Dorothea Neff

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Dorothea Neff (born February 21, 1903 in Munich , † July 27, 1986 in Vienna ) was an Austrian actress.

theatre

After an apprenticeship in Munich, Dorothea Neff's stage career took her to Regensburg and Aachen in the roles of the teenage heroine and lover, then as a character actress at the State Theater in Munich and then via Cologne and Gera in 1939 to the German Volkstheater in Vienna.

Dorothea Neff was hired by Walter Bruno Iltz , who had already been her director in Gera. Here she played u. a. Elisabeth in Friedrich Schiller's Maria Stuart at the side of Judith Holzmeister , Queen Isabella in the play of the same name by Hans Rehberg and in Franz Grillparzer's A loyal servant of his master at the side of O. W. Fischer .

From 1941 to 1945, Dorothea Neff hid her Jewish friend Lilli Wolff, who was threatened with deportation, in her apartment in Annagasse in Vienna's first district, thereby endangering not only her theater career but also her life. She was supported by the then young doctor and later psychiatrist Erwin Ringel , who looked after Lilli Wolff in the event of illness. On September 2, 1944, all theaters in Vienna were closed and Dorothea Neff was assigned to a factory in Wurmsergasse, in which uniform parts and shirts for soldiers were produced. She looked after Lilli Wolff the whole time, bribed the caretaker and stayed with Wolff in the apartment, even when air raid sirens sounded. With her help, Lili Wolff was able to emigrate to the USA after the war , where she settled in Dallas .

After the war Dorothea Neff continued her career at the Volkstheater in Vienna, first under Günther Haenel , then under director Leon Epp . She played the mother in Karl Kraus ' Die last Tage der Menschheit (1945), the village midwife Képes in Julius Hays haben (1945), ( a performance that caused a theatrical scandal when Neff hid poison under a statue of the Madonna), Franz Grillparzer's Medea ( 1946) and the grandmother in the Austrian premiere of Ödön von Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods (1948), a performance that led to the biggest theater scandal after the war, when Neff announced in the last picture that she was responsible for the death of her little grandson .

In the 1962/63 season, the Volkstheater ventured into a play by Bertolt Brecht with Mother Courage and her children . This could not be performed for many years in Austria against the background of the Cold War under the leadership of Hans Weigel and Friedrich Torberg in the so-called Brecht boycott . The press spoke of the "Blockadebrecher" premiere on February 23, 1963 with Dorothea Neff in the title role and directed by Gustav Manker . Neff received the Kainz Medal for her portrayal in this piece and for her role as Colonel Hühnerwadel in Frank Wedekind's music (directed by Gustav Manker) .

Later Neff also played at the Akademietheater and the Burgtheater , but had to end her acting career because of her gradual blindness and only gave private acting lessons.

Dorothea Neff kept silent about the fact that she kept her friend Lilli Wolff hidden in her apartment for four years at risk of death; only insiders knew about it. A Viennese journalist only found out about it in 1978 and was able to win her over for an interview about this time. This interview appeared in the weekly newspaper Die Furche , in the monthly community of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde and in the Jüdische Rundschau in Basel.

Official invitation to the ceremony in the Akademietheater in February 1980

While there was no reaction to the two articles published in Vienna, the then Israeli ambassador in Vienna read the Basel article and forwarded it to Yad Vashem. Dorothea Neff was honored on February 21, 1980 in the Akademietheater by the Israeli ambassador and in the presence of Federal President Rudolf Kirchschläger , at which Dorothea Neff was awarded the Yad Vashem medal as “Righteous Among the Nations” (Yad Vashem on commons , May 29, 2017).

A particularly important consequence of this award for Dorothea Neff was that she was able to resume her acting career despite her blindness.

Gravestone at the central cemetery

In 1986 Dorothea Neff was buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery (Group 33G, No. 72) in an honorary grave of the City of Vienna. The actress Eva Zilcher , her long-time partner, is also buried here.

In 2007 a new park on the corner of Seidengasse / Bandgasse was named after Dorothea Neff in Vienna's 7th district .

In 2018, the Dorothea-Neff-Weg in Vienna's 12th district of Meidling was named after her.

The then Volkstheater director Michael Schottenberg commissioned the Tyrolean author and playwright Felix Mitterer to write a play about Dorothea Neff's spontaneous decision to hide her friend Lilli Wolff with her, and for the following years. The world premiere of You stay with me took place on September 9, 2011; Neff was portrayed by Andrea Eckert , who still had acting lessons from Neff and Zilcher. Felix Mitterer wrote about the prehistory of the play and its difficult history in the introduction to the program for the premiere.

The question of why Dorothea Neff had been silent for so long remained unanswered. One reason could be that the love affair between her and Lilli Wolff had failed due to the tensions of the years in hiding. Lilli Wolff never set foot on Austrian soil again after emigrating to the USA.

The decisive factor, however, was something else: As a result of the fact that Dorothea Neff was honored, the historian, political journalist and author Ines Rieder , who has dealt with the history of gays and lesbians, fundamentally began with the question of “more lesbian U-Boats ”in the Nazi era. It also became clear that until 1971 homosexuality was prosecuted in Austria - which also affected Dorothea Neff and Eva Zilcher's relationship.

Filmography

literature

  • Thoma, Helga: warning - helpers - patriots. Portraits from the Austrian Resistance . Edition Va Bene, 2004. ISBN 978-3-85167-168-1
  • Peter Kunze: Dorothea Neff. Courage to live . Orac Verlag, Vienna 1983. ISBN 978-3-85368-927-1

Dorothea Neff Prize

After the re-dedication of the Karl Skraup Prize to the current Dorothea Neff Prize , the Volkstheater Wien, in cooperation with the Bank for Labor and Economics and Österreichische Postsparkasse AG (BAWAG), has been honoring "a great courageous artist" at the Vienna Volkstheater since 2011, which “is a great example of our time both through its humanity and its artistic importance”.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ I. Schinnerl: Neff, Dorothea. In: Austria Forum. Friends of the Austria Forum, Association for the Promotion of Digital Collection of Data with a Reference to Austria, accessed on May 9, 2017 .
  2. ^ Helga Thoma: Mahner - Helfer - Patrioten. Portraits from the Austrian Resistance . Edition Va Bene, Vienna 2004, ISBN 978-3-85167-168-1
  3. ↑ 100 years of Volkstheater. Theatre. Time. History ; Youth and People, Vienna - Munich 1989, ISBN 3-224-10713-8
  4. ^ Paulus Manker : The theater man Gustav Manker . Searching for traces , Amalthea, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-85002-738-0
  5. ↑ The Kristallnacht, prelude to the misery of the Jews: "No: You go underground with me" . No. 45 , November 10, 1978, pp. 6 .
  6. ↑ What happened 40 years ago, terrorism prescribed by law: Four years "U-boat captain" . No. 11/1978 , November 1978, pp. 23 .
  7. ↑ The "small" resistance . No. 50 . Basel December 14, 1978, p. 23 .
  8. ↑ 2011/2012 program on the Volkstheater website, September 4, 2011 ( Memento of the original from August 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.volkstheater.at
  9. ↑ Felix Mitterer: "You stay with me" . Ed .: Volkstheater. September 2011.
  10. ↑ Ines Rieder: "Who with whom?" Hundred years of lesbian love . In: Wiener Frauenverlag (ed.): Series of documentations . tape 10 , 1994, pp. 11 .
  11. ^ Andreas Brunner: Ines Rieder 1954-2015 . Ed .: QWien http: www.qwien.at? P = 3669. January 7, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Neff, Dorothea
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian actress
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 1986
Place of death Vienna