Körner, Hermine

(1878-1960)

   Actress, manager. Körner showed early in childhood an extraordinary talent for the piano and studied with promising composer Max Reger (1873-1916) to attempt a career as a concert pianist. In 1898 she changed her mind, however, and without having studied acting or even having been in a play, she auditioned for the Burgtheater in Vienna. She was cast in the title role of Oscar Wilde's Salome, much to her own surprise as well as nearly everyone else's. In 1904 Körner began working at the Berlin Residenz Theater, where she became one of director Sigmund Laut-enberg's major attractions in French boulevard comedies.

   Realizing she needed more training as an actress (critics complained of her "brittle organ," meaning that her voice was weak), Körner moved to Düsseldorf in 1909 to both study under and work with Dumont. The training was highly effective, for she soon received an offer of permanent company membership in the Dresden Court Theater. She remained in Dresden until 1915, but then, to the shock of the German theater establishment, relinquished that lifetime sinecure to work with Max Reinhardt in Berlin instead. Körner remained in Berlin until 1919, and then began a new career in the 1920s as theater manager and director. She ran the Munich Schauspielhaus until 1925 and the Albert Theater in Dresden until 1929, before returning to Berlin in 1931 to concentrate on acting. She was a member of Gustaf Gründgens's company at the State Theater from 1933 to 1944, becoming a favorite of the National Socialists in the process and receiving their ultimate honorific Staatsschauspielerin, or state actress. After the war, she resumed her managerial career in Stuttgart, but her greatest triumph in the postwar years was the title role in Jean Girau-doux's The Madwoman of Chaillot in 1950.

   Körner had an astonishingly wide range as an actress, though most agreed her greatest work came in character parts, along with numerous roles in Greek tragedies. She received several awards and prizes in the postwar period, and in her will she even instituted one of her own: the Hermine Körner Ring, given to a German actress displaying "serious striving" toward excellence in her art.