Marianne Hoppe has died

obituary
Marianne Hoppe, one of the most famous German actresses of the last century, a student of Max Reinhard and a star of the Third Reich, died in Berlin at the age of 93.
“The German theater has lost its queen” - this is how the famous director Claus Peymann, the current director of the Berliner Ensemble theater, on the stage of which Marianne Hoppe played her last roles, reacted to the death of Marianne Hoppe. And she began her acting career back in the late 20s. For the sake of a talented girl from the city of Rostock, the great Max Reinhardt himself made an exception, and Hoppe was accepted into his school when the enrollment had long been completed. And immediately after her debut on the stage of the Berlin Deutsche Theater, Reinhardt signed a two-year contract with Marianne: it became clear that an actress had arrived who was destined to become a star.
Marianne Hoppe then worked in other cities in Germany, but soon after she returned to Berlin, a completely different era began. The young actress, who by that time had begun a successful career in cinema, really liked the actor and director Gustav Grundgens, with whom she played at the Deutsche Theater with Reinhard and who turned out to be close to the Nazi elite. Soon after Hitler came to power, Grundgens was appointed head of the State Theater, the main official stage of the Third Reich. Marianne Hoppe became Grundgens' wife and the first actress of the theater beloved by the authorities on Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt. The spectacular blonde fully corresponded to the state ideal of Aryan beauty, and a certain Prussian coldness with which Hoppe played on stage gave her characters the required aura of inaccessibility.
Many later claimed that Marianne Hoppe was Goering’s mistress, and her marriage to Grundgens, in turn, was simply a staging sanctioned by the authorities: in the personal life of Germany’s leading actor, Grundgens was only interested in men. In any case, the fact of her private dinner with the Fuhrer is well known. However, the fame of the “theatrical Riefenstahl” somehow did not stick to Marianne Hoppe: after all, she played mainly in the classical repertoire, had nothing to do with ideology, and after the war she did not persist and was not shy about apologizing. Hoppe repeated many times that she considered the decision to stay in Germany a big mistake in her life.
Soon after the collapse of the Third Reich, she broke up with Grundgens, but remained his first actress. When he was released from prison after a short stint, they went to West Germany together and worked in Düsseldorf and Hamburg. Hoppe played a lot, and it was during these years that she became the very queen of the German theater who is mourned in Germany these days. She didn’t act much in films, but she became seriously interested in working on television. She became a grande dame, but at the same time she continued to be a fearless actress, open to new drama and any experiments. One day, without hesitation, she agreed to play King Lear in a formal, aesthetic play by Robert Wilson in Frankfurt, and this was one of the greatest successes of her career. When Hoppe was already over 80, Heiner Müller invited the actress to return to the united capital, to the Berliner Ensemble, and she played the Marquise Merteuil in Müller's dramatization of Dangerous Liaisons. And in his last play “Career of Arturo Ui” she played her last role.
In the mid-90s, after Muller’s death, this performance was performed in Moscow. Hoppe had only one scene there - but what a scene! She played an actor who teaches the power-hungry rogue Arturo Ui (that is, according to Brecht, Hitler himself) the techniques of stagecraft. Brecht, of course, did not have Marianne Hoppe specifically in mind when he wrote this small role. And Heiner Müller did not invite the great old woman to once again remind her of her ties to fascism. And she went to play, probably not because she wanted to once again repent of something for which no one had ever reproached her. But some higher logic of fate was still present in this ten-minute episode. After the performance I went to the dressing room of the famous actress. For some reason, she laughed a lot, sang in Ukrainian, referring to some friend of her youth who was from Ukraine, and in response to my naive question, “Have you seen Hitler up close?” exclaimed: “Of course!” - and took my hand, making it clear that it was with this hand that she had once touched the Fuhrer. “How did you feel then?” - I asked no less naively. Marianne Hoppe replied: “I’ll say it very simply: that’s life. A person forgets a lot. But then the people I loved were alive. It was just life, but special, strange.”
ROMAN Kommersant-Dolzhansky

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 196/P dated October 28, 2002, p. 21

Authors:

Roman Dolzhansky

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Obituaries

"The German theater has lost its queen"