The woman behind "Mädchen in Uniform"

On 23 December 1888, Christa Winsloe is born in Darmstadt. The officer's daughter loses her mother early and ends up at the Kaiserin-Augusta-Stift in Potsdam, a boarding school meant to drill aristocratic girls in obedience and order. These years never let her go.

At first she takes a different path. Against her family's wishes, she studies sculpture in Munich and makes a name for herself with animal sculptures. In 1913 she marries the Hungarian writer Baron Lajos Hatvany. The marriage fails, and Winsloe starts to write.

In 1930, her play about a schoolgirl who falls in love with her teacher reaches the stage, first in Leipzig, then in Berlin as "Gestern und heute" (Yesterday and Today). A year later comes the film adaptation "Mädchen in Uniform" (Girls in Uniform), with an all-female cast. The film is shown throughout Europe, in the United States and even in Japan. Today it is considered one of the first films to portray lesbian love sympathetically. Winsloe becomes famous overnight.

In her private life, too, she loves women. She travels to the United States with the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who warned early on against Hitler. Under the Nazis, Winsloe's books land on the list of undesirable literature, and the film disappears from German cinemas. She helps persecuted people to emigrate and finally moves to France. There she lives with the Swiss woman Simone Gentet.

At the beginning of 1944, the two retreat to Cluny in Burgundy. Winsloe wants to make her way to her sister-in-law in Hungary. But on 10 June, four men attack the women and shoot them in a forest. The leader later claims to have acted on behalf of the Résistance, saying the two were spies. The accusation turns out to be baseless. Nevertheless, the perpetrators are acquitted in 1948.

Today, Christa Winsloe is known almost only for "Mädchen in Uniform". Her own life would be worth at least as much cinema.