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Berlin (dpa) - Berlin has an insatiable appetite for anything to do with the actress, author of the autobiography "The Gift Horse" and singer Hildegard Knef who died in 2002, aged 77 in the city.
The life and loves of Knef are currently being recalled in a spate of exhibitions, stage shows and television documentaries linked to what would have been her 80th birthday on December 28.
Born in Ulm, Germany, in 1926, Knef grew up in wartime Berlin where she was one of the country's first big, post-war screen stars.
Like Marlene Dietrich before her, she left Germany in 1947, with ambitions of a Hollywood career after marrying her first husband U.S. army officer Kurt Hirsch who had lost half of his Jewish relatives during the Holocaust.
Her hopes were based on the great success of a German-released film, "Die Suenderin" or "The Sinner". But although equipped with a Hollywood contract, her career did not take off as hoped in America, and she grew bored waiting vainly for film roles that never appeared.
Knef was a quintessentially German artist, who unlike Dietrich, frequently returned to Europe to make movies in Britain, France and her native homeland, when her career failed to advance in Hollywood.
Her marriage to Hirsch did not last, and in fact got off to a bad start when his parents made known their feelings about his return to America with a "German war-bride!"
But Knef did enjoy spectacular success on stage, starring in the Broadway musical "Silk Stockings" in 1954 which ran for 18 months. Following her divorce from Hirsch, the actress married David Cameron Palastanga with whom she had a daughter Christina, who now lives in the United States.
With her movie career flagging, Knef turned chanson singer, touring in Germany and other neighbouring countries in the late 1960s. In this period, she sold more than three million discs, and became the author of a best-selling book "The Gift-Horse", which dealt among other things, with her traumatic battle against breast cancer.
A career highlight was a concert she gave at the Berlin Philharmonie in 1967.
Three years ago, the Berlin Film Museum purchased a vast trawl of personal effects from Knef's estate. It is through these items letters, documents, programmes and paintings that the public are able to trace her talented, but at times tortured, career.
In 1943, Knef began an apprenticeship as a cartoon animator at UFA Universum. A year later, aged 18, she made her first movie-only to learn later her role had been cut out of the film. A second wartime film was destroyed in an air raid.
In spring 1945, Berlin was in ruins, but soon its theatres were vibrant once more albeit under Allied control. That June, Knef could be seen on the stage of the reopened Tribune. A few months later, she was a member of the Schlosspark Theatre ensemble in Berlin's Steglitz district.
However, it was a film role as a released concentration camp prisoner in an early Wolfgang Staudte post-war movie that Knef was catapulted to stardom. Her flat, make up-less face, and delayed manner of speech led to her being hailed as a "brave representative of the new Germany".
Curator Daniela Sannwald, says she spent 18 months sifting through Knef's belongings when preparing for the Berlin exhibition. "We all underestimated Knef," she says, adding, "She was much more versatile than we'd imagined."
Knef was not only a film talent, but also a gifted artist and fashion designer, and as her correspondence shows maintained close links with a string of famous personalities including Henry Miller and Marlene Dietrich among others at various periods in her life.
Recently a musical based around Hildegard Knef was staged at a Berlin theatre, and a one-hour documentary by Felix Moeller entitled "Knef The Early Years", was premiered at Berlin's Arsenal-Cinema, and also shown on German WDR TV.
Knef's wartime lover is alleged to have been Ewald von Demandowsky, who was a top Reich's film official and apparent close confidante of Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister.
She had denied ever meeting Demandowsky after the Nazi surrender, but in her best-selling autobiography, she described the chaos in Berlin in spring 1945, and hints she was detained for a spell in a Russian camp, after donning a soldier's uniform.
But David Cameron seems to question parts of her account, and husband number one, Hirsch, recalls a day when both he and Knef had a "hardly coincidental meeting" with Demandowsky on a Berlin street shortly after the war.
Demandowsky was executed by the Russians in October 1946 by chance a week before the premiere of the film, "Die Moerder sind unter uns" or "The Murderers Are Among Us" in which Knef had an important, early post-war role.
Knef lived in Berlin in a grace-and-favour apartment offered her by the city government for a spell in the 1970s. After her marriage to Paul von Schell in 1977, the couple left for Los Angeles in 1982, returning to Berlin in 1989.
Knef died on February 1, 2002, from a lung complaint, and is buried in a city cemetery.
She made headlines in German newspapers until her death. During her lengthy career, the German tabloid daily, Bild, featured more than 400 headline "splash stories" about the actress.
The Knef exhibition at the Film Museum on Berlin's Potsdamer Platz opened in late November and runs until April 17, 2006. Admission is two euro. A catalogue entitled "Hildegard Knef - An Artist from Germany", costs 19,90 euro (23 dollars).
Copyright 2005 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
