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).
Girls in Uniform, To Whom Does the World Belong?, The Eleven Schill Officers, Man Without a Name
Star Sign
Taurus
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Quote
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To Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany's propaganda minister, when she refused to assist in the production of propaganda movies: "I don't blow with the wind each time it changes directions."
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Fact
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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".
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In 1931 she was given the lead role in the film adaptation of a play she had done there, Gestern und heute 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 fourteen-year-old schoolgirl deeply infatuated with her teacher, Fräulein von Bernburg who was 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.
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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".
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When she refused to act in the propaganda movie "Hans Westmar" in 1933 this meant the end of her career in the National Socialist Germany. She was excluded from the Reichstheater and Reichsfilmkammer in 1936, one year later she went to Switzerland where she carried on "middle-class" works for the time being. Only from 1942 she got a contract at the Stadttheater Bern and was able to appear on stage again.
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She continued to work in theatre during the early 1930s, including productions with Max Reinhardt (Harmonie, 1932) and Veit Harlan (Veronika, 1935).
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After the movie 'Mädchen in Uniform' (1931)she was reunited again with Dorothea Wieck in another lesbian-themed film, Anna und Elisabeth (1933), which was banned by the Nazis soon after it opened and which she later said was the most important work of her career.
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Towards 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.
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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.
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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.
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In 1975 Thiele's work was featured in a television documentary, Das Herz auf der linken Seite and in 1983 a monograph on her life and work was published by Deutsche Kinemathek.
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Her father worked as a locksmith.
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After refusing to appear in Nazi propaganda movies, she was prohibited to work as an actress in Germany and emigrated to Switzerland (1937).
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Although returning to Germany in 1949, where she didn't succeed in staring a theater career, she later lived again in Switzerland and Paris, working as a psychiatric nursing assistant. In 1966, she finally returned to East Germany.