Knef, Hildegard (1925—)

Award-winning German-born actress, author, and singer who built an international stage and film career. Name variations: name spelled "Neff" during her film career. Pronunciation: Nef. Born Hildegard Frieda Albertina Knef on December 28, 1925, in Ulm, Germany; daughter of Hans Theodor Knef and Frieda Auguste Groehn Knef; attended Wilmersdorf Peoples (Grade) School and High School, as well as the acting school of the German Film Studio UFA; married Kurt Hirsch (divorced); married David Cameron; married Peter Rudolph Schell, in 1977; children: (second marriage) daughter Christina Cameron.

Appeared in German propaganda films (1945); acted on stage in first German postwar stage productions at the Schlossparktheater, Berlin (1945); appeared in first German postwar film, The Murderers among Us (1946); auditioned in Hollywood (1947); became major German film star with her role in The Sinner (1950); played the female lead role in the Broadway production of Cole Porter's Silk Stockings, New York City (1955–56); sang the role of Jenny in the German film of The Three Penny Opera (1962); began career as a night-club singer (1963). Prizes include the Bundesfilmpreis (1959 and 1977); the Edison Prize (1972); the Karlsbad film festival prize for best female role (1976); and the Golden Tulip award at the Amsterdam film festival (1981).

Selected writings:

The Gift Horse: Report on a Life (translated from the German by David Palastanga, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1971); The Verdict (translated by Palastanga, NY: Farrar, Straus, 1975).

"It has been my fate always to wander in new realms," Hildegard Knef wrote in 1970. Coming to adulthood during Nazi rule in her native Germany and surviving Allied bombings that destroyed her family's homes three times, Knef overcame the chaos and destruction of postwar Germany to create a career as an international stage and film actress. Her multilingual acting talents were showcased in German, French, British, and American films. Eventually, she added singing and writing to her repertoire, becoming a singing actress in an American musical comedy, as well as an internationally known author.

Knef did not remember her father, who died six months after her birth, though she was told that he was a "big, wild, restless, and red-haired man." He had served in the German army during World War I and fought in the battle of Verdun. She described her mother Frieda Knef , who was often absent because she worked to support the family, as "very beautiful, with the loveliest longest legs, greenest eyes—slender, tough, powerful, fearless." Knef remembered that she had a "lovely clear voice" but had not become a singer because there was not enough money for training or even to "go around begging for a scholarship."

As a child, Knef stayed much of the time at the farm of her maternal grandfather in eastern Germany—"really a glorified shack," she wrote, "with four rooms and a stove where we put the chicks at night to keep them warm." She also tied her pet goat to the bed post. Although her mother did not approve, Knef was allowed to run around "half naked," except during her mother's frequent visits.

In order to spend more time with her daughter, Frieda left her job with the Siemens Electrical Company and opened her own tobacco shop in Berlin, taking Knef with her. Hildegard later wrote that her mother changed to a candy shop after she realized that many of her male customers to the shop only to see her, often tossing their newly purchased cigars into the street outside. When Frieda Knef remarried, to a shoe-repair man, the family moved to a shop near the Wilmersdorf railway station in Berlin.

Although Knef saw less and less of her grandfather, who was estranged from her stepfather for a time, both grandfather and stepfather impressed on Knef their dislike for the new Nazi government of Germany. She remembered her grandfather's saying that "the idiots should have done something in '33" (a reference to the Nazi accession to power) and, later, "we would have to pay for the death of the Jews." She was disappointed when, after she drew "Hitler is nuts" in sand, her stepfather forbade her to make any more such drawings. But when she came home from school and announced that she wanted to join the girl's branch of the Hitler youth, she was surprised to find her grandfather, stepfather, and mother all refusing to give her permission to do so. Her stepfather eventually joined the Nazi Party, but when asked to make a voluntary financial contribution to the faction, he thought a moment and then placed a one-mark piece (with a value of less than a dollar) on the table. Because of this, he lost his shop and had to search for a new one.

Knef was educated in schools where the students were subjected to a constant barrage of Nazi propaganda. She disliked both the teacher who began school by screaming "Heil Hitler" and the requirement that pupils study racial history and write essays on the theme, "I am Nordic because.…" When a teacher spoke of defending the Fatherland, Knef was disciplined for asking which country Germany should defend itself against, since it had not been attacked.

Gestapo arrests of other families in her neighborhood left a deep impression on Knef. In one case, a woman tried to escape across the roof and fell to her death. In another, members of a Jewish family were arrested despite their attempts to "appease" the government, such as their hanging of a swastika from their window on Hitler's birthday and the care with which the wife bleached her hair.

Upon graduation from high school, Hildegard was enrolled by her mother in a business school so that she would not have to do farm work for the national Labor Exchange. Knef was interested in working as a commercial artist, however, and showed samples of her drawings to a Labor Exchange official. She was sent to UFA, a major German film studio, where she worked as a studio artist and began attending the studio's acting school. The woman who hired her, Else Bongers of the Berlin film office, would be a lifelong friend. While at UFA, Knef was also required to work in a factory, where she painted the luminous instrument dials on German nightfighter aircraft.

Hildegard Knef began working on the other side of the camera when her beauty caught the eye of a UFA director, who decided to use her in two of his wartime propaganda movies. In her memoirs, she reported that propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, the "patron of the film industry" and a notorious womanizer, invited her to dinner "privately, in order to get to know me personally," but that Bongers protected her by insisting that she was unavailable.

Wartime film work was hectic and difficult, though filming continued during the constant bombing by Allied planes. Knef's family replaced bombed-out windows of their home with cardboard, but still had to move three times. Two Hitler youth used one of their houses to fight Russian troops; Knef's grandfather, who escaped from the burning house but was badly burned, eventually committed suicide during the war, leaving a note saying that he could not "forget the horrors." Although Knef saw her mother infrequently and often worried about her safety, the two would be reunited at the end of the war.

The great film stars … were the … indomitables whom no make up, costume, or character could change and whose mystery was wrapped in an incorruptibility which only the camera was capable of measuring.

—Hildegard Knef

As Polish and Russian troops moved into the eastern section of Germany in 1945, Knef, attempting to flee, was convinced to join the German army by a 36-year-old soldier named Ewald Demandowsky, a fervent Nazi. Sporting a rifle and a grenade, she hid her hair under a hat, so that fellow soldiers did not know at first that she was a woman. She shot two enemy soldiers while in the middle of the fighting and saw two young German soldiers run over by a tank. She also fell in love with Demandowsky. Although the first lieutenant of their unit refused to marry them as they requested, Knef later referred to the period they were together as a "honeymoon." Captured and closely questioned by Polish and Russian soldiers, they were separated. Demandowsky, believing that Knef was endangered by her relationship to him, smuggled a note to her, telling her to flee, if possible, to the Berlin home of Viktor de Kowa, a filmmaker.

Knef's arrival at the Kowa house, which was in the American zone of occupation, proved fortuitous. Because Kowa was no sympathizer with Nazism, and because his wife knew one of the American generals occupying the area, he was able to vouch for Knef, who was being questioned by American authorities about her relationship with Demandowsky. Kowa was also able to convince occupation authorities to allow him to reopen playhouses in Berlin. To Knef's surprise, Bongers also vouched for her; Bongers revealed that her husband, an anti-Nazi, had fled Germany in the 1930s, but that the Nazi government had required Bongers to remain behind as a guarantee of her husband's silence.

At the start of the occupation, as Knef began appearing on the Berlin stage, authorities allowed her to travel within the country; she also began a career in postwar German film. "I busied myself with a fresh outbreak of dysentery and concentrated on the only thing I have ever really learned: survival, which now offered itself in the form of theater," she said. Her stage career in Germany was notable enough that among her visitors backstage was the distinguished conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, whose presence left her speechless. Thus began a theater career of more than ten plays.

Knef also began a relationship with Kurt Hirsch, a Czech who had immigrated to the United States and now regularly visited postwar Berlin on business. Hirsch invited her to accompany him to see a film being shown in the Russian sector of postwar Berlin; it turned out to be photographs of Auschwitz. "I wanted to talk the picture away," she wrote, "wanted to hear that it wasn't true, wanted to think instead" of the German soldiers she had seen run over by a tank. At that point Hirsch told her, "I lost 12 relatives [in the Holocaust]." Although her official biographies in reference works do not list him as a husband, she has written in her memoirs that Hirsch began to help guide her career and eventually became her husband. When a German secretary criticized her for marrying a Jew, she replied, "Hold your tongue, you stupid cow." But she wrote that his family was not happy with the marriage, and they were later divorced.

Knef began to gather awards and international attention for her performances. While she was shooting exteriors in the desolation of postwar Berlin, a Life magazine photographer took a series of pictures of her which appeared under the theme "German girl makes good in the ruins of Berlin," and though she did not know it, her early films drew the attention of Hollywood. In 1947, the American producer David Selznick asked her to come to Hollywood for screen tests. Although Hirsch went along, helping her with the American press and American culture, the trip was a disaster. She refused to change her name to "Gilda Christian," although she later agreed to the new Anglicized form of her name, "Neff." (Even later in life, she stumbled over Neff and could not get used to it. She changed back to "Knef" in the late 1960s.) She refused to tell the American press that she was Austrian rather than German. When she reminded studio representatives that "Hitler was an Austrian," they replied, "but most Americans do not know that."

Studio executives were also unhappy with her outspokenness; she once remarked, "If the Nazis had been only half as dumb as they were portrayed [in American films], the thousand year Reich would have lasted a week." Knef refused to conform to studio heads' ideas of proper behavior for an actress and rebelled against advice on how she should behave. (Caught hurrying from one studio building to another, she was told, "A lady does not run.") "Especially in America," she later wrote, "… a man was never a woman's friend nor ever will be, [and] … the man-woman conflict has been retained and nurtured from the pioneer era and has led to an insurmountable rift, a setting of limits.… If in my conversations with American men, I went beyond the accepted giggling stage, they became suspicious and frightened and took me for a dangerous bluestocking who did not observe the rules, a busybody who might ask about politics or even money."

The studio offered no contract, and she returned to Germany feeling that she had failed. But this visit to Hollywood, and subsequent trips, left her with vivid impressions of some of the stars and filmmakers of the era. The director Billy Wilder struck her as "the embodiment of all that I held to be desirable at the time: a conqueror of the New World." She noted the mistreatment of Marilyn Monroe by others, but added, "The camera loved her. The camera registered the honesty, candor, and naivete which disarmed the audiences and made her a star after a few appearances in mostly bad films." But her sharpest portrait was of Marlene Dietrich , who took the younger Knef under her wing. Knef saw Dietrich as a regal figure surrounded by sycophants, a woman who sometimes wore her Legion of Honor with her formal clothes, and one whose silence could terrorize.

Upon her return to Germany, Knef appeared in Film without a Name (1948) before making her breakthrough motion picture, The Sinner (1950). In the movie, Knef portrayed a woman who turned to prostitution at the end of the war, quit, and then returned to prostitution to pay for an operation. Although the film gained a prize at the Berlin film festival, it also received condemnation from Catholic prelates. In Knef's words, the film brought her "illustrated proposals from sex maniacs and attacks from the pulpit."

Yet The Sinner returned her to the attention of studio executives in other countries, launching her into a multilingual acting career that would span more than 35 movies made by studios in four countries—France, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Although she never reached the level of top film "star," she compiled a series of firsts: she was in Germany's first postwar film, The Murderers among Us (1946); she was the first German woman to appear in a Paris film production after the war (1948): and, as she acknowledged with a laugh, she was the first actress to appear nude in a postwar German film. She was lured back to the American cinema by the film Decision before Dawn (1951); at first she rejected the film, until

talked into it by director Anatole Litvak. During her second Hollywood period, she also appeared in the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), co-starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward .

Knef had an international lifestyle as well. She became an American citizen during the 1950s but changed to British citizenship in 1962 when she married a British citizen, David Cameron. She lived for various periods in several countries, including Great Britain. Knef believed that for much of her career she was treated with special hostility by the German press, partly because of the "immoral image" she was given by some of her films and partly because, as an international actress, she was suspected of not being German enough. After one particular round of hostile stories in the German press, a friend told Knef, "not even Hitler himself would get such bad reviews."

Knef was able to pursue her acting career despite almost constant medical problems. Added to a childhood battle with polio were adult bouts of hepatitis. After her daughter Christina was born by cesarean section in 1968, peritonitis set in, and Knef had to undergo numerous operations to correct resulting problems. In 1973, she would deal with a diagnosis of breast cancer.

During the 1950s, Knef added singing to her career. Despite daunting obstacles, she accepted a role in Cole Porter's 1955 Broadway musical Silk Stockings. She would have to sing nightly; speak clear and understandable English, but with a Russian accent; and risk comparison with Greta Garbo , who had played the same role (as a Russian commissar) in the 1939 film Ninotchka. To make matters worse, during the run of the musical, Knef was mistakenly diagnosed with leukemia. Yet her performance in Silk Stockings was so widely praised that one critic labeled her "the thinking man's Marlene Dietrich."

Knef expanded her singing career by accepting the role of Jenny in the 1962 German film of The Three Penny Opera. In 1963, she began a new career as a nightclub singer, both in Europe and the United States. She wrote the lyrics to many of the wry and ironic songs she sang. After a highly successful tour with a five-man combo, she set out again with a big-band accompaniment and her husband as producer. Their daughter, only six months old when they started, often was taken along on the tours. The songs Knef sang are called chansons in Europe—in her words, "little stories where the lyric is more important than the music, [with the] melody … serving the word." Out of her singing career came a large number of recordings.

Starting in 1970, Knef, who settled in Munich, also built an international career as a writer, including a book about the actress Romy Schneider . Some of the most highly praised of her writings were her books of memoirs, particularly The Gift Horse (the original German version appeared in 1970) and The Verdict (1975). Praised for their frankness and sophisticated literary style—critics referred to them as "literature"—the books sold more than three million copies. Translated into more than 15 languages, they dealt with her early life, the birth of her daughter, and her constant hospitalizations, including the diagnosis of breast cancer. Her last film, Checkpoint Charlie, was released in 1980.

sources:

Knef, Hildegard. The Gift Horse: Report on a Life. Translated by David Palastanga. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

——. Tournee, Tournee … Munich: Goldman Verlag, 1980.

——. The Verdict. Translated by David Palastanga. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975.

suggested reading:

Angst-Nowik, Doris. One-Way Ticket to Hollywood: Film Artists of Austrian and German Origin in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, CA: University of Southern California Library, 1986.

Ragan, David. Who's Who in Hollywood: The Largest Cast of International Personalities Ever Assembled. NY: Facts on File, 1992.

Wollenberg, H. Fifty Years of German Film. NY: Arno Press, 1972.

Niles Holt , Professor of History, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois