Berta Waterstradt

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Berta Waterstradt , née Wiener (born August 9, 1907 in Katowice ; † May 8, 1990 in Berlin ) was a German radio play and screenwriter. She also appeared as a narrator and playwright.

Life

Memorial plaque on her home at Altheider Strasse 21 in Adlershof , which was unveiled on her 100th birthday

She was the daughter of a Jewish businessman and first learned to be a stenographer. Since 1925 she lived in Berlin. In 1930 she became a member of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers (BPRS). In the following year she joined the KPD and wrote poems, satires and short stories for the party press ( Die Rote Fahne , Linkskurve ). In 1933 she was temporarily imprisoned and then emigrated to Great Britain, but returned to Germany in 1934 to do resistance work there in the illegality. In 1936 she was arrested again and sentenced to two and a half years in prison. After her imprisonment, she lived on in Berlin and had to do forced labor in the Siemens works; her marriage to the non-Jewish locksmith Rudi Waterstradt protected her from deportation.

From 1945 she was active in the cultural reconstruction in East Germany, for example through corresponding engagement in large Berlin companies or as a dramaturge for the Berlin radio . She then mainly worked as a freelance writer and wrote mostly radio plays in which everyday problems in post-war Germany were discussed in a humorous way. Her first radio play During the electricity lock served as a template for the DEFA film Die Buntkarierte , for which she received the national prize of the GDR 2nd class in 1949 . In 1958 she also wrote the play Ehesache Lorenz , which was filmed in the same year by Joachim Kunert , and the scripts for the television films Kubinke (1962) and Mathilde (1964) based on the literary models by Georg Hermann and Theodor Fontane . From 1956 she worked for the monthly magazine Das Magazin , where she published rhymed travel reports together with the illustrator Elizabeth Shaw .

Waterstradt died at the age of 82 and was buried in the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery .

Works

  • I was a radio pioneer. In: Memories of Socialist Broadcasting Pioneers. Pp. 71-74. Berlin (East) 1975.
  • Look back and wonder. Eulenspiegel Verlag, Berlin 1985.

Filmography

Radio plays

literature

  • Waterstradt, Berta . In: Proletarian Revolutionary Literature 1918 to 1933 . People and Knowledge, Berlin 1970, p. 325. (= contemporary writers 9)
  • Elfriede Brüning : Companions: Portraits of forgotten women . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-320-02242-6 .
  • Waterstradt, Berta , in: Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.2. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 1211

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. So short that it’s a shame - stories by Berta Waterstrad , original sound portrait by Heide Böwe and Matthias Thalheim, Rundfunk der DDR 1989, 55 min.