Carola Neher

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Carola Neher in Fallen Angels by Noël Coward , drawing by Julie Wolfthorn (1929)

Carola Neher (born November 2, 1900 in Munich , † June 26, 1942 in Sol-Ilezk , Soviet Union ) was a German actress who achieved success in Berlin around 1930. Fled from National Socialist Germany , she died in a camp in the Stalinist Soviet Union.

Life

Carola Neher, daughter of a music teacher and a landlady, worked as a bank clerk from 1917 to 1919 after attending a commercial school . Without thorough training, she played at the Baden-Baden theater from summer 1920 to 1922 , then in Darmstadt and Nuremberg . Eventually she was hired at the Munich Kammerspiele , but only received piece contracts for small roles. In 1924 she went to the Lobe Theater in Breslau , where Therese Giehse and Peter Lorre also played. She was followed there from Munich by the poet Klabund (Alfred Henschke), whom she married on May 5, 1925. The lung sick Klabund, ten years older than her, was already a well-known poet. The world premiere of his play Der Kreidekreis in Meißen was her first great success for Carola Neher.

In 1926 she went to Berlin , where she worked with Bertolt Brecht . When she was rehearsing Brecht's Threepenny Opera (as Polly) in 1928 , her husband Klabund died of tuberculosis in Davos . That is why the legendary premiere of the piece took place without her. Neher only took over the role when it was resumed in May 1929; Now there were also sound recordings of the song by the pirate Jenny and the Barbara song .

In the next few years Brecht wrote the roles of the Salvation Army soldier Lilian Holiday in Happy End and Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses for her . In 1931 she played Polly in the film adaptation of the Threepenny Opera . In the same year she celebrated further successes as Marianne in Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods and in the revue I dance around the world with you .

After a liaison with the conductor Hermann Scherchen , she married the Romanian engineer Anatol Becker in 1932 . In 1933, Neher , who was close to the KPD , signed an appeal against Hitler together with other artists . Therefore, in the spring of that year, she thought it appropriate to leave Germany. Together with Anatol Becker, she first went to Prague , where she played in Shaw's Pygmalion and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew at the New German Theater . In 1934 both emigrated to the Soviet Union; In November of the same year, the National Socialist-led government revoked her German citizenship . In Moscow they were involved in the cabaret column Links under the direction of Gustav von Wangenheim . Their son Georg was born on December 26, 1934. Neher worked as a journalist, recited and gave acting lessons. Her initial hope for a continuation of her film career in the Soviet Union was not fulfilled.

Captivity and death

On July 25, 1936, Carola Neher and her husband were arrested in the course of the Great Terror . Becker was executed as a “ Trotskyist ” in 1937 , and Neher was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp. After five years in prison, she died in the camp sol-iletsk in Orenburg to typhoid .

The document-based account of the sociologist Reinhard Müller , Neher and her husband had been denounced as Trotskyists by Gustav von Wangenheim, but was later rejected by his son as one-sided and inaccurate. The documents at hand, as far as they are printed in Reinhard Müller's publications, make the allegations against von Wangenheim appear highly dubious. According to the court ruling, Carola Neher was specifically convicted of alleged messenger service for Erich Wollenberg , "by delivering a directive letter from him to the members of the counter-revolutionary terrorist organization Moscow". In the minutes of the interrogation of Wangenheim by the NKVD , this accusation does not play a role, if only because this letter from Wangenheim should not have been known, at least at the time of his interrogation. In Carola Neher's indictment, also printed in the appendix to the documentation Die Säuberung published by Reinhard Müller, only the allegation of fraud in connection with Neher's membership in the KPD appears in addition to the messenger service mentioned. Anatol Becker as well as Hermann Taubenberger and Abram Rosenblum are listed as witnesses .

Let down?

In particular, Bertolt Brecht, a well-known German writer, could have tried as an emigrant to get Neher's release. Some contemporaries accuse him of failing to do so. The Trotskyist Walter Held accused Brecht, who was living in Denmark at that time (1938), for his silence:

“The saddest and most embarrassing chapter of this bloody tragedy [the murder of Carola Neher and other emigrants] is the attitude of the official German emigration towards the fate of their members who emigrated to the Soviet Union. The German 'People's Front': Messrs Heinrich and Thomas Mann , Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger , Arnold Zweig , ' die Weltbühne ', the ' Pariser Tageszeitung ', the 'Volkszeitung', [...] all of them, all of them are silent. You, Mr. Brecht, knew Karola Neher. They know that she was neither a terrorist nor a spy, but a brave person and a great artist. Why are you silent? Because Stalin paid for your publication ' Das Wort ', the most mendacious and depraved magazine that has ever been published by German intellectuals? How do you get the courage to protest against Hitler's murder of Liese Hermann, Edgar André and Hans Litten ? Do you really believe that you can break the dungeon gates of the Third Reich with lies, servitude and baseness? "

Margarete Buber-Neumann expresses himself in a similar way decades later in her memoirs As Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler . Before she was deported to Nazi Germany, she met and fell in love with Neher in the Butyrka prison in Moscow in January 1940 . At that time, Neher had already attempted suicide in the notorious Lubyanka , but above all the painful separation from her son behind him. After twelve days, Buber-Neumann was picked up for the "onward journey":

“When I hugged Carola, she sobbed: 'I'm lost ...' That was the last I heard from her. I never saw her again. Bert Brecht, her friend and colleague, replied many years later when asked about Carola Neher's fate that she was running a children's theater in Leningrad and that she was doing well. He did not mention the years of her imprisonment. The truth of his answer is more than doubtful. "

Sabine Kebir refers to Brecht's attempts to stand up for Carola Neher at Lion Feuchtwanger. Very cautiously avoiding any attack on the Soviet judiciary (“without complicating the work of the judicial authorities”) and citing the model Maxim Gorky , who stood up for artists and scientists, he tried to persuade Feuchtwanger “to go to the secretariat of Stalin to inquire about the proximity ”. That is also in the interests of the Union, "given the reputation it enjoys in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland". Brecht repeated his request to Feuchtwanger in May 1937. Feuchtwanger replied on May 30th that he had not received Brecht's first letter. Regarding Neher's arrest, he wrote: “Carola Neher was locked up while I was in M.. She is said to be involved in a treasonous plot by her husband. I don't know the details. ”In a draft letter, Brecht states that he also asked about Carola Neher elsewhere. "I myself have not received an answer to a question from anyone, which I don't appreciate."

Further reception

Neher's son Georg managed to leave the Soviet Union for Germany in 1975. He had not seen his mother after the arrest and then lived in the orphanage and later with foster parents. Georg didn't find out who his parents were until 1946. The search for traces of his mother took him to Moscow, Sol-Ilezk (where Carola Neher was arrested) and Berlin in the late phase of the Soviet Union. In 1990 Lichtfilm GmbH shot a documentary about it on behalf of WDR .

In 1995 the play Pale Mother, Tender Sister by Jorge Semprún , in which the life of Carola Neher is dealt with, was premiered in Weimar in a Russian military cemetery below the Belvedere Palace . The role of Carola Neher / Iphigenie was played by Hanna Schygulla , directed by Klaus Michael Grüber .

From October to December 2016, the exhibition Carola Neher (1900–1942): Actress took place in the Literaturhaus Berlin .

Honors

Berlin memorial plaque on the house, Fürstenplatz 2, in Berlin-Westend (2017)

In the Berlin district of Hellersdorf , a Carola-Neher-Straße has been commemorating the actress since 1992 . There is a Carola-Neher-Strasse in Munich, which was inaugurated on November 15, 2013.

In Moscow, as part of the Posledny adres (Last Address) project , a memorial plaque with the (Russian) inscription “Last address of actress Carola Neher” was placed on the facade of the house at 36 Krasnoprudnaja Street on February 5, 2017.

On December 7, 2017 , a Berlin memorial plaque was unveiled at her former place of residence, Berlin-Westend , Fürstenplatz 2 .

roll

Theater (premiere roles)

Movies

Radio plays

literature

Web links

Commons : Carola Neher  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Republished on the CD Die Dreigroschenoper Berlin 1930. (Teldec Classic International)
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Bergmann: Carola Neher. TV documentary Lichtfilm / WDR 1990
  3. ↑ Reinhard Müller: Human trap Moscow. Exile and Stalinist Persecution. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-930908-71-9 .
  4. ↑ Von Wangenheim's son stated that his father, himself arrested by the NKVD and accused of "monarchist plans to overthrow", merely signed a protocol after prolonged interrogation that incriminated Carola Neher as "anti-Soviet". Von Wangenheim expressly rejected the accusation that Neher and her husband Anatol Becker had planned the murder of Stalin. See Friedel von Wangenheim : My father Gustav Freiherr von Wangenheim and the case of the actress Carola Neher. In Wangenheim Nachrichten , No. 25, from December 1998, ZDB -ID 2303658-8 .
  5. ↑ Stalin's German Victims and the Popular Front. In: Our word. (Exil-Zeitschrift) No. 4/5, October 1938, p. 7 f .; quoted from Michael Rohrwasser : Stalinism and the renegades. The literature of the excommunists. Metzler, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-476-00765-0 , p. 163; Brackets in the quote taken from Rohrwasser.
  6. ↑ Margarete Buber-Neumann : As prisoners with Stalin and Hitler. Herford 1985. Quoted from the licensed edition, 2nd edition. Ullstein-Taschenbuchverlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-548-36332-6 , p. 179. On the whole, Neher is mentioned repeatedly on pages 165 to 179. Buber-Neumann also mentions the futile attempts of the NKVD to lure Neher with an offer to become a Russian spy (p. 176).
  7. ↑ Sabine Kebir: Brecht and the political systems. In: From Politics and Contemporary History . APuZ , Heft 23/24, 2006, pp. 22-29, here p. 26; Retrieved January 9, 2011.
  8. ^ Bertolt Brecht: Works. Large annotated Berlin and Frankfurt edition. Volume 29: Letters , 2: 1937-1949. Suhrkamp u. a., Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-40029-0 , p. 14.
  9. ^ Bertolt Brecht: Works. Large annotated Berlin and Frankfurt edition. Volume 29: Letters , 2: 1937-1949. Suhrkamp u. a., Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-40029-0 , p. 13.
  10. ^ Bertolt Brecht: Works. Large annotated Berlin and Frankfurt edition. Volume 29: Letters , 2: 1937-1949. Suhrkamp u. a., Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-40029-0 , p. 14.
  11. ^ Bertolt Brecht: Works. Large annotated Berlin and Frankfurt edition. Volume 29: Letters , 2: 1937-1949. Suhrkamp u. a., Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-40029-0 , p. 14.
  12. ↑ Moscow
  13. ^ Bertolt Brecht: Works. Large annotated Berlin and Frankfurt edition. Volume 29: Letters , 2: 1937-1949. Suhrkamp u. a., Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-40029-0 , pp. 587f.
  14. ^ Bertolt Brecht: Works. Large annotated Berlin and Frankfurt edition. Volume 29: Letters , 2: 1937-1949. Suhrkamp u. a., Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-40029-0 , p. 30.
  15. ↑ Berlin celebrates the acting icon Carola Neher. Welt.de on November 28, 2016.
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Bergmann: Carola Neher. TV documentary Lichtfilm / WDR, 1990.
  17. ^ Exhibition page ( Memento from November 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on November 28, 2016.
  18. ^ Tilman Krause: She was the most beautiful German woman around 1930. welt.de , November 28, 2016.
  19. ^ Carola Neher , theatermuseum.de
  20. ↑ Moscow, 36 Krasnoprudnaya Street . in the Posledny adres project (Russian) accessed on August 5, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Neher, Carola
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actress
DATE OF BIRTH November 2, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 1942
Place of death Sol-Ilezk , now the Russian Federation