Leontine Sagan (born Leontine Schlesinger; 13 February 1889 – 20 May 1974) was a theatre director and actress of Jewish descent, whose life and career took her from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to South Africa, Britain and the United States.Bernard Sachs, South African Personalities and Places (pitzer.edu), Kayor Publishers, Johannesburg, 1959. She is best known for directing a film, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), which has been celebrated for its scathing indictment of Prussian military-style schooling, as well as its sensitive portrayal of same-sex intimacy between a teacher and a student at a girls' school, in the waning years of Germany's Weimar Republic.
Sagan was born in Budapest but grew up in South Africa. After returning to Vienna to attend Max Reinhardt's Theatre School in Vienna, she acted on Austrian provincial stages, and moved on to major roles in Dresden, Frankfurt and Berlin, where she also directed theatre, first in Germany and, after she had to flee Hitler, in Britain, South Africa, and Australia. She co-founded the National Theatre Organisation of South Africa in 1947, and died in Pretoria, South Africa in 1974, at the age of 85.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 229
Personal life Born in Budapest in 1889, Sagan spent her early childhood in Vienna at a time when these cities were the twin centers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father Isidore Schlesinger was largely absent, as he travelled to seek fortune in the South African diamond fields. Leontine and her siblings were raised by a mother who worked, a rarity among educated Europeans at that time, and she credits her mother with inspiring her likewise to seek a career.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 14 In 1899, as a child, she and her family moved to South Africa to join her father, just before the Second Boer War, when they settled in Doornfontein, at the time a fashionable district in Johannesburg. She was educated in the German School and later worked for the Austrian consulate in Johannesburg.
After returning to Vienna to study with the famous director Max Reinhardt, Leontine adopted the stage name Sagan and acted on stage first in Austrian provincial theatres and then in the 1910s and 1920s in Vienna, Frankfurt and Berlin.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 40–109 In 1916, she married Austrian art publisher and writer Dr. Victor Fleischer.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 74 Fleeing Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933, the pair moved to Britain, and later, in 1939, to South Africa, where they spent the years of World War II (1939–1945).Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 116–205 After the war, Sagan directed theatre abroad in Britain and Australia, but remained domiciled in South Africa, where she founded the National Theatre Organisation and also taught theatre practice to black as well as white students.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 206–229
Despite her long marriage to Fleischer, who died in South Africa in 1950,Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 229 Sagan expressed interest in lesbian themes and characters throughout her career as an actor and director, before and after making Mädchen in Uniform.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 59–96 This film and Sagan's choice to play the role of the teacher in English versions of the original stage play, variously titled Girls in Uniform and Children in Uniform,Mennel, Mädchen in Uniform, 8 in Britain and South Africa in the 1930s, as well as her taste for masculine dress as seen in the photographs illustrating her autobiography Lights and Shadows, suggests at least a commitment to representing lesbian lives and loves, if not also personal attachments to women.Kruger, Loren. Introduction. Lights and Shadows: The Autobiography of Leontine Sagan, xxxvii–xliMennel, Mädchen in Uniform, 14–26
Career Supported by her mother and savings from working in the Austrian consulate in Johannesburg, Leontine moved to Vienna in 1911 to train with Max Reinhardt, who was already known for elaborate and imaginative sets and direction of intimate drama and mass spectacles, as well as his theatre school.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 40–53 After acting in small roles in provincial Austrian theatres, Sagan moved to Germany, where she played Abel in Comrades by August Strindberg in the Munich Kammerspiele. This role in a play by a controversial modern playwright led to an engagement at the Albert Theatre in Dresden, where Sagan played Nasya in Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths in 1913, and at the avant-garde Neues Theater in Frankfurt am Main, during World War I, where Sagan originated roles in expressionist plays by Walter Hasenclever and Georg Kaiser.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 75–96 After the war, she played major parts at the Frankfurter Schauspielhaus, in classical German plays by Goethe and Schiller, as well as the lead in a historical drama on Catherine the Great.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 91–93 She appeared in films such as The Holy Mountain (1926), The Great Leap (1927), and The White Ecstasy (1930).Leontine Sagan profile, filmdirectorssite.com; retrieved 2 May 2015. At the Schauspielhaus she also turned to directing, including Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, and G.B. Shaw's Caeser and Cleopatra. as well as plays on topical Jewish themes such as anti-Jewish pogroms in Die Jagd Gottes (Hunted by God), by the Rabbi Emil Bernhardt Cohn, which proved controversial.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 94–96 Sagan's decision to play the lesbian Countess Geschwitz in Frank Wedekind's play Pandora's Box in 1919 (but not in the later film version of Pandora's Box ), early in her career at the Schauspielhaus, reflected not only her interest in lesbian subjects, but also the relative tolerance in the Weimar Republic of lives and institutions which today would be identified as LGBTQ+, including the Institute for Sexology (1919–1933) as well as informal groups.Mennel, Mädchen in Uniform 14–18Kruger, Introduction, Lights and Shadows, xvi–xxiv
Although best known for her film Mädchen in Uniform, Sagan came to film directing indirectly. In 1931, she directed Gestern und Heute [Yesterday and Today], a play about an intimate relationship between a teacher and a student at a girls school, by the avowed lesbian Christa Winsloe.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 110Mennel, Mädchen in Uniform, 18–23 On Winsloe's recommendation, the feminist Hertha Thiele played the role of the student and caught the attention of Carl Fröhlich, head of the German Film Chamber. Although Fröhlich maintained overall control as artistic supervisor and changed the title to Mädchen in Uniform, allegedly to attract more male viewers, Sagan cast and directed the actors, including Thiele and, in the role of the teacher, Dorothea Wieck.Mennel, Mädchen in Uniform, 9–13 Sagan's direction of the all-female cast was ground-breaking not only for its portrayal of lesbian and pedagogical eros and for its critique of Prussian militarism, but also for the production's co-operative and profit-sharing financial arrangements.Mennel, Mädchen in Uniform, 27–63 The film was a national and international hit, despite some censorious responses in the U.S. and Britain.Mennel, Mädchen in Uniform 64–67 After the war, a more sentimental remake, also titled Mädchen in Uniform, starring Romy Schneider, appeared in 1958, but from the 1970s, renewed interest in lesbian lives and culture at women's film festivals brought viewers back to the 1931 original.Mennel, Mädchen in Uniform 92–99
After Hitler's rise to power, Sagan moved to England.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 220–229"Hitler Comes to Power", ushmm.org; retrieved 8 May 2015. While her husband Victor Fleischer continued until 1938 to manage his publishing house in Vienna, Sagan directed stage plays, in 1933 first a stage version of Mädchen in Uniform called Girls in Uniform in London, and then in South Africa with the perhaps less controversial title Children in Uniform.Sagan, Lights in Shadows, 139–145 Her reputation as a director of young people led to work with the Oxford University Dramatic Society, with whom she directed male students and professional actresses in plays by Shakespeare.Sagan, 140–146 Her observations of student rivalries at Oxford inspired the script for her second film Men of Tomorrow (1934), which Sagan directed for London Film Productions, but this film has since vanished.Kruger, Introduction, Lights and Shadows, xxiv–viii It was on the strength of Mädchen in Uniform that Sagan was invited to Hollywood by MGM studios, where she stayed for six months in 1936, describing the period as a "joyride".Sagan, Lights and Shadows 151 While writing treatments, she renewed contact with former colleagues who had found work in Hollywood such as screenwriter Salka Viertel, whom Sagan had known as Salome Sara Steuermann when they were both acting in Austria. Although Sagan wrote several treatments, among them one for a fictional film on the South African imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, she had no success in persuading MGM, possibly because Salka's husband, the director Berthold Viertel, had already directed a Rhodes biopic for Gaumont in Britain. Sagan's treatments based on historical women, such as Florence Nightingale, were likewise unsuccessful.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 159–160
Instead, Sagan returned to acclaim in the London theatre; she was the first woman to produce plays at London's Drury Lane in the West End, where she directed Ivor Novello's hit musicals Glamorous Night (1935), Careless Rapture (1936), Crest of the Wave (1937), The Dancing Years (1939) and Arc de Triomphe (1943).Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 161–174 Novello's popularity and Sagan's directing flair have been credited with saving Drury Lane from potential closure in the 1930s. In 1939 with the outbreak of World War II, Sagan and Fleischer moved to South Africa, where she directed mostly amateur actors but also taught black students at the Hofmeyr School fo Social Work, including later famous people such as the creator of the township musical Gibson Kente.Sagan, Lights and Shadows, 198–213Kruger, A Century of South African Theatre, 109, 210-11 After the war, she returned to directing Novello in London and to take his and other musicals on tour to Australia.Sagan, 214–219 Between tours, she was also able to develop theatre in South Africa by co-founding with Andre Huguenet the National Theatre Organisation which toured the country from its base in Pretoria. In February 1948 she directed the NTO's first English production Dear Brutus by J.M. Barrie, followed by J.B Priestley's An Inspector Calls.Kruger, A Century of South African Theatre, 59
Filmography Mädchen in Uniform (1931) featured an all-female cast and was the first film in Germany to be produced cooperatively (both the crew and cast obtained shares rather than a salary).Acker, A. (1991). Reel women: Pioneers of the cinema, 1896 to the present (pp. 320–322). New York: Continuum. It is based on the play originally titled Ritter Nerestan by Christa Winsloe.Mennel, Mädchen in Uniform, 6 The film, like the play which Sagan directed as Gestern und Heute in 1931, centers on a girls' boarding school, which was realistically depicted and shot on location at a school, albeit at one for boys. In the film, the school is ruled by a strict Prussian headmistress but, where Winsloe's play has the student who has fallen in love with her teacher commit suicide by throwing herself down the stairwell, Sagan revised the plot. In Mädchen in Uniform, the solidarity and intervention from fellow students saves Manuela's life; this revised story critique the Prussian education system, in favor of the more liberal systems of the Weimar Republic. But it is as a lesbian classic and more broadly as a feminist film, that Mädchen in Uniform has been praised since the 1970s.Rich, Mädchen in Uniform, 114Gramm and Schlüpmann, Gestern und Heute: Gespräch mit Herta Thiele, 34