German-Hungarian novelist, playwright and sculptor, best known for her play Gestern und heute (known under several titles), filmed in 1931 as Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform) and the 1958 remake. Winsloe was the first to write a play on female homosexuality in the Weimar Republic.
In the play, the young student, Manuela, is destroyed because of rejection by her teacher, Fräulein Elizabeth von Bernburg, who did not dare to side with Manuela against the headmistress or oppose the brutal educational methods. Manuela commits suicide. The film is more ambiguous, with von Bernburg attempting to defend the student and herself. The film version was also a considerable success, both financially and critically. This was due to its ambitiously aesthetic form and the fact that only women performed in it. The lesbian aspect of the story was downplayed and depicted as an adolescent crush, even though Winsloe co-authored the script, and Leontine Sagan, who in the play had stressed the lesbian aspect, acted as director.
In response to the play and film’s downplaying of the lesbian themes, Winsloe completed and published her novel Das Mädchen Manuela (The Child Manuela) in 1933. It was a bolder novelized version of the screenplay that emphasized the lesbian storyline.
Winsloe did not publish anymore after Das Mädchen Manuela because she did not want to write under the rules and conditions of the German Literature Department. Soon enough, all of Winsloe’s books and articles were on the Nazi index of “undesired literature”. The author was considered as “politically unreliable”. During World War II, however, she wrote scripts for G.W. Pabst.
In 1913, she married Baron Ludwig Hatvany (1880–1961), a rich Hungarian writer and landowner. Thus, she became known as Baroness Christa Hatvany de Hatvan. The marriage failed, but Hatvany made Winsloe a generous allowance after the divorce.
Winsloe was involved in a relationship with American newspaper reporter Dorothy Thompson, probably before World War II when Thompson was reporting from Berlin. Early in the War, they fled the Nazis (Thompson had warned against Hitler early on, and was one of the first women who interviewed Hitler). They spent time in Italy and then Winsloe followed Thompson to the USA, but Winsloe did not like it there. Her scripts were rejected by Hollywood producers and she did not want to write in English, so she left Thompson and returned to Europe in 1935. She spent the next years travelling between Italy, France, Hungary, Austria, and Germany.
In October of 1939, Winsloe moved south and settled in Cagnes. There she met Simone Gentet, a Swiss author ten years her junior. They stayed together during the following years and Gentet translated some of Winsloe’s works into French. The two women also offered temporary support and refuge for people fleeing the Nazis.
Following an immediate evacuation order on 10 June 1944, Winsloe and Gentet were falsely accused of being Nazi spies by four Frenchmen. They shot and killed the two women in a forest near the country town of Cluny.
Link to Wikipedia biography