DEAD LADIES SHOW #42

For the February show, they return to their bilingual format, offering captivating presentations in either English or German.

Learn about three lesser-known women who all survived the Nazis: a Jewish film critic who gained immense influence, an Afro-German editor and illustrator, and a frustrated Bauhaus student who managed to create art throughout her life. Their almost-ignored stories deserve much-discussed attention.

This time, our passionate hosts are your popular co-host Florian Duijsens, top German author Lene Albrecht, and the first-ever husband-and-wife team, Sally McGrane and Axel Scheele. The whole event will, of course, be moderated by your equally popular co-host Katy Derbyshire. As always, you can expect a charming audience and a warm and entertaining
atmosphere.


Standard tickets cost €10 and the reduced price is €4. Seeing it’s a Sunday, we’re starting earlier. Doors open 6:30 pm – come on time to get a good seat!



LOTTE EISNER (1896–1983) was a Berlin-born writer, film critic, archivist and curator. She fled the Nazis for Paris in 1933 but was interned in 1940 along with other Jewish women. Don’t worry – she escaped the camp and helped preserve banned films hidden in a freezing-cold chateau. After liberation she became Chief Curator at the Cinémathèque Française, continuing her work of collecting, saving and curating films, costumes, set designs, artwork, cameras and scripts. She might be most famous for her influential book on Expressionism in German cinema, The Haunted Screen. In later life she mentored various movie dudes, who were utterly dedicated to her in a weirdly egotistical way. She was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre National de la Légion d'honneur and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

Born in Hamburg, ANDREA MANGA BELL (1902–1985) was the daughter of a white German mother and a Black Cuban father, a classical pianist. After her marriage failed, she was a single parent to two children, working as a magazine editor and illustrator in Berlin and also translating from French to German. She and the kids joined her lover, the writer Joseph Roth, in French emigration to escape the Nazis. Whereupon he pissed up her inheritance and she left him, moving to Paris and living partly in hiding. After the war, her Cameroonian husband showed up again, then ended up killing their son in an argument. Andrea Manga Bell campaigned for his trial, but it never happened. Despite her heartbreak, she fed James Baldwin a hot meal every day while he was living in Paris. From 1954 until her death, she worked for the United Restitution Organisation, helping former victims of Nazism to make claims.

LI LOEBELL (1904-1995) one of the “lost women of the Bauhaus,” led a life marked by art, love, sexuality and survival under the Third Reich. Born in 1904 at the White Stag Sanatorium, where her father was the head doctor and Kafka had once been a patient, she started studying at the Bauhaus in 1921. There, she had a hand – and perhaps more – in the creation of the famous Bauhaus cradle, before her father took her out of the school because of its loose morals. Banned from working as a gymnastics teacher from 1933 on because her father had been Jewish, Li kept making art her whole life – from dolls and stuffed animals to earn money during the war, to portraits and Madonna figures made from charcoal and paper, stones, bark or trash she found on the street. The flea market discovery of a box containing her early artworks has shed new light on her ties to the Bauhaus – and vice versa.

Florian Duijsens is an editor, teacher and literary translator, plus of course co-host and co-founder of the Dead Ladies Show.

Lene Albrecht writes novels and essays. Her debut novel Wir, im Fenster (We, in the Window) was published in 2019, followed by Weiße Flecken (White Spots) in 2024. As part of the Writing with CARE/RAGE collective, she advocated for the compatibility of artistic work and care work.

Sally McGrane is a Berlin-based American journalist and novelist. She has written for The New York Times, the New Yorker, and many others. Her most recent spy novel is Odesa at Dawn.Axel Scheele is a Berlin-based musician, audio producer, and Bauhaus-era detective.


IN GERMAN & ENGLISH