I wish to thank our own Sonia Pressman Fuentes for bringing
this excellent and fascinating article by Henrik Eger to my attention.
When Jewish people got deported to labor and concentration camps during the
Third Reich, one of Berlin’s most eccentric transvestites — Lothar Berfelde,
known as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf — bought or collected the belongings of Jewish
deportees and made them part of her Gründerzeit Museum, which still exists
today.
In 2003, Doug Wright, a New York-based, Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright, wrote
“I Am My Own Wife,” about the cultural outsider. The play has since been
performed in 30 countries and is scheduled to come back to the United States for
a run in early 2011. The Forward’s Henrik Eger asked the author about the plight
of Jews in Berlin as seen through the eyes of Charlotte, the flawed heroine of
his award-winning play, which hit a raw nerve with Jewish and non-Jewish
audiences alike.
Read the entire original interview
here.