Christa Winsloe

Christa Winsloe (23 December 1888 – 10 June 1944), formerly Baroness Christa von Hatvany-Deutsch, was a German-Hungarian novelist, playwright and sculptor, best known for her play Gestern und heute (known under several titles, see below), filmed in 1931 as Mädchen in Uniform and the 1958 remake. Winsloe was the first to write a play on female homosexuality in the Weimar Republic, yet without a "radical critique of the social discrimination of lesbian women." Early life Christa Kate Winsloe was born in Darmstadt to the military officer Arthur Winsloe and his wife Katharina Elisabeth Scherz. Her mother died unexpectedly in 1900. Upon her death, Christa was sent to the Kaiserin-Augusta-Stift, a very strict boarding school in Potsdam. In this institution, the girls of the aristocracy were drilled to learn discipline and submission. The experience would inspire Winsloe's later body of work: "as an adult Winsloe had to write down this nightmare to get it off her chest." In 1909, she studied sculpture in Munich (specifically, her interest was sculpting animals), against her family's consent. Sculpture-making was considered an "unfeminine" profession at the time. In 1913, she married Baron (1880–1961), a rich Hungarian writer and landowner. Thus, she became known as Baroness Christa von Hatvany-Deutsch. While married to Hatvany, Winsloe began to write Das Mädchen Manuela ("The Child Manuela"), a short novel based on her experiences at Kaiserin-Augusta but held off on publishing. Soon after, her marriage failed, but Hatvany made Winsloe a generous allowance after the divorce.