Biography

After the movie 'Mädchen in Uniform' (1931)she was reunited again with Dorothea Wieck in another lesbian-themed film, Anna und Elisabeth (1933), which was banned by the Nazis soon after it opened and which she later said was the most important work of her career.

Towards the end of her life, western feminists researching the history of Mädchen in Uniform sought her out and she enjoyed a small measure of renewed cult celebrity before she died in 1984.

In 1931 she was given the lead role in the film adaptation of a play she had done there, Gestern und heute but now called Mädchen in Uniform, a tale set in a Prussian boarding school for girls. The film had an all-female cast and Thiele played Manuela, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl deeply infatuated with her teacher, Fräulein von Bernburg who was played by Dorothea Wieck. Mädchen in Uniform was distributed internationally and briefly made Thiele a star. She received thousands of fan letters, mostly from women.

Hertha Thiele returned to East Germany after the war but was unsuccessful in her efforts to begin a theatre. She returned to Switzerland and worked as a psychiatric nursing assistant during most of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966 Thiele again returned to the GDR, working in stage productions in Magdeburg and Leipzig.

She is noted for her starring roles in then controversial stage plays and films produced during Germany's Weimar Republic and the early years of the Third Reich.