Biography:

Hertha Thiele was born in Leipzig on May 8, 1908. There she began her acting career at the age of twenty and played the lead in the theater production Yesterday and Today. She was later cast as the lead in the film adaptation of the play, which became famous under the title Mädchen in Uniform. The critics praised her performance in this film and compared her to Greta Garbo. Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow also saw her in this groundbreaking lesbian role and cast her for the lead in Kuhle Wampe, oder Wem gehört die Welt?

After 1933, she refused to appear in Nazi propaganda movies and was prohibited from working as an actor in Germany. In 1937, Thiele went to Switzerland as a political emigrée. She finally got a brief acting engagement at a theater in Bern, after which she continued working at the theater as a prompter. In 1949, she returned to Germany, where she worked in radio and tried to set up a theater. When this failed, she returned to Bern, where she worked first as an actor and then as a psychiatric nurse assistant. After visiting her sister in East Germany in 1965, Thiele never returned to Switzerland. She performed in theaters in Magdeburg and Leipzig and was a member of the East German television ensemble (1968-1979). Hertha Thiele died on August 5, 1984 in Berlin.