Carola Neher

Carola Neher (born in Munich in 1900, died 1942 in Sol-Iletsk in the Soviet Union) is a German actress, famous in Weimar Berlin. Fleeing the Nazi regime, she takes refuge in the Soviet Union, where the Stalinist regime sends her to die in the Gulag as part of the Great Purges. Still another victim of the two totalitarianisms of the 20th century.
A beautiful woman, she was married to the poet Klabund (Alfred Henschke), and was one of the iconic actresses of Bertolt Brecht, having played in several of his pieces, in The Threepenny Opera in particular.

 

    

The painter Werner Schramm

Werner Schramm (1898 – 1970) was a son of merchants. After a classical education, he entered the school of Decorative Arts in Düsseldorf. Like many artists, he was influenced by German expressionism but also by the first attempts at abstract art. The discovery of the Isenheim Altarpiece of Matthias Grünewald, temporarily exhibited in Munich, was a revelation to him and inspired him to use middle-ages techniques: a well accomplished drawing on a priming of chalk or plaster with a mixture of oil and yolk of egg as paint.

In 1920 he was appointed decorator at the theatre of Düsseldorf. He later lived in Italy and France. He died in Düsseldorf.

 

    

Rudolf Dischinger, yet a "neoobjectivist"

One of the less often named painters belonging to the New Objectivity, alongside Otto Dix or Karl Hubbuch, is Rudolf Dischinger (1904-1988).
His paintings from the Weimar years show great skill in drafsmanship and composition, while his subjects varied from straight realism to surrealism.

 All the works above date from the 1920s and 1930s. In later years he turned to abstract painting. Here, a work from his later years (1960):

    

Der gelbe Schein, a film with Pola Negri

Der gelbe Schein (The Devil’s pawn) was a German film shot 1918 partly in Warsaw, a city then still occupied by German troops. Historically very estimable, as some scenes were shot in that city’s Jewish ghetto, completely destroyed in the WWII. 
 
The film was based on a 1914 Broadway play by the English dramatist Michael Morton and there were other film versions of that play, among them one from 1931, featuring Laurence Olivier and Boris Karloff (!). And I can see some likeness with the plot of Pabst’s Diary of a lost girl, with Louise Brooks, another German film from 1929. 
 
The star of Der gelbe Schein was Pola Negri, a Polish born actress who went on to make a great career in Germany and in the U.S. She plays Lea, a teen-ager who lives in Warsaw with her ill father. She loves to read, and want to study medicine St. Petersburg in the hopes of making her father well again. But Jews were not allowed to live in the Russian capital. Except for girls carrying a « yellow passport » (Der gelbe Schein), which meant they worked as prostitutes.
Der gelbe Schein had its premier on November 22, 1918, incidentally during the very days when the German monarchy collapsed and the Weimar Republic was born. 
 
Last but not least, Der gelbe Schein can be seen on Youtube, with English texts. 

    

Pogrom, a film from 1919

I cannot find much about this German film from 1919, except that it was directed by Alfred Halm (1861-1951) and that the main actress was Ilka Grüning, a famous Austrian star.
Still, it seems to me appropriate to mention Pogrom, having in mind the antisemitic missdeeds perpetrated these last weeks in some European countries. 

The life of Eastern European Jews, especially in the Czar’s Russia, their misery, legal discrimination, and their suffering of antisemitic violence, were themes which German cinema addressed around the First World War. For instance, in Der gelbe Schein (The Yellow Passport, GER 1918), Der Ritualmord (Ritual Murder, GER 1919), as well as Pogrom, the film by Alfred Halm. 

As for Ilka Grüning, she was born in Vienna in 1876. A respected actress in Germany, being of Jewish descent, she had to flee when the Nazis came to power in 1933. She held one of the roles in Die freudlose Gasse, 1925 (Joyless street or The Street of Sorrow), directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and with Greta Garbo in one of her first main roles. 

 The poster of Pogrom, by the way, is by Josef Fenneker.

    

Speedy Schlichter

And speaking of the painter Rudolf Schlichter, I can't avoid mentioning his wife, Speedy. That’s was not her birth name, of course.  Elfriede Elisabeth Koehler was born in Switzerland in 1902. On her husband’s advice, she anglicized her name, which was a common thing among artists. John Heartfield's real name was Helmut Herzfeld, and George Grosz' original name was Georg Ehrenfried Gross.

But, why did she change to Speedy and not to Sylvia, or to Lilian? My guess: around the time she met Rudolf, a Harold Lloyd film had its premiere. Its title was Speedy.

Some maintain that Speedy Schlichter worked as a prostitute at the time. The reason might be that her husband had had a prior relationship with a prostitute, Fanny Hablützel. Or the fact that he had to purge once a prison sentence for pimping as she had been accused of receiving paying guests in their apartment. It is worth noting that prostitution was not a very uncommon way of earning a living in poverty-ridden interwar Germany.

Whatever her profession, she did pose a great number of times for Rudolf, on occasion for pictures with an erotic theme. And Speedy was an actress too. She had a role in a very successful Fritz Lang-film:  Diary of a Lost Girl, with Louise Brooks in the main role.

She played also in Rivalen im Weltrekord (Rivals for the World Record), a sports film directed by Ernö Metzner (1930).

Some scenes from Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen)

 

CLIC HERE for some scenes from the film

Rudolf Schlichter, from Dada to realism

Lady with red scarf, 1933

The painting above, Lady with red scarf, by Rudolf Schlichter, 1890-1955, belongs to the George Economou collection and has been recently exhibited at Tate Modern in London.

« Immediately after the war, Schlichter was associated with the anarchic Berlin dada artists. Like George Grosz and Otto Dix, he went on to develop a highly detailed realist technique. This portrait shows his wife, Speedy Schlichter. She adopted the anglicised name in place of her original name, Elfriede Koehler. She is presented here as a self-assured, even confrontational figure. The evening sky and devastated landscape add a mysterious, fantastical quality. «  (text from the Tate exhibition).

Other works of Schlichter, an ever experimenting artist, an endless seeker:

Portrait of the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch