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Fraulein Eva was born in 1899 Berlin as Elly Giese. As a young girl, she worked in the cigarette manufacturing industry, but by age 19 was being cast in silent films. She received leading roles immediately, mainly in comedies, and playing mostly adolescent girls. This was, for her, a very lucky thing indeed, since 1918, the year she began a successful career in film, was also the year the war ended, and a terrible economic depression was just around the corner from descending on Germany, whose people had already undergone great privations in the years leading up to the war's end.
Her career, though successful, was a relatively short one, mostly spanning the 1920s. She did make a few films into the 1930s, but whether she simply didn't catch on with the "talkies," or didn't see eye to eye with the Nazis, who gained power in the 1930s, is not a question we were able to answer through our research, though doubtless we'll learn more in future.
There were probably few places in 1920s Europe, where the dividing line between the "haves," and the "have nots," was as dramatic as in Weimar era Berlin. The 1972 film "Cabaret," based on the famous Broadway musical of the same name (in turn, based on the 1939 short novel, "Goodbye to Berlin," by Christopher Isherwood), offered a very candy-coated view of late Weimar Berlin (it was set in 1931), just before Hitler came to power. If you research this time and place, you will probably, like us, end by feeling alternately thrilled, horrified, and depressed, and not necessarily in that order, so dramatically intense, and wretchedly gray, were the details of life there.
Still, here at Red Poulaine, though we are fascinated by history, we hope to offer the pleasure of a lovely image, a fantasy, with only a little taste of the real. We hope you enjoy this one as much as we do.