Gina Kaus - Biography

Biography

Regina Wiener, the daughter of money broker Max Wiener, attended an all-girls school. Regina married the Viennese musician Josef Zirner in 1913, but he died in 1915 on the battlefield in World War I. She was the mistress and common law wife of the banker Josef Kranz and used the last name Zirner-Kaus. Four years later, 1920, she married the writer Otto Kaus, but the couple divorced in 1926, after the birth of two sons, Otto and Peter.

In the twenties, Gina Kaus published her first novel The Rise, which won the Theodor Fontane Prize. And was very active in the circle of literary intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna. She had friendships with both Austrian writers Karl Kraus and a romance with Otto Soyka; in her autobiography she would write "... I had a lover, I am not loved." in 1933 she would watch both their books fall victim to the Nazi Bücherverbrennung or book burnings.

Kaus had visited America in 1936. And in March 1938 she moved from Vienna via Zurich to Paris. In Paris she wrote two screenplays from her novels "Gefangnis ohne Gitter" and "Die Schwestern Kleeh", which became the popular movies "Prison sans barreaux" and "Conflict", before coming to the United states in 1939. After a few months in New York, she settled in Hollywood in November 1939. Her 1940 novel written Devil Next Door was filmed by director Rolf Hansen in 1956, with Lilli Palmer and Curt Jürgens as Teufel in Seide or the Devil in Silk. Gina Kaus wrote many scripts in Hollywood, and would not return to Vienna until 1948 and visit Berlin until 1951.

In 1979 Kaus wrote an autobiography published in Germany as : Und was für ein Leben...mit Liebe und Literatur, Theater und Film.

She died in Los Angeles in 1985.