At the suggestion of Memorial Deutschland e.V. (Bettina Nir-Vered), the city of Munich has decided to name a street after the actress Carola Neher. On the occasion of the street opening, the Deutsche Theatermuseum Munich will showcase a special exhibition about Carola Neher.
Curators are Petra Kraus and Micha Neher, author of the accompanying publication.
Carola Neher was born on November 3, 1900, in Munich. After engagements at the Munich Kammerspiele and the Municipal Theatre in Baden-Baden in the early 1920s, she celebrated great successes on stages in Breslau, Berlin, and Vienna. Both her first husband, the poet Klabund, and Bertolt Brecht wrote roles for her that made her famous throughout Germany.
Her portrayal of 'Polly' in the film adaptation of The Threepenny Opera (1930/31) by Georg Wilhelm Pabst is unforgettable.
Carola Neher - Kurt Gerron - Arthur Schröder: The Songs of the Threepenny Opera 20.8.1928 - Part 1
Due to her political opposition to the Hitler regime, she emigrated in 1933 via Vienna and Prague to Moscow, along with her second husband, Anatol Becker. In 1936, the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union pursued Carola Neher for allegedly counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities and sentenced her to ten years of forced labour in 1937. She died of typhus in the Sol-Iletsk prison in 1942.
Carola Neher is considered one of the most significant actresses of the Weimar era.
Klabund: Love Song, read by Josef Pfitzer
The exhibition presents an impressive chronological account of her acting career. It showcases Carola Neher's films, around 80 photographs from the family collection, complemented by selected graphics from (not related) Caspar Neher from the Austrian Theatre Museum, her costumes from the productions of The Chalk Circle by Klabund (Role: Haitang) in 1925 and The Threepenny Opera by Brecht (Role: Polly) in 1929, her original scripts for theatre productions, with dedications from Klabund and Ödön von Horváth, the records produced with her, and the radio premiere of Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses (1932) in new acoustic restorations, as well as personal memorabilia like her own travel gramophone, theatre reviews, and her collected fashion photographs.
Carola Neher - Kurt Gerron: The Songs of the Threepenny Opera 20.8.1928 - Part 2
The exhibition also documents significant life situations: the revocation of her German citizenship, which made a return to Germany impossible, the birth of her son Georg Becker in Moscow, the conditions of her imprisonment in numerous Soviet prisons, and her later rehabilitation by the Supreme Soviet Military Court.
Furthermore, the exhibition shows the artistic recognition of Carola Neher in the post-war years, including in Jorge Semprun's play La retour de Carola Neher in 1995.
On November 15, 2013, at 2:00 PM, the city of Munich will officially inaugurate a street named after Carola Neher. The exhibition aims to reacquaint the public with the short yet impressive life of this artist, who lived in Munich and celebrated success at the Kammerspiele.