Christa Winsloe

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Marble bust Christa Winsloe by Heinrich Jobst

Christa "Kate" Winsloe (born December 23, 1888 in Darmstadt ; † June 10, 1944 near Cluny , France ) was a German - Hungarian writer , screenwriter , playwright and sculptor.

Live and act

Young years

Christa Winsloe was born in Darmstadt in 1888 as the daughter of an officer. When her mother died, Winsloe was only eleven years old. Since her father was overwhelmed with her upbringing, he sent her in 1903 to the Kaiserin-Augusta-Stift in Potsdam , a boarding school for officer's daughters. The girls were brought up there with military drill and very strict rules. This time became a nightmare for Christa Winsloe, which shaped her life and is also reflected in her later work. Later she was able to attend a higher daughter boarding school in Switzerland.

education and profession

In 1909 she moved to Munich because she was one of the few women who wanted to learn sculpture at the Royal School of Applied Arts . She mainly modeled animals that she especially loved.

In 1913 she married the Hungarian sugar factory heir, writer and literary critic Baron Lajos Hatvany and moved to Hungary . When the First World War broke out, the two were on their honeymoon in Paris and then drove back to Hungary. Winsloe continued to work there as a sculptor and had contacts with literary circles. It was there that she met Dorothy Thompson , the US foreign correspondent , who would later become her friend and partner. In 1922 Winsloe and Hatvany separated and Winsloe returned to Germany, where she settled in Berlin and set up a studio.

After her divorce in 1924, Winsloe bought a large house in the Schwabing district of Munich and lived there with her animals, which she modeled, earning herself the name Master of the Guinea Pig . She now also began to write and published her first articles in the Berliner Tageblatt , in the magazine Cross Section , in the Vossische Zeitung and in Tempo . She belonged to the Munich Bohème and was friends with Kurt Wolff , Erich Mühsam , Joachim Ringelnatz and Erika and Klaus Mann , among others .

Her first play also fell during this time: the play Knight Nérestan was a stage success in 1930, which was made into a film by Leontine Sagan a short time later under the title Girls in Uniform (1931) and made the author famous worldwide for a short time. In addition, Winsloe wrote a novel version under the title Das Mädchen Manuela and other plays such as fate as desired .

After the National Socialists came to power , Winsloe, who had been a Hungarian citizen since she married, began to travel more and more. Together with Dorothy Thompson , with whom she shared a passionate love, she first went to Italy and later to the United States . There she wrote for the Saturday Evening Post , Harper's Bazaar and the Ladies Home Journal, among others . Among other things, she tried her hand as a screenwriter in Hollywood , where she was unsuccessful. Eventually Christa Winsloe returned to Europe, where she settled in the south of France. Here she lived with her partner, the Swiss translator Simone Gentet.

Second World War

Due to the war, they had to settle in Cluny in the Rhone valley at the beginning of 1944 . In order to escape the poverty, loneliness and lack of prospects in her exile, Winsloe had tried since 1942 to obtain a German visa to travel to Hungary. Before she could start the journey, which had been approved after a long waiting period, in the summer of 1944, a group of French abducted her and Gentet to the Cluny forest, which was controlled by the Resistance , to shoot them on June 10, 1944. The background to the fact remains unclear. In a letter from Paris dated July 1, 1945, Klaus Mann reported, apparently circulating in France about the reasons for the execution , that German officers had been hidden in Winsloe's Riviera house . Then , on June 2, 1946 , Hilde Walter , a recognized journalist who had emigrated from Germany to the United States, reported the execution of Winsloe in the “ Neue Volkszeitung ” under the heading “What did Christa Winsloe do?” With all sorts of speculations. This prompted Thompson to ask the French ambassador to the United States for clarification. He informed her in December 1946 that Winsloe was not arrested by the Maquis but was murdered by a man named Lambert who falsely claims he had carried out orders from an underground organization . Lambert is now in jail and is charged with premeditated murder . The American author Peter Kurth later investigated the murder charges. In June 1987 he received the names of the three co-defendants Lamberts from France and the information that all four of the defendants had been acquitted in 1948 and that no more could be said about them. In the biography of Christa Winsloe's life published in 2012, the author Doris Hermanns refers to the trial documents, from which it emerges that it was considered proven that Winsloe and Gentet were not spies. The defendants were acquitted in 1948 on the grounds that the behavior of the women had aroused suspicion, but this, according to Hermanns, was a terrible mistake .

Works

Christa Winsloe wrote the play Ritter Nérestan (first performance in Leipzig in 1930, second production in Berlin in 1931 under the title Yesterday and Today ) about the lesbian love of a boarding school student for her teacher, with whom she spent her youth as a pupil at the Kaiserin-Augusta-Stift in Potsdam literarily processed. The play was such a success that it was filmed in 1931 under the title "Mädchen in Uniform" . Winsloe wrote the script herself, but the director Leontine Sagan changed the ending and focused less on the history of the lesbian relationship than on the criticism of the educational system of the time. Winsloe then wrote the “book about the film” in 1933: In the novel Das Mädchen Manuela , she corrected the happy ending of the film, under whose title the later editions of the novel were nevertheless published.

In 1958 the remake of the film was made, also with the well-known title Girls in Uniform , directed by Géza von Radványi , with Romy Schneider , Lilli Palmer and Therese Giehse in the leading roles. The material had already been remade in Mexico and Japan: Muchachas de uniforme ( Girls Without Love , 1951) by Alfredo B. Crevenna and Onna no sono (1954) by Keisuke Kinoshita . Christa Reinig wrote the stories Girls Without Uniform (1981) and Die Ewige Schule (1982) in a literary analysis of Winsloe's work .

Drama (selection)

  • Yesterday and today. Play in three acts and twelve pictures. Berlin: Georg Marton , 1930.
  • Sylvia and Sybille. Acting in six pictures. 1931 Unsalable stage manuscript from LITAG Theaterverlag, Munich .
  • Fate as you wish. A time comedy in four parts and a foreplay. Berlin: Georg Marton, 1932.
  • Home in need. (previously unpublished, in the estate)
  • The step over. Comedy in three acts. Basel : Reiss , 1940.

Novels

  • The black sheep. 1913 (unpublished debut novel, from the estate)
  • The girl Manuela. The novel by: Girls in Uniform. Leipzig: EP Tal & Co., 1933; 2nd edition 1934; Berlin: Krug & Schadenberg , 2012 (new edition, edited and with an afterword by Doris Hermanns, ISBN 978-3-930041-85-5 )
    • also published by the German-language exile publisher Allert de Lange , Amsterdam . 1933, 2nd edition 1934.
    • published in English (1934), Portuguese (1934), Spanish (1934), Czech (1935), Catalan (1935), Dutch (1935) and French (1972) translations.
  • Half the violin. 1935 (unpublished, in the estate)
  • Passeggiera. Novel. Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1938.
  • Life begins. London: Chapman & Hall, 1935 (translated into English by Agnes Neill Scott).
    • Published in New York under the title Girl Alone : Farrar & Rinehart, 1936.
  • Aiono. 1943 (unpublished, last novel, in the estate)

reception

Christa Reinig writes briefly and concisely about Christa Winsloe: “She was always 'one of them'. For the bourgeois world, to which she wanted to belong, she was one of the officer's daughters. For the artist colleagues in the studio, she was one of those women who shouldn't actually be drawing nudes, but rather drop their covers themselves. For literature, she was one of those scribblers who write women's novels and social comedies. For the emigrants, she was one of those who emigrated because they didn't want to live under Hitler. Since she was not Jewish and not political, no committee or authority was responsible for her. And in the war she was one of those who ran around defenseless and unarmed. Always between all fronts. No human company caught them. "

literature

  • Doris Hermanns: monkeys, chisels and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. Berlin: Aviva 2012. ISBN 978-3-932338-53-3 .
  • Klaus Johann: Limit and stop. The individual in the “House of Rules”. On German-language boarding school literature (= contributions to recent literary history , volume 201). Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2003, ISBN 3-8253-1599-1 , (dissertation Uni Münster 2002, 727 pages).
  • Christa Reinig : About Christa Winsloe. In: Christa Winsloe: Girls in Uniform. Novel. Epilogue v. Christa Reinig. Munich: Frauenoffensive 1983. pp. 241–248.
  • Claudia Schoppmann (ed.): The language in flight luggage. German-speaking women writers in exile. Frankfurt / Main: Fischer 1995. (= Fischer Taschenbuch. Die Frau in der Gesellschaft. 12318.) pp. 128–152.
  • Anne Stürzer: playwrights and time pieces. A forgotten chapter in theater history from the Weimar Republic to the post-war period. Stuttgart u. Weimar: Metzler 1995. (= results of women's research. 30.) pp. 96–111 u. Pp. 165-178.
  • Christa (Kate) Winsloe. In: Personalities in Berlin 1825-2006. Memories of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and intersex people. Senate Department for Labor, Integration and Women, Berlin 2015, pp. 80–81. urn: nbn: de: kobv: 109-1-7841313 (archive)
  • Peter Sprengel (ed.), Dieter Burdorf (inlet): Rudolf Borchardt . "How verbose is longing". Love letters to Christa Winsloe 1912/13 . Quintus, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-947215-54-6 (= writings of the Rudolf Borchardt Society, Volume 15).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. Berlin: Aviva 2012. ISBN 978-3-932338-53-3 . About her childhood p. 21–27, about her boarding school days p. 28–38.
  2. ^ Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Karola Ludwig, Angela Wöffen: Lexicon of German-speaking women writers 1800–1945. dtv Munich , 1986. ISBN 3-423-03282-0 . Pp. 326-329
  3. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. Pp. 39-49.
  4. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. Pp. 62-82.
  5. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. Pp. 84-89.
  6. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. Pp. 90-99.
  7. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. P. 99.
  8. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. P. 100.
  9. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. Pp. 109-131.
  10. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. P. 128.
  11. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. Pp. 144-150.
  12. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. P. 162.
  13. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. Pp. 223-232.
  14. ↑ Large parts of the area around Cluny were ruled by one of the strongest French partisan units in June 1944, see Wolfgang Schumann , Olaf Groehler : Germany in the Second World War. Volume 6. The smashing of Hitler's fascism and the liberation of the German people (June 1944 to May 8, 1945) , Verlag Pahl-Rugenstein , Cologne 1985, p. 340
  15. ↑ In a letter to Miss Eva Herrmann in Santa Monica (Calif.) , In: The turning point. A life report , S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1952 (in the "One-time special edition. With an afterword by Frido Mann", Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag , Reinbek 1999, ISBN 3-499-22653-7 on p. 688f.)
  16. ↑ Hilde Walter: What did Christa Winsloe do? The poet shot dead by girls in uniform in France , in: Neue Volkszeitung , New York June 1, 1946.
  17. ↑ Peter Kurth: American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson, Boston, Toronto, London 1990, ISBN 0-316-50723-7 , p. 342f., The information from the French point p. 520, notes and sources, no. 57 , there also the extract from Ambassador Bonnet's letter relating to Lambert.
  18. ↑ Doris Hermanns: Meerkatzen, Chisel and the girl Manuela. The writer and animal sculptor Christa Winsloe. Pp. 261-272.
  19. ↑ So the dates in: Klaus Johann: Limit and Halt: The individual in the "House of Rules" . P. 492.
  20. ↑ See: Klaus Johann: Limit and Halt: The individual in the "House of Rules". P. 494.
  21. ↑ Christa Winsloe: Girls in Uniform. Munich 1983, pp. 241-248.
personal data
SURNAME Winsloe, Christa
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Winsloe, Kate (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Hungarian writer, screenwriter and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH December 23, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Darmstadt , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH June 10, 1944
Place of death near Cluny , France