Biography

Carola Neher was a German stage and screen actress and singer. In 1926, she went to Berlin to work with Bertolt Brecht, who wrote the role of Polly Peachum in "The Threepenny Opera" for her. While in Berlin, she practiced boxing with Turkish trainer and prizefighter Sabri Mahir at his studio, which opened to women, including Vicki Baum and Marlene Dietrich, in the 1920s. Carola Neher positioned herself as a "New Woman", challenging traditional gender categories. In 1932 she left Germany after Adolf Hitler's ascension to power. She first emigrated to Prague, where she worked at the New German Theater, but went on to the Soviet Union in 1934, where she met Gustav von Wangenheim and worked with him at his Cabaret Kolonne Links. In 1936, during the Great Purge, she denounced herself as a Trotsky supporter and was arrested on 25 July 1936. She was sentenced to ten years in prison and sent to Black Dolphin Prison near Orenburg in Russia, where she died of typhus on 26 June 1942, aged 41.