Hertha Thiele - Later Fame in East Germany

Later Fame in East Germany

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. During the 1970s she was often seen on East German television acting in sundry series and made-for-television films which were virtually unknown in West Germany, including the popular Polizeiruf 110. 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 Kinematek.

Thiele reportedly married more than once. One of her husbands was actor Heinz Klingenberg.

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 her death in 1984.

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".