Hertha Thiele

Hertha Thiele (8 May 1908 – 5 August 1984) was a German actress. She is noted for her starring roles in then controversial stage plays and films produced during Germany's Weimar Republic and the early years of the Third Reich. After the post-war partition of Germany, Thiele became a television star in East Germany. She is best remembered for her portrayal of Manuela in the lesbian-themed film Mädchen in Uniform (1931). 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.