German Postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3790/1. Photo: Baumann / Ufa.
Swedish-born German film actress Kristina Söderbaum (1912-2001) was considered the prototype of an Aryan woman during the Third Reich. The blonde, blue-eyed star played the lead in several Nazi propaganda films directed by her husband Veit Harlan (1899-1964). After the war this would lead to a speedy end of her career. As two of her characters in Harlan’s melodramas committed suicide by drowning, the public gave her the nickname ‘Reichswasserleiche’ (literally for "most prominent water corpse in the Reich"). Söderbaum was born in Stockholm as the daughter of professor Henrik Gustaf Söderbaum, head of the Nobel Prize Committee. (During WW II she would become an honoury student at Uppsala University.) After graduation, she went to Paris to learn French and by chance got a role in the short instruction film Hur behandlar du din hund? (1934, Arne Bornebusch). In 1935, she studied art history in Berlin and attended acting classes with actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge. Her first film in Germany was Onkel Bräsig (1936, Erich Waschneck). Then she got to know director Veit Harlan and they fell in love.
Kristina Söderbaum skyrocketed to fame in Jugend (1938, Veit Harlan) and automatically joined the inner circle surrounding propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. With Harlan directing and another prominent Nazi sympathizer, Thea Von Harbou, supplying the screenplays, she played the typical modest and selfless maiden in government-sanctioned melodramas such as Die Reise Nach Tilsit (1939) and Das unsterbliche Herz (1939). The worst was the anti-semitic historical melodrama Jud Süß (1940). After that she starred in the pompous Der grosse König (1942), the hugely popular melodrama Die goldene Stadt (1942), Immensee (1943) and Kolberg (1945). Strangely, her popularity remained somewhat intact in the early post-war years but she reportedly refused all offers because Harlan was banned from working by the Allied occupation forces. Acquitted three times for collaborating with the past regime, he was finally allowed to resume work. Although they continued to make seven more films, the couple was definitely past their prime. After Harlan's death in 1964 Kristina Söderbaum established herself as a portrait and fashion photographer in Germany and wrote her memoirs, Nichts bleibt immer so (1983). She seldom appeared in a film but made an interesting come-back in the arthouse production Karl May (1974, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg). Her last film was the low-budget thriller Night Train to Venice (1994, Carlo U. Quinterio) starring Hugh Grant. On 12 February 2001, she died in Northern Germany. Harlan and she had two children.
Sources: AllMovie, Cyranos.ch, Wikipedia and IMDb.
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