Hanna Berger

Hanna Berger, born Johanna Elisabeth Hochleitner-Köllchen on 23 August 1910 in Vienna, was an Austrian dancer, choreographer, teacher, director, writer, and committed anti-Nazi and communist who also appeared on Broadway in 1935. She died on 15 January 1962. Associated with the free dance movement, Berger built a career that spanned Europe and the United States and was shaped throughout by her political convictions.

Berger was born illegitimate to Maria Hochleitner in the working-class Viennese district of Meidling, where she spent her early childhood between her grandfather's home and her mother's. Her biological father was identified as the wealthy Eduard Wolfram, though her mother's husband was a railway worker named Wilhelm Köllchen, who formally adopted Berger when she was eight years old. She was baptised Roman Catholic and contracted tuberculosis as a young child, which affected her eye. She later described the poverty of her upbringing as producing in her a condition of hypersensitivity and a longing for art. Piano lessons began at fourteen. At sixteen she married Leopold Berger, a machinist; the couple separated within a year, though a formal divorce did not occur until 1943. She retained the name Berger and did not remarry. Between 1927 and 1928 she was a member of the Communist Party of Austria.

Her formal dance training took place from 1929 to 1934, when she studied gymnastics and modern dance in Berlin alongside Jonny Ahemm, Vera Skoronel, and Gertrud Wienecke, and with Mary Wigman in Dresden. To fund her studies during this period she gave dance lessons under the name Hanna Wolfram and worked as a masseuse. In 1929 she also began a relationship with the sculptor and committed communist Fritz Cremer, a partnership that would last until 1950.

Berger's professional performing career began in earnest in 1935, when she toured with Mary Wigman, dancing in the Women's Dances cycle, which included pieces such as The Seer and Witches' Dance. That same year she appeared on Broadway in Fridolin On the Road and Want Ads. In 1936 she joined the Trudi Schoop troupe and performed in the choreographies Zur Annoncengabe and Fridolin unterwegs! during an extended tour that included the United States, London, and Zurich. She also deepened her technical knowledge at the German Master Studio for Dance in Berlin, where she attended classes in theatre directing, ballet, and character and national dance.

By 1936 Berger was openly anti-Nazi, publishing articles under the pseudonym The Stage Artist in the Swiss theatre magazine Der Bühnenkünstler. The pieces, titled Dance in the Stadium and About German Dance and Its Real Content, directly attacked Nazi cultural policy. On 11 October 1937 she made her solo choreographic debut at the Berlin Bach-Saal, presenting an eleven-part programme that included Three Romantic Studies: Summer, Late Summer, Summer in Paris and Everyday Story: Girl, Lover, Abandoned Mother, Mourning Woman. The centrepiece of the evening was Solo Krieger, set to music by Ulrich Kessler, a work the Nazis had banned and which was performed only through the intervention of the Austrian ambassador, who served as patron of the event. The dance was reviewed by Dietrich Dibelius in the Frankfurter Zeitung on 18 October 1937. The work's depiction of a soldier's experience of war drew the hostility of Nazi authorities, and Berger was forced to flee Germany for Vienna.

Her Vienna debut followed in December 1937 at the great hall of the Urania. City councillor Viktor Matejka, recognising the politically expressive character of her work, offered her a performance space at the Volksheim Ottakring, where she performed Krieger again on 5 February 1938. A review in the Workers-Weekly newspaper noted that all those present developed a disgust for war. In 1938, shortly before the annexation of Austria on 13 March, Berger followed Cremer to Rome, where she taught at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After passing an examination for an academic post she was appointed to a professorship. Through the Academy she choreographed and performed in Florence, Messina, and across Italy.

During the years of the Second World War, Berger continued to perform and teach in Berlin, giving lessons in gymnastics, piano, and acting while also taking modelling work. In 1940 she danced the cycle Italian Journey at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome. In 1941 she performed at the Theatre on the Kurfürstendamm alongside Marianne Vogelsang. Between 1941 and 1942 she staged The Unknown from the Seine in eight scenes, and on 30 May 1943 she held her own dance evening at the Theatre on the Kurfürstendamm. In October 1942 she danced at the Schiller Theater under the direction of Heinrich George and appeared alongside actors Will Quadflieg and Ernst Legal. To avoid scrutiny from the Reich Chamber of Culture and the Gestapo, she labelled her works as historical dances.

From 1937 onward, Berger and Cremer were involved in anti-Nazi communist resistance in Berlin through a group that later became known as the Red Orchestra. Her relationship with Cremer ended in 1950 when he relocated to East Germany. Contributing factors to the separation included his objection to what he perceived as the Americanisation of Vienna, the stigmatisation of communists, a controversy surrounding a memorial to victims of fascism at the Vienna Central Cemetery — a nude bronze figure of a resistance fighter that Archbishop Theodor Innitzer demanded be altered — and Cremer's numerous affairs. Berger did not remarry following the end of that relationship.