One of the more harrowing themes in cinema centers around school administrators doling out physical and psychological punishment to their students. The first talkie to vividly display such abuse is the German movie, November 1931's "Madchen in Uniform." Based on Christa Winsloe's 1930 play 'Yesterday and Today,' the movie follows a fourteen-year-old daughter, Manuela, (Hertha Thiele), of a military officer whose mother had died, making it necessary for the teenager to board at an all-girls private school. The tension-packed film is also one of the first in cinema to have an exclusive all-female cast.
The play-and the movie-was a personal story of playwright Winsloe, who found herself undergoing the harsh educational private school system in Germany. The character Manuela, a sensitive girl thrusted into a new environment, experiences the rough transformation of her friendly individuality forced to live in an uniformly unfriendly, cold environment. Winsloe personally witnessed the destructive results of such harsh treatment impacting with disastrous long-lasting effects on young women. The actress Hertha Thiele recalls years later that "The whole of Mädchen in Uniform was set in the Empress Augusta boarding school, where Winsloe was educated. Actually there really was a Manuela, who remained lame all of her life after she threw herself down the stairs. She came to the premiere of the film. I saw her from a distance, and at the time Winsloe told me 'The experience is one which I had to write from my heart.'"
Winsloe portrayed one of her teachers, Fraulein von Bernburg (Dorothy Wieck) in the movie, as the only adult in the school having compassion towards the students. The teacher's warmth around the students, treating them as humans instead of objects to be trained like seals, was totally against the school's rigid philosophy, set down by the institution's strict headmistress (Emilia Unda). When she hears of von Bernburg's benevolence towards Manuela, she's instructed never to speak to the student again. Manuela is devastated by the edict, and plans to commit suicide by jumping off the top of a multi-story atrium similar to what Winsloe had witnessed.
"Madchen in Uniform" has enjoyed a cult-like following decades after its release. Because of its topical subject matter of women's affections towards each other, the movie was almost banned in the United States in 1932 before Eleanor Roosevelt, then wife to the governor of New York State, Franklin Roosevelt just before he was elected President, persuaded the state's censor board to allow the movie to be shown. The film, produced shortly before the Nazi Party took control of Germany's government, was banned by the Nazis, who ordered every copy burned. By that time there were so many prints distributed in a number of countries that it has survived intact today.
Winsloe's play, translated as "Girls in Uniform," was her only published stage work. She relocated in the United States early in World War Two before moving to France, where, in 1944, she was accused of being a Nazi spy by four Frenchmen. She was shot along with her companion on June 10, 1944.
