Christa Winsloe

Christa Winsloe (23 December 1888 – 10 June 1944), formerly Baroness Christa von Hatvany-Deutsch, was a German-Hungarian novelist, playwright and sculptor, best known for her play Gestern und heute (known under several titles, see below), filmed in 1931 as Mädchen in Uniform and the 1958 remake. Winsloe was the first to write a play on female homosexuality in the Weimar Republic, yet without a "radical critique of the social discrimination of lesbian women."

Early life Christa Kate Winsloe was born in Darmstadt to the military officer Arthur Winsloe and his wife Katharina Elisabeth Scherz. Her mother died unexpectedly in 1900. Upon her death, Christa was sent to the Kaiserin-Augusta-Stift, a very strict boarding school in Potsdam. In this institution, the girls of the aristocracy were drilled to learn discipline and submission. The experience would inspire Winsloe's later body of work: "as an adult Winsloe had to write down this nightmare to get it off her chest."

Career In 1930, Winsloe wrote the play ‘Knight Nerestan’ which was produced in Leipzig and then Berlin under the title Gestern und heute (‘Yesterday and Today'). The play's success led to a 1931 film version called Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform) with Winsloe as one of the screenwriters. The play ends differently from the film. In the play, the young student, Manuela, is destroyed because of rejection by her teacher, Fräulein Elizabeth von Bernburg, who did not dare to side with Manuela against the headmistress or oppose the brutal educational methods. Manuela commits suicide. The film is more ambiguous, with von Bernburg attempting to defend the student and herself. The film version was also a considerable success, both financially and critically. This was due to its ambitiously aesthetic form and the fact that only women performed in it. The lesbian aspect of the story was downplayed and depicted as an adolescent crush, even though Winsloe co-authored the script, and Leontine Sagan, who in the play had stressed the lesbian aspect, acted as director.

In response to the play and film's downplaying of the lesbian themes, Winsloe completed and published her novel Das Mädchen Manuela (The Child Manuela) in 1933. It was a bolder novelized version of the screenplay that emphasized the lesbian storyline.

Winsloe did not publish anymore after Das Mädchen Manuela because she did not want to write under the rules and conditions of the German Literature Department. Soon enough, all of Winsloe's books and articles were on the Nazi index of "undesired literature". The author was considered as "politically unreliable". They stayed together during the following years and Gentet translated some of Winsloe's works into French. The two women also offered temporary support and refuge for people fleeing the Nazis.

Following an immediate evacuation order on 10 June 1944, Winsloe and Gentet were falsely accused of being Nazi spies by four Frenchmen. They shot and killed the two women in a forest near the country town of Cluny.

Works

Plays

Gestern und heute (1930) Published in English as Children in Uniform (1932)

Films

Mädchen in Uniform (1931)

Novels

Das Mädchen Manuela (1933) Published in English as The Child Manuela (1934, translated by Agnes Neill Scott) Life Begins (1935) Also published in the U.S. as Girl Alone (1936)

Unpublished works

Sylvia and Sybille (play, 1931) Die halbe Geige (novel, 1935, 'Half the Violin')