Working with Reinhardt was to open doors for the rising star as it did for so many other aspiring young actors of her generation. Being a Reinhardt actor was an effective calling card and anyone who could claim an association, particularly those who later emigrated to Hollywood, did. In August 1931, Hedy packed her bags and left for Berlin.
She was not alone in making this journey; many others in the Austrian film industry also followed the promise of money and opportunity to the capital of German-language filmmaking. The transition from silent cinema to talkies was under way, and the conventional German accent was considered too harsh by many. Audiences were reportedly roaring with laughter as previously silent stars opened their mouths and produced streams of sibilants and double consonants. The softer intonations of Southern Germany and Austria were more agreeable, and demand for actors from these regions grew, especially for the romantic roles. Hedy was also literally not alone; she traveled with Alfred (Fred) Döderlein, who was also en route from Vienna to Berlin and with whom she was having a brief affair.
Berlin was a magnet for the artistic community of the day. One of its adopted sons was Christopher Isherwood, whose account of the capital's decadence was immortalized onstage and then film with Cabaret, an adaptation of his Berlin Stories. Another vivid chronicler was Otto Friedrich. In Before the Deluge, he depicts Berlin in the decades between world wars as its population first saw the economy crumble beneath inflation and unemployment and then soar on the back of financial speculation; political instability was the order of the day, and militarism the first resort of the ruling classes. This was a city where hunger and artistic brilliance were bedfellows and all shades of sexual expression were on parade. The twenties were not the Golden Years for everyone, Friedrich reminds us, yet the names of the people, places, and events most associated with the Berlin of that time have retained a magical ring: “Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Josephine Baker, the grandiose productions of Max Reinhardt's ‘Theatre of the 5,000,’ three opera companies running simultaneously under Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Erich Kleiber, the opening night of Wozzeck and The Threepenny Opera.”12 Albert Einstein moved to Berlin, as did W. H. Auden and Isherwood; Vladimir Nabokov gave tennis lessons to the wealthy as their children raced their new motorcars along the recently constructed speedway. “Berlin's nightclubs were the most uninhibited in Europe; its booted and umbrella-waving street-walkers the most bizarre,” Friedrich continues. “Above all, Berlin in the 1920s represented a state of mind, a sense of freedom and exhilaration. And because it was so utterly destroyed after a flowering of less than fifteen years, it has become a kind of mythical city, a lost paradise.”13 No wonder, then, that Hedy should be drawn to this pulsating Center City.
By most accounts, Hedy moved to Berlin to study under Max Reinhardt; however, the Deutsches Theater archive has no record of her attendance in either Reinhardt's courses or in his Berlin productions. Certainly, she would have kept up with Reinhardt in Berlin; in fact, Hedy went to work with another great theater name of the day, Alexis Granowsky.
Through Granowsky, Hedy would encounter a circle of Russian émigrés whose political leanings were far to the left. Leo Lania describes Granowsky as “one of the most remarkable men I have ever met: a character out of a Russian novel.”14 He had been born to a well-to-do Jewish family in Riga and lived a life of privilege before the First World War, studying and traveling in Europe and mastering several languages. The Russian Revolution “made him a beggar,” according to Lania, “but poverty impressed him as little as wealth.” A close friend of Chagall and Mayakovsky and Maxim Gorky and his wife, in Russia Granowsky had been at the center of a coterie of Jewish and Soviet intellectuals. His Jewish Academic Theatre of Moscow (GOSET) became the sensation of Moscow and “the Bolsheviks overwhelmed him with honours, which in those years of civil war often had to take the place of bread, or even coal to heat his theatre…. The Soviet Government even let him keep his valuable library and his rare collection of erotic prints.”15 After a performance at GOSET, this group of intellectuals would retire to the Gorkys’ Moscow apartment and argue about art, politics, and theater through the night.
Granowsky's first film, Jewish Happiness, was produced for Sovkino in 1925, but it was in theater that he flourished. When Freud saw his stage production of Night in the Old Market in Vienna, he said he was “deeply moved.”16 By the 1930s, however, the advent of a more hard-line approach to the arts in the Soviet Union forced Granowsky to flee the country. “He thought himself a Western European—by culture and upbringing. But he was a Russian. This contradiction was his ruin.”17 After a few productions at the Reinhardt Theatre in Berlin, Granowsky turned to filmmaking, making his German debut with The Trunks of Mr. O. F. (Die KofferDesHerrnO.F).
Lania, himself a Russian Jew, journalist, and writer, who had been brought up in Vienna and had long been a Communist, wrote the script for Granowsky. He too was working with Reinhardt at the time, though he had previously scripted the film version of Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (Dreigroschenoper) for the famed Austrian film director, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, and collaborated with the left-wing theater director, Erwin Piscator, on his “political theater.” Lania remembers the part of Helene in The Trunks going to a “young girl just out of dramatic school. She was inexperienced, shy and very pretty. Her name was Hedy Kiesler.”18 Granowsky shot his film between 15 September and 17 October 1931 and it premiered in Berlin on 2 December 1931.
Once again, Hedy was acting in a comedy, this time as the pretty young daughter of the mayor of Ostend (Alfred Abel). Another of the film's rising stars was Peter Lorre. The film is subtitled A Fairytale for Grown-Ups and the story starts with the unexpected appearance at a modest hotel of thirteen suitcases bearing the initials O. F. The town's motto is apparently “Better two steps back than one step forward.” A small-time local journalist named Mr. Stix, played by Lorre, starts a rumor that the cases belong to the millionaire Mr. Flott, and that he has come to invest in Ostend. In anticipation of Mr. Flott's arrival, the townspeople shake off their apathy and set about modernizing Ostend. Mr. O. F. does not arrive, and Ostend continues to develop until it becomes a metropolis. Only then is the error revealed. The suitcases were destined for Ostende, not Ostend.
Hedy's part was small, but more significant than her Vienna roles. She is generally seen in long or medium shots with a just a few close-ups of her face, which is still rounded and more charming than classically beautiful. Indeed, her overall demeanor exemplifies the ideal of smalltown wholesomeness. She plays a strong character who is well able to scold those who displease her, but whose natural environment is the domestic space. In a sequence near the film's end, her character is explicitly contrasted with that of the imported cabaret singer Viola Volant (Margo Lion). Helen and her mother are waiting for the mayor to return for dinner. A phone call to his office finds him claiming that he has to work late. In fact, a cut to the other side of the room reveals that he is enjoying the company of Viola Volant, who is sitting and smoking a cigarette in a pose that reveals a considerable amount of leg. Hedy/Helene's virtuous domesticity is again emphasized in the next scene where she phones her fiancé, Baumeister Stark (Harald Paulsen), to discover that he too is allegedly working late. Sufficient scolding results in him scurrying round and the twosome are shortly married, thus concluding one of Granowsky's several parodies of bourgeois life.
Critics were divided over the production, in particular its fairy-tale qualities and Granowsky's decision to film in a nonrealist manner (the narrative was interrupted throughout with songs written by Erich Kästner). Some attributed the production's aesthetic to the influence of Rein-hardt's theater, while others saw in the cinematography reminders of the Soviet cinema. Still others questioned the need to spell out the meaning of the satire.19 This prompted the question of The Trunks' political message, which Lania said was intended as a critique of capitalism.20 Given the recent