Hertha Thiele - Career in Weimar and Nazi Germany

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 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.

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 was reunited with Dorothea Wieck in another lesbian-themed film, Anna und Elisabeth, 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 (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 Dr. 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 further efforts to reach a workable understanding with Goebbels, by 1936 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.