Johannes Meyer | Schwarzer Jäger Johanna (Black Fighter Johanna) / 1934 [in German only, film difficult to obtain]

the lesbian warrior

by Douglas Messerli

 

Heinrich Oberländer, Heinz Umbehr, and Georg von der Vring (screenplay), Johannes Meyer (director) Schwarzer Jäger Johanna (Black Fighter Johanna) / 1934 [in German only, film difficult to obtain]

 

I once watched this film in its original German, the only copy I could find; but now as I seek out to review it, even that version seems to have been taken off of the internet. I currently know of no way currently to obtain a copy, and my German was insufficient for me to be able to cogently talk about it that long ago experience.

     According to other sources such as IMDb and Letterboxd, the story begins in the Napoleonic period, when Germany was under his rule. A German woman, Johanna (Marianne Hoppe), is riding a stagecoach when another of the coach’s occupants, Major Georg Ludwig Korfes (Paul Hartmann) is arrested by the French militia. Before his capture, he has given a mysterious letter to Johanna.

     Johanna, soon after, dons black breeches and armor, crossdressing as a male, and joins the German Freikorps to help in the German resistance of Braunschweig in the 1809 attempt to fight the Napoleonic occupation. She is, of course, an immediate hero. Among the other heroes was actor Gustav Gründgens as the character Dr. Frost.

    In real life Hoppe was a lesbian, and Gründgens was gay. And only two years after the film, as the Nazis consolidated their power, the two married in the desire to protect their careers and prevent persecution. Accordingly, as critics have pointed out, the film itself is highly interrelated to the ways in which gays of the period attempted to elude imprisonment, and today is often read in the context of how many artists were able to survive in the Third Reich.

     The couple divorced at War’s end in 1946. Four years later Hoppe starred as Blanche Dubois in the German production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and after that played notable avant-garde roles in plays by Heiner Müller, Thomas Bernhard, who became her partner in private life; she also was a favorite of directors such as Claus Peymann, Robert Wilson, and Frank Castorf, among others.

 

Los Angeles, May 22, 2026

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (May 2026).