Biography:

Elfriede Née (Ruth Solter) was born in 1922 in Königsberg (now: Kaliningrad, Russia). She worked in Lübeck, Erlangen and Darmstadt. In 1948, she moved to Leipzig and played at the Schauspielhaus, including in Goethe’s Faust (1949). After director Wolfgang Langhoff saw her in a guest performance of the Leipzig theater at the Berliner Ensemble, he invited her to join the ensemble of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1953, where she worked with well-known directors, including Wolfgang Heinz and Klaus Erforth.

Parallel to her theater work, Elfriede Née performed in film. One of her memorable supporting roles is Ruth Solter, the wife of the engineer who tries to fight against old methods of management, in Günter Stahnke’s banned film Der Frühling braucht Zeit. Née was also cast for Lied der Matrosen (dir. Kurt Maetzig) and for Frank Beyer’s docu-drama Rottenknechte about the fate of German marines at the end of WWII. Elfriede Née shared the screen with leading East German actors, including Ekkehard Schall, Günter Simon, Dieter Mann, Fred Düren and Alexander Lang.

Née hit the Neues Deutschland headlines when she refused to join a protest during the workers’ uprising and was struck down by angry demonstrators on June 17, 1953.