Kristina Söderbaum
| Kristina Söderbaum | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 5 September 1912 , Sweden |
| Died | 12 February 2001 (aged 88) Hitzacker, Germany |
| Occupation | Actress |
Beata Margareta Kristina Söderbaum (5 September 1912 – 12 February 2001) was a Swedish-born German film actress, producer, and photographer. She is most known for her roles in Nazi-era films.
Born in , Sweden; her father, Professor Henrik Gustaf Söderbaum (1862–1933), was the permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
After both her parents had died shortly after each other, she moved to Berlin and enrolled in a theatre school.
Beginning in 1935, Söderbaum starred in a number of films with her husband, director Veit Harlan, whom she married in 1939. Harlan and Söderbaum made ten films together under Joseph Goebbels.
According to Antje Ascheid, Soderbaum is frequently identified as "most singularly representative of the Nazi ideal, as the quintessential Nazi star". As a beautiful Swedish blonde, Söderbaum had the baby-doll looks that epitomized the model Aryan woman. In fact, she had already played the role of the innocent Aryan in a number of feature films and was well-known to German audiences. Her youth and beauty made her a symbol of health and purity and thus an exemplary specimen of the Nazi ideal of womanhood.
In a number of her films, she had been imperiled by the threat of "rassenschande" ("racial pollution"). Two such roles were Dorothea Sturm, the doomed heroine of the antisemitic historical melodrama Jud Süß, who commits suicide by drowning after being raped by the villain and Anna in Die goldene Stadt, a Sudeten German whose desire for the city (in defiance of blood and soil) and whose seduction by a Czech result in her drowning suicide. As a result of her watery fate in these two films, as well as a similar end in her debut in Harlan's 1938 film Jugend, she was given the mock honorary title Reichswasserleiche ("Drowned Corpse of the Reich").
Other roles included Elske in Die Reise nach Tilsit, the wholesome German wife whose husband betrays her with a Polish woman, but finally returns, repentant; Elisabeth in Immensee, who marries a rich landowner to forget her unrequited love, and in the end decides to remain faithful even after she is widowed and her lover returns; Aels in Opfergang, a woman who dies after her love affair; Luise Treskow in The Great King, a miller's daughter who encourages Frederick the Great; and Maria in Kolberg, a peasant girl who loyally supports the resistance to Napoleon and is the only survivor of her family.
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