German postcard by Verlag Ross, Berlin, no. 353/2, 1919-1924. Photo: Becker & Maass.
German postcard by Verlag Ross, Berlin, no. 353/4, 1919-1924. Photo: Becker & Maass.
The hyenas of lust
Little is known about German actress Charlotte Böcklin. We found that she was born in 1894, and she probably started her silent film career in 1917 in the short comedy Eine Verzwickte Geschichte / A Complicated Story (Carl Heinz Wolff, 1917) with Fritz Junkermann. She soon became a popular film actress.
Rather cheerful was the - nowadays forgotten - two-reeler series around the film character 'Krause', embodied by actor Carl Neisser. Böcklin acted in two episodes, Ganz ohne Krause / Completely free of Krause (Lorenz Bätz, Albert Paul, 1918) and Papa Krause (Lorenz Bätz, Albert Paul, 1918). In these short comedies, she either played the 'disreputable' wife or the battered, fate-stricken suffering woman. Karl Figdor wrote a whole series of scripts for the Krause films, while Hans Hyan and Marco Brociner each wrote the scripts for two films.
Böcklin showed her range when she played a demi-mondaine in one of the popular crime films of the era, Die Edelsteinsammlung / The Gem Collection (Viggo Larsen, 1918) with Danish actor-director Viggo Larsen as the detective.
In 1919, Charlotte Böcklin starred in Otto Rippert's two-part white slave trade drama Der Weg, der zur Verdammnis führt / The Road to Damnation (1918). In the first part, Das Schicksal der Änne Wolter / The Fate of Anne Wolter, the pitiful Anne Wolter or Änne Wolter (Charlotte Böcklin) falls in the hands of scheming white slave traders. In the second part, Hyänen der Lust / Hyenas of Lust, Käthe Haack and Grete Weixler played two naive girlfriends, who also became victims of the white slave trade.
The whole film premiered at the Berlin Marmorhaus on 1 August 1919. The cinematography was by the notable Carl Hoffmann, the script was by Julius Sternheim, and the film was produced by Erich Pommer. Director Otto Rippert was a former stage actor who had started his film career as the Captain in the Titanic disaster film In Nacht und Eis / Shipwrecked in Icebergs (Mime Misu, 1912). He became a film director for Continental Kunstfilm, where he did some 10 films. But he had his breakthrough in 1916 with the internationally commercially and artistically successful serial film Homunculus (Otto Rippert, 1916), starring Olaf Fönss. It was a coproduction of Deutsche Bioscop and Erich Pommer's Decla, and from then on, he worked for Decla.
German postcard in the Film-Sterne series by Rotophot, no. 555/3. Photo: Decla. Charlotte Böcklin in Der Weg der zur Verdammnis führt, I. Das Schicksal der Anne Wolter / The Road to Damnation (Otto Rippert, 1918). Böcklin sits far right.
German postcard in the Film-Sterne series by Rotophot, no. 555/5. Photo: Decla. Charlotte Böcklin in Der Weg, der zur Verdammnis führt, I. Das Schicksal der Anne Wolter / The Road to Damnation (Otto Rippert, 1918). The man may be the white slave trader Ignaz Czyslow (Guido Herzfeld), while Toni Tetzlaff played the brothel owner.
A woman without a conscience
As a film actress, Charlotte Böcklin peaked around 1919. She appeared with Conrad Veidt in Die Okarina (Uwe Jenss Krafft, 1919), based on the novel 'Good as Gold' (1912) by the Danish author Karin Michaëlis. In Das goldene Buch / The Golden Book (1919), she acted opposite Alexander Granach, and in Die schwarze Marion / The Black Marion (Uwe Jenss Krafft, 1919), she played next to Reinhold Schünzel.
Her roles ranged from the demi-mondaine in crime films to a social outlaw in Die schwarze Marion / The Black Marion and in Die Sumpfhanne (Carl Boese, 1919), with Ernst Dernburg and Ferdinand von Alten as her partners.
Böcklin was the 'Asphalt Rose' Hilde Brunn in the metropolitan crime scene Die Asphaltrose (Richard Löwenbein 1922), and was the unbecoming lover Aline Puvogel in the film adaptation of Thomas Mann's classic novel Die Buddenbrooks / The Buddenbrooks (Gerhard Lamprecht, 1923) with Alfred Abel.
Charlotte Böcklin finally played Felicitas Alberti, the 'woman without a conscience', in presumably her last silent film, Die Frau ohne Gewissen (Richard Strauss, 1925) with Alphons Fryland. While her career was relatively short, she had made quite an impact with her 30 film roles, including some impressive parts.
During 1919-1920, she was married to the writer Hans Egon Karl Rudolf Kurt Freiherr von Barnekow. Charlotte Böcklin died in 1981 in Berlin.
German postcard in the Film-Sterne series by Rotophot, no. 555/7. Photo: Decla. Charlotte Böcklin in Der Weg, der zur Verdammnis führt, I. Das Schicksal der Änne Wolter / The Road to Damnation (Otto Rippert, 1918). The name Änne Wolter is sometimes also written as Anne Wolter.
German postcard in the Film-Sterne series by Rotophot, no. 555/8. Photo: Decla. Charlotte Böcklin in Der Weg, der zur Verdammnis führt, I. Das Schicksal der Änne Wolter / The Road to Damnation (Otto Rippert, 1918).
Sources: Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), Wikipedia (German), Filmportal.de and IMDb.
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