Glimpses of an acting life

Minnie Kronfeld, a.k.a. Maria Dronke

Image: Wellington 1943

I know of no other close-knit community than all humankind.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Myths, sagas and legends are the most intriguing form of memory. When it comes to Minnie Kronfeld, known in Germany by her stage name Minnie Maria Korten and in New Zealand as Maria Dronke, almost everything sounds like the stuff of myths and legends. She spent her early years in Berlin rubbing shoulders with the leading writers and artists of the day, reciting poems at the funeral of Rainer Maria Rilke in Vienna, appearing on stage with the Berliner Theater directed by Max Reinhardt, touring with acclaimed actor Alexander Moissi and, at the home of her brother Arthur – the best-known Berlin psychotherapist and psychiatrist of the time – making the acquaintance of the young Bertolt Brecht, who offered Minnie, of all people, the chance to recite his “Ballad of the Adventurers”. Then there is the story of how, as a Jew, she was forced to flee Adolf Hitler’s regime and seek exile in the South Pacific, and how she went on to introduce the art of poetry recital and even the spectacular mass performances in the style of Max Reinhardt to her new surroundings, as well as training the first generation of New Zealand professional actors. Even the fact that she died, at age eighty-three, in what she called her “Montsalvat (Castle of the Holy Grail) at the opposite end of the earth”, with a view of the ocean and the only book she managed to bring with her from Germany, Goethe’s Faust, has an air of mythos. Many strange stories combine to flesh out the portrait of Maria Dronke, and many of those stories sound made up, yet truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. The same applies to the spirited personality of Maria Dronke: “Her larger-than-life personality” – the phrase many New Zealanders used to describe her – seems, therefore, a fitting way to begin this portrait.

The “World of Yesterday”, as Viennese author Stefan Zweig called it, the era when Maria Dronke was born, is long forgotten. But among all the lost stories, art trends, conventions and revolutions, something precious has remained that begs to be retrieved from the depths of memory and oblivion. It is like a dream that lingers long after wakening – familiar and yet disconcerting, something of an enigma. We have a sense of a human being whose tragic and intriguing story is noticeable only by its absence – after being buried for so long.

It was the year 1953 when Maria Dronke was reunited with the land of her birth for the first time since her escape in December 1938. Germany was no longer her home, as she had been completely uprooted and had ceased to belong to any group or community there. After returning to the land that had offered her refuge fifteen years earlier and would remain her true anchor until her life’s end, she wrote “where one lives is no longer important; how one lives is the only thing that counts now. Otherwise, the essential things are overlooked – life and humanity.” So, the burning question is: who was the real Maria Dronke?

At the turn of the twentieth century, Max Reinhardt, the world-famous director who developed mime as a stage technique, changed theatre in Germany forever – artistically, architecturally and financially. Suddenly the young heroes of Shakespeare’s works were played by young actors, and a brand-new lighting technique – a spotlight – was used to highlight the individual physiognomies of the actors. Meanwhile, a forest created on the famous revolving stage for A Midsummer Night’s Dream proved an extraordinarily effective way to portray the courting couples and enigmatic sprites. Eduard von Winterstein wrote:

It was an actual, real forest you saw as soon as the curtain went up. And to make the illusion complete, the aroma of pinecones was sprayed liberally onto the stage until it quickly filled the entire auditorium. It was the same when Mendelssohn’s Dance rang out – no longer performed by elves in traditional ballet tutus, but by lithe, half-naked girls decked only in green veils, and holding hands as they wandered through the trees, up hill and down dale – it was a totally beguiling sight.

Minnie Maria, Münster 1929

Minnie Maria Korten was an actress whose name appeared in the theatre programmes of Reinhardt’s Berlin stages in 1928. The most striking feature of the actress was her voice: deeply resonant, melodious and surprisingly versatile. Shakespeare’s Juliet was the role of her life. Max Reinhardt’s direction and Minnie Maria’s realisation that with every appearance in the role she identified more and more with it, meant Juliet became her favourite Shakespearean character.

At that time, the leading actors and actresses in Berlin were artists with immense talent and outstanding personalities: Elisabeth Bergner, Alexander Moissi, Fritz Kortner – each a star in their own right. The young Minnie Maria Korten possessed the ability to exude the radiant soul of each role she played. She inhabited the roles, reinterpreted them like a poet using theatrical forms of expression, stood out with dramatic intensity beyond the visual spectacle and thus conveyed the essential quality of theatre. The weekly newspaper Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung had much to say about the pressure on any rising star around 1928:

Never before have such high demands been placed on young female actors as they are today, and particularly so in Berlin

… For in the past a young actress had her ‘type’ and if she plied her trade successfully, people were happy; she was either naïve or sentimental and she could at best deliver a virtuoso performance of that particular type. Now those types have gone, so an actress has to portray the entire person on stage as a fully-fledged, charming woman.

A full-size image of Minnie Maria Korten was pictured on the title page next to that quote.

When she turned her back on Nazi Germany, she fell out of that realm altogether, consigned for all time to the dusty corners of obscurity. The cosmopolitan actress Minnie Maria Korten has become a forgotten name of twentieth-century Germany. The sources of information about her past also seem sketchy, as much of the documentation in Germany was destroyed during the Second World War.

Berlin, Vienna, Münster, Gera, Altona, Bochum, Duisburg, The Hague, Cologne, London, Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch were the many stations of her eventful life. This means one must sift through archival material scattered all over the globe and try to connect the many glimpses into the various worlds she inhabited. From the colourful kaleidoscope of photographs – including over- and under-exposed snapshots – memoir fragments, poems, recollections and thoughts, an image of an artist eventually emerges, but the contours of her personal life remain elusive to us. For Maria, in her heart of hearts, was always an actress. A wooden stage set and its boards were her entire life. She only ever revealed her true self when playing a part.