Brigitte Horney

Charismatic German theatre and film actress Brigitte Horney (1911-1988) worked both in German and English films. Her earthy charm, prominent cheekbones and deep, sultry voice made her stand out from her colleagues. She is best remembered as Empress Catherine the Great in the lavish UFA spectacle Baron Munchhausen (1943). After the war she moved to the US and became an American citizen.


German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. 9238/1, 1935-1936. Photo: Ufa.


German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. 9828/1, 1935-1936. Photo: Ufa.


German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. A 2745, 1941-1944.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. G 228. Photo: Hämmerer.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 1899/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Ufa / Hämmerer.

Forgotten Masterpiece

Brigitte Horney was born in 1911, in Berlin-Dahlem, Germany. She was the daughter of Karen Horney-Danielsen, a noted German psychoanalyst, and Oscar Horney, an industrialist from Berlin. She had a bilingual education. Brigitte attended lessons for expressive dance by the legendary Mary Wigman and also acting classes by actress Ilka Grüning at the Ilka-Grüning-Schule in Berlin.

She began her stage career in Würzburg, and was, for more than a decade, engaged by Berlin's Volksbühne. Already in 1930 she won the Max-Reinhardt-Preis as up-and-coming actress. Young director Robert Siodmak discovered her for the cinema and cast her as a sales clerk in his film Abschied/Farewell (Robert Siodmak, 1930), the first sound film of the Ufa and according to reviewer Stanislas Lefort at IMDb a ‘forgotten masterpiece’.

The young actress refused the contract that Ufa offered her, because she wanted to continue her stage career. But in the next years Horney would also appear in films like Fra Diavolo (Mario Bonnard, 1931), Rasputin, Dämon der Frauen/Rasputin (Adolf Trotz, 1932) featuring Conrad Veidt, and Ein Mann will nach Deutschland/A Man Wants to Get to Germany (Paul Wegener, 1934) with Karl Ludwig Diehl.

Although her mother had escaped to New York, Horney opportunistically remained in the Third Reich. When she accepted the starring role as a waterfront girl in in the highly popular film Liebe, Tod und Teufel/Love, Death and the Devil (Heinz Hilpert, Reinhart Steinbicker, 1934) with Käthe von Nagy. A new star was born when she sang in her inimitable husky voice So oder so ist das Leben (So or so is life), written by Theo Mackeben. It became her Leitmotiv song. Critics and audiences alike compared her favorably to Marlene Dietrich.

This success was followed by such films as Savoy-Hotel 217 (Gustav Ucicky, 1936) opposite Hans Albers, the English films The House of the Spaniard (Reginald Denham, 1936) and Secret Lives (Edmond T. Gréville, 1937) as well as Der Katzensteg/The Cat’s Alley (Fritz Peter Buch, 1937), Anna Favetti (Erich Waschneck, 1938) with Mathias Wieman, and Befreite Hände/Freed Hands (Hans Schweikart, 1939) with Olga Tschechova. In these films she often played strong women, not unlike herself.


German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. 3378/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Bavaria / Binz.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3480/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Ufa / Baumann. Publicity still for Illusion (Viktor Tourjansky, 1941).


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. 3667/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Baumann / Ufa. Publicity still for Münchhausen/The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Josef von Báky, 1943).


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3829/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Hämmerer / Wien Film.


Big German card by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. W 83, 1941-1944. Photo: Wien-Film / Hämmerer.

Tuberculosis

When Brigitte Horney appeared at Joachim Gottschalk's side in Du und ich/You and I (Wolfgang Liebeneiner, 1938) the result was a splendid success and they continued to work successfully as a pair in Aufruhr in Damaskus/Tumult in Damascus (Gustav Ucicky, 1939), Eine Frau wie Du/A Woman Like You (Viktor Tourjansky, 1939) and eventually Das Mädchen von Fanö/The Girl From the Isle of Fanö (Hans Schweikart, 1940).

The cooperation was destroyed when Joachim Gottschalk was ordered by the Nazis to leave his Jewish wife. The family Gottschalk committed suicide in 1941 - one day before their deportation. Horney and Gottschalk had been good friends and Horney attended with only four other people his funeral in 1941, regardless of the political and career implications of doing so.

Till the end of the war she took only part in a few more films and she is maybe best remembered for her role as Empress Catherine the Great in the Ufa production Münchhausen/Baron Munchhausen (Josef von Baky, 1943), with Hans Albers in the title role.

Josef Goebbels, Reichsminister of propaganda and also chief of the Ufa Studios, ordered this film to be made for the 25th anniversary of Ufa. Ironically the banned author Erich Kästner worked on this film and included some digs at the Nazi regime, such as a villain with a moustache talking about invading Poland. During the war he was hidden in Horney's house in Neubabelsberg where he could write on under a pseudonym.

Horney soldiered on in her own way - filming the prophetically titled Am Ende der Welt/The End of the World (Gustav Ucicky, 1944) while bombs were literally dropping around her. She finally fled to Switzerland in early 1945, with her husband, the Russian cinematographer Konstantin Irmen-Tschet. There she fell ill with tuberculosis and the newspapers even announced her death in 1946, but she answered the condolences herself.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. G 181. Photo: Baumann.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3829/2, 1941-1944. Photo: Hämmerer / Wien Film.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3728/1, 1941-1944. Photo: V. Swolinski/Ufa. Publicity still for Munchhausen/The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Josef von Baky, 1943) with Hans Albers.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3480/2, 1941-1944. Photo: Ufa / V. Harbou.

Aunt Polly

After the war, Brigitte Horney first acted in Zurich and Basel, including a Swiss production of Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mains Sales/Dirty Hands (1949). She also appeared in films in Austria. The post-war cinema offered her - with a few exceptions - no demanding roles.

In 1952 she moved to the US to open the Karen Horney clinic in New York City, in honour of her mother’s achievements. There she married art historian Hanns Swarzenski and received the American nationality in 1953. She visited Germany frequently, and had a house in Bavaria.

She continued to work in films like Solange Du da bist/As Long as You're Near Me (Harald Braun, 1953) with O.W. Fischer, Der letzte Sommer/The Last Summer (Harald Braun, 1954) starring Hardy Krüger, Der gläserne Turm/The Glass Tower (Harald Braun, 1957) with Lilli Palmer, and the Edgar Wallace Krimi The Trygon Factor (Cyril Frankel, 1966) with Stewart Granger.

During her later years she became a popular TV star as Aunt Polly in the Canadian-German children’s series Huckleberry Finn and His Friends (1980). On TV she also appeared in the popular series Jakob und Adele (Hans Jürgen Tögel, 1983-1986) with Carl-Heinz Schroth and the soap Das Erbe der Guldenburgs/The Guldenburg Heritage (1986–1988).

She incidentally appeared in interesting films as the war drama Charlotte (Frans Weisz, 1981) with Birgit Doll as the Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon, and Bella Donna (Peter Keglevic, 1983) with Harry Baer and Krystyna Janda. She also played a supporting role in Fassbinder's Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss/Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982), based on the life of one of her contemporaries, the haunting Sybille Schmitz.

Brigitte Horney died by cancer in 1988, in Hamburg, Germany. She was honoured with several German awards, the Bambi in 1965, the Filmband in Gold in 1972, the Goldene Kamera in 1981 and the Telestar in 1987.


Brigitte Horney sings So oder so ist das Leben in Liebe, Tod und Teufel/Love, Death and the Devil (1934). Source: Alparfan (YouTube).


Scenes from Baron Munchhausen (1943). Source: classicmovieslibrary (YouTube).


Eddi Arent, Brigitte Horney, Robert Morley and Cathleen Nesbitt in The Trygon Factor (1966). Source: whatchawatchabar (YouTube).


Opening and closing titles of Huckleberry Finn and His Friends (1980). Source: eurochrissy2 (YouTube).

Sources: Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), Hans J. Wollstein (AllMovie), Stanislas Lefort (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.

Joachim Gottschalk

During the 1930’s, German stage and film star Joachim Gottschalk (1904 – 1941) was a romantic lead in the style of Clark Gable. He starred in a series of films opposite the popular German actress Brigitte Horney. When the Nazis demanded that her would separate from his Jewish wife, the Gottschalks committed suicide.


German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. A 3253/1, 1941 - 1944. Photo: Baumann / Terra.

Smash Hit
Joachim Gottschalk was born in Calau, Germany, in 1904. He was the son of a doctor. He attended the Gymnasium in Cottbus and after his exams he went at sea. Between 1922 and 1926 he sailed on the three-master Großherzogin Elisabeth to Chile and to Australia. After leaving service, he took acting classes in Berlin and Cottbus. During an engagement at the Württembergische Volksbühne in Stuttgart, he met his future wife, the actress Meta Wolff. In May 1930 they married in Halberstadt and in February 1933 their son Michael was born. A few months later Adolph Hitler came to power. Meta was Jewish and Michael thus half-Jewish, but the Gottschalks managed to avoid the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws and rising tide of anti-semitic violence in Nazi Germany because of ‘Joschy’ Gottschalk's immense popularity with the public. His wife had a Berufsverbot but Gottschalk could continue his acting if he stayed secret about his family situation. After an engagement in Leipzig, Gottschalk played from 1934 to 1938 in Frankfurt am Main. There he had his breakthrough at the Municipal Theater in parts as a hero and romantic lover. In 1938 he moved to Berlin to play at the Volksbühne. There he had a smash hit in his role as Fiesco in the play by Friedrich Schiller. His theatrical successes have made him one of the most popular actors in the capital. In 1938 he also began his film career with a starring role alongside Brigitte Horney in the Tobis production Du und ich/You and I (1938, Wolfgang Liebeneiner). The film was a success, and the two leads subsequently made four more films together. In Tripoli in Libya they filmed Aufruhr in Damaskus/Tumult in Damascus (1939, Gustav Ucicky). Then they starred in the successful romantic comedy Eine Frau wie du/A Woman Like You (1939, Viktor Tourjansky) with Hans Brausewetter, which made Gottschalk ‘the German Clark Gable’. On the island Farnö, they next filmed the romantic drama Das Mädchen von Fanö/The Girl from Fano (1940, Hans Schweikart) with Gustav Knuth. He also appeared with Paula Wessely in the melodrama Ein Leben lang/A whole life long (1939, Gustav Ucicky), and with Hertha Feiler in Flucht ins Dunkel/Escape into Darkness (1939, Arthur Maria Rabenalt).


Brigitte Horney. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. G 228, 1941-1944. Photo: Wien-Film / Hämmerer.


German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. A 2895/1, 1941 - 1944. Photo: Wien-Film / Tobis.

No Way Out
After the start of the war, the pressure of the Propaganda Ministry on the Joachim Gottschalk began to increase. Hans Hinkel, Special Representative for Kulturpersonalien (cultural celebrities) demanded Gottschalk to divorce, but the star refused. He worked in the studio on Die schwedische Nachtigall/The Swedish Nightingale (1941, Peter Paul Brauer) about the romance of fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen (Gottschalk) and the Danish singer Jenny Lind (Ilse Werner). It was again a huge success. Another triumph was his stage role as Silvio in Carlo Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters. But in early June as Volksbühne director Eugen Klöpfer presented his next production, Faust, Gottschalk's name was not on the cast list. He was not offered any more roles at any Berlin stage. English Wikipedia explains what had caused the ban. Naively, Gottschalk had taken his Jewish wife to a film industry Artist's Association dinner and introduced her to some of the prominent Nazis who were present. Although the Nazis were charmed, when Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels learned about this incident, he decreed that Gottschalk would be required to separate from his Jewish wife. (Klaus J. Hennig at DieZeit.de writes that Goebbels was present at the dinner and was charmed by Gottschalk’s wife, but he became enraged when he later found out that Meta was Jewish). When Gottschalk refused to separate, Goebbels ordered Gottschalk's wife and child transported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Gottschalk insisted on accompanying Meta and Michael to Theresienstadt, but Goebbels ordered Gottschalk inducted into the German Army, the Wehrmacht. The Gottschalks saw no way out. In November 1941, minutes before the expected arrival of the Gestapo at their apartment in Berlin-Grunewald, they first sedated their nine year old son and then committed suicide by gas poisoning. Joachim Gottschalk was only 37 when he died.


German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. A 3253/2, 1941 - 1944. Photo: Baumann / Terra.


German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. A 3376/1, 1941 - 1944. Photo: Rolf von Barm.

Only a Few Courageous Colleagues
Joachim Gottschalk was buried with his wife and son in one grave (it was forbidden to bury Jews and non-Jews together) at the Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdorf of Berlin. Only a few courageous colleagues attended the funeral, among them were Brigitte Horney, Gustav Knuth, Hans Brausewetter, Werner Hinz, Wolfgang Liebeneiner and Ruth Hellberg. Joseph Goebbels forbade any obituary, but word about his death got out anyway and millions of German women were in mourning. Because of Nazi censorship, most of his devoted fans did not learn the awful circumstances of his death. This incident poisoned the already-tense relationship between Goebbels and the German film community. At the end of WWII, Goebbels and his wife would also commit suicide in Hitler's Berlin bunker and poisoned their six young children. Goebbels' motive was fear of being captured by the advancing Soviet Army, which was less than a mile away. Goebbels had played a major role in the Holocaust, including the production of a series of anti-Semitic films, and he knew he would have been put on trial and executed, had he lived. After the war, the DEFA studio made a film about Joachim Gottschalk, Ehe im Schatten/Marriage in the Shadows (1947, Kurt Maetzig). Finally, the tragic fate of Gottschalk and his family became known to the German public. The film was based on the novella Es wird schon nicht so schlimm (It won’t become that bad), written by Gottschalk’s former director Hans Schweikart. Since 1999, Gottschalk’ grave is an Ehrengrab (grave of honour) for the city of Berlin.


Silhouette in memory of Jews deported from the Grünewald Station in Berlin. Grünewald was the area, where Gottschalk and his family lived. This deportation memorial was erected fifty years after the beginning of deportations of Berlin's Jewish population to concentration camps. The Polish artist Karol Broniatowski created this concrete block embedded with human silhouettes representative of the passage taken to the rail tracks for deportation in 1991. Between October 1941 and February 1943 more than 50,000 Jews of Berlin were deported by the National Socialist state from Grünewald Station.

Sources: Klaus J. Hennig (Die Zeit), Hanns-Georg Rodek (Filmportal.de) (German), Wikipedia (German and English), and IMDb.