Helga Hahnemann

Helga "Big Helga" Hahnemann (8 September 1937 - 20 November 1991) was an East German multi-faceted stage performer and entertainer. She came to wider prominence through her television and radio appearances after 1962. By the time reunification arrived in 1990 she had become a leading star of the small screen in East Germany. She fell terminally ill and then died shortly afterwards, possibly because of the extent of her addiction to cigarettes: she was 54. Her death left unanswered the question of how successfully her performances might have captivated pan-German television audiences post unification.

The annual "Goldene Henne" (literally "Golden Hen") prize was inaugurated in 1995 to celebrate and commemorate her. (One of Helga Hahnemann's informal soubriquets among fans was "Henne".)

Life and career Helga "Henne" Hahnemann was born in Berlin-Wilhelmsruh, the youngest of her parents' four children, a couple of years before war broke out. Wilhelmsruh was a central quarter of Berlin which after 1945 would find itself administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone. The zone was rebranded and relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). She later told an interviewer that she discovered her talent for comedy while still at school. In 1959 she made her stage debut with Die Pfeffermühle (literally, "The Pepper Mill"), a mildly edgy cabaret ensemble established five years earlier in Leipzig. Her appearances as the main attraction on "Tele-BZ", which soon won a nationwide audience of several million for the shows in which she appeared, continued for three decades, earning her the prestigious arts prize of the East German Trades Union Federation. Eventually, in 1969, Hahnemann joined the broadcaster's payroll as a member of the "DFF Drama Ensemble" ("Schauspielerensemble des DFF"). She remained on the payroll for the next 21 years, despite an annual salary of 1,500 Ostmarks, which even then was a relatively modest amount: by 1990 it had increased to 2,100 Ostmarks.

Another much loved programme which Hahnemann regularly presented was Ein Kessel Buntes, a Saturday evening television variety show. She performed with actor-comedians such as Alfred Müller, Herbert Köfer, Dagmar Gelbke and Ingeborg Naß in a wide variety of television comedy sketches. She teamed up with Ingeborg Naß to head up workers' cabaret in Berlin.

The changes which led the German Democratic Republic to democracy were followed, formally in October 1990, by German reunification. Hahnemann set about trying to win over audiences in a very different kind of Germany, in which western social and economic norms tended to trump those that had emerged in the east under Soviet socialism. There are indications that for several months she held off visiting a doctor in pursuit of a diagnosis. She was keen that "the public should say she was 100% fit when she died". A footpath in the centre of Berlin carries her name. A street in Schönefeld carried her name. A star on Berlin's expanding Boulevard of the Stars was dedicated to Helga Hahnemann on 10 September 2010.