Hertha Thiele: Movies & Filmography

Hertha Thiele (8 May 1908 – 5 August 1984) was a prominent German actress best known for her work during the Weimar Republic and the early years of Nazi Germany. Born in Leipzig, she began her professional acting career in 1928 as a stage actress. One of her early drama teachers famously told her that she would either have a "great stage career or nothing at all," noting her Botticelli face but one which suggested depravity. Thiele rose to international fame in 1931 with her starring role as Manuela in Mädchen in Uniform, a controversial lesbian-themed film set in a Prussian boarding school for girls. The film, distributed internationally, briefly made her a star and she received thousands of fan letters, mostly from women. She continued to appear in notable films including Kuhle Wampe (1932) with Ernst Busch and Bertolt Brecht, and Anna and Elizabeth (1933), another lesbian-themed film banned by the Nazis soon after its release. Her career was significantly hampered when she refused to cooperate with the Nazi propaganda machine, famously telling propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that she did not "blow with the wind each time it changes directions." Excluded from the Reichstheater and Reichsfilmkammer, she fled to Switzerland in 1937, where she struggled to find acting work for several years despite her earlier international fame.

After World War II, Thiele returned to East Germany but was unsuccessful in her efforts to establish a theatre. She spent most of the 1950s and 1960s working as a psychiatric nursing assistant in Switzerland before returning to the GDR in 1966. She performed in stage productions in Magdeburg and Leipzig, and became a familiar face on East German television during the 1970s, appearing in popular series such as Polizeiruf 110. Her work was honored with the Art Prize of East Germany and the National Prize of East Germany, as well as the Fatherland Service Order. In 1975, her 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 the Deutsche Kinemathek. Toward the end of her life, Western feminists researching the history of Mädchen in Uniform sought her out, bringing her a small measure of renewed cult celebrity. Thiele reportedly married more than once, with one of her husbands being actor Heinz Klingenberg. She died in East Berlin in 1984 at the age of 76, leaving behind a complex legacy as both a victim of political persecution and an enduring icon of early feminist cinema.