Marianne Hoppe and the most famous lavender marriage of Nazi-era theatre
Her marriage to Gustaf Gründgens was considered a cover. Both were bisexual, and the letters tell a different story.
On 23 October 2002, Marianne Hoppe died in a care home in Siegsdorf, Upper Bavaria. She was ninety-three and had been on stage for seven decades. With her, German theatre lost one of its most contradictory personalities.
Hoppe had become famous in the thirties as a Ufa film star. In the spring of 1936, Gustaf Gründgens, director of the Prussian State Theatres, took her on a drive to the Havel. At the end of it, he proposed. Hoppe accepted, and in June the two were married at the registry office.
A mocking rhyme soon circulated in Berlin about the marriage, from which no children would come anyway. That Gründgens loved men was known in theatre circles. A few weeks before the wedding, the Nazi newspaper "Völkischer Beobachter" had publicly linked him to Oscar Wilde – a barely veiled threat. Gründgens retreated to Switzerland. At Hermann Göring's request, he returned and was appointed a Prussian State Councillor. Göring made clear what protection this title offered: a State Councillor could only be arrested with his personal consent.
For a long time, the union was therefore regarded as a pure lavender marriage. But the relationship was more complex. Hoppe and Gründgens were both bisexual; letters from her estate bear witness to genuine affection. When their Berlin flat was bombed out, however, they looked for new homes separately: Gründgens moved on with a male friend, Hoppe with a female friend. They divorced in 1946. Their bond outlasted the marriage and endured until his death.
Hoppe later lived with the actress Therese Giehse, and in the seventies with Anni Mewes. She hardly ever spoke publicly about these relationships. Only when the German Theatre Museum acquired her estate did this part of her life come more fully into public view.