Lotte Meyer

Lotte Meyer (22 February 1909 - 7 June 1991) was a German stage and screen actress.

Biography

Lotte Meyer was born in Bremen. She was born into a theatre family. During the nineteenth century her grandparents had run their own theatre company which had toured across Germany, Russia, Austria and Switzerland. He mother, born Fanny Musäus, was a stage actress who had learnt her profession from her own parents. Alfred Meyer, Lotte Meyer's father, was a stage actor and comedian. Preparing to follow in the family tradition, she took acting lessons from Alice Verden at the Dresden State Theatre (Staatstheater).

Meyer was just 19 when she made her stage debut, playing "Lucy", the daughter of the police chief, in Leopold Jessner's production of The Threepenny Opera at Chemnitz. After that she had a successful stage career at the Dresden State Theatre (Staatstheater) between 1930 and 1935. Her sons Christoph and Peter were born in 1937 and 1940: she took a break from her stage work till 1945. Sources are silent about Mr. Schroth, the boys' father. After Lotte Meyer returned to the stage in 1945, her two sons shared their mother's itinerant theatrical lifestyle as they grew up.

Returning to the stage in 1945 she became part of the group around Erich Ponto, supporting his efforts to rebuild the "Staatsschauspiel" theatre in Dresden and resume its theatrical traditions. She also appeared at the city's newly founded "Komödienhaus" (loosely, "Comedy Theatre"). The central third of Germany, including Dresden, had ended the war administered as the Soviet occupation zone, to be relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet-sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). It was in East Germany that Lotte Meyer now built her career. Towards the end of the 1940s she began to travel around more (always within East Germany), appearing at theatres in Stralsund, Schwerin and then, via Eisenach, joining the Berlin-based Berliner Ensemble theatre company. Here she worked with Bertolt Brecht, a convinced Marxist who remained an iconic figure for the political left even if he was by now becoming a thorn in the side of the "Marxist" East German Politburo. For Meyer, work with Brecht was a constant learning opportunity.

Later she appeared at Erfurt, at the Theatre of the Young Generation in Dresden, the (East) German National Theatre in Weimar and at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin.