Trivia

From the early 1930s she was in a relationship with the married painter Willy Jaeckel for about six years. After their separation, she married the draftsman and illustrator Wilhelm M. Busch in 1936. Since then her name has been Brigitte Busch. The marriage produced three children, including the future illustrator Thomas Busch.

Dismissed as a saleswoman in the course of the economic crisis, Borchert then worked as a secretary. She frequented Berlin artist circles and was a guest at the Romanisches Café, the meeting point of the Berlin avant-garde.

In 1929-1930 she acted as an actress in some cinema advertising clips. These were created in the Sirius color system and are among the oldest surviving color films in the world. Those films are included in the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation as the Brigitte Borchert collection.

In 2000, she spoke in the documentary Weekend am Wannsee about her memories of filming the feature film Menschen am Sonntag.

Borchert was working as a saleswoman in a Berlin record and gramophone store when she was discovered there by the theater producer Moritz Seeler for the film.

Brigitte Borchert died at the age of 100 in Hamburg-Blankenese. She was buried in the Blankenese Cemetery in Hamburg-Sülldorf.

She played the leading role of the record seller Brigitte in the documentary feature filmMenschen am Sonntag "People on Sunday" (1929/1930), one of the last German silent films. Borchert was one of the four main actors in the film, which describes the attitude towards life of young people in the late phase of the Weimar Republic. In the film, she spent a Sunday at the lake in Berlin with her boyfriend and another couple in the late 1920s. The screenplay for the film was written by Billy Wilder; directors included Robert Siodmak and Fred Zinnemann. The film was only shot on Sundays, since the amateur actors were not available for shooting during the week. The premiere of the film, which is one of the works of the New Objectivity, took place in February 1930.

Brigitte Borchert spent part of her childhood in Cameroon, where her father worked as a doctor. When he died in an operation under unclear circumstances shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, Borchert's mother returned to Germany with her children and moved to Berlin.

Her participation in the movie Menschen am Sonntag remained Borchert's only film work; she still wrote film history with it.

Bombed out in Berlin in 1943, she fled - her husband was a Soviet prisoner of war at the time - to Hamburg in 1945, where she settled.