Reichsfilmkammer and in 1937 she left Germany for Switzerland. It was another five years before she was able to find acting work in Bern. In 1949 she went to East Germany, where she didn't succeed in beginning a theater,. For years she lived again in Switzerland and Paris, working as a psychiatric nursing assistant. In 1966, she finally returned to East Germany. She worked in stage productions and during the 1970s she was often seen in sundry tv series and made-for-tv films, including the popular Polizeiruf 110. In 1975 Thiele's work was featured in a television documentary, Das Herz auf der linken Seite and in 1983 a monography on her life and work was published by Deutsche Kinematek. To her last movies belong Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973, Heiner Carow) and Die Unverbesserliche Barbara (1977, Lothar Warneke). One of her husbands was actor Heinz Klingenberg.

Sources: Wikipedia, Cyranos.ch and IMDb.

German postcard by RossVerlag, no. 684. Photo by Gerstenberg-Dührkoop, Berlin.