Reinhild Solf
Reinhild Solf was a German born stage and television actress and author.
Life
Early years
Reinhild Solf was born in Haldensleben, a small town a short distance to the northwest of Magdeburg in Saxony. She received her drama training at the Max Reinhardt Acting Academy in West Berlin and went on to make her stage debut at the regional theatre in Hanover. This was followed by work at the Theater Lübeck and at the National Theatre in Berlin.Theatre
In 1973, at Berlin, she played Fontanelle in Edward Bond's take on King Lear and Mrs. Frost in The Vegetable, or From President to Postman (in German "Der Präsident oder das Würstchen") by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1974 she embarked on a freelance career. In 1983 she took over the title role in Goethe's Stella at the Zürich Playhouse. She followed this the next year with Penthesilea by Kleist. Further roles followed at Zürich, where she remained until 1989. In 1988 she took the part of Mrs Meinhold in The Open Country by Arthur Schnitzler, and in 1989 she appeared as Lotte in Peter Shaffer's "Laura and Lotte". It was around this time that Solf married the theatre director Hans Hollmann.In 1989 she joined Frank Baumbauer at the Theater Basel where the same year she appeared in the first theatre production of The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. In 1991 she appeared at Basel in "Die Zeit und das Zimmer" by Botho Strauß, and two years later she took the title role in Victor Hugo's Lucrezia Borgia. During the next few years she worked variously at the Kleine Komödie theatre in Munich as well at theatres in Bonn, Düsseldorf, Basel and Berlin.
Literature
Reinhild Solf's first novel appeared in 1980, published by Molden Verlag of Graz, and in 1985 as a paperback by Goldmann Verlag, by this time based in Munich in West Germany. The book, entitled "Leberwurst, Käsebrot, zwo, drei vier: Ein deutsch-deutsches Märchen" provided a fictional account of a childhood in East Germany, a theme that will have resonated with thousands of readers in the west because of the massive population shifts across the "internal frontier" that had taken place between the foundation of the two separated German states in 1949 and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The book was a commercial success and the paperback edition was reprinted in January 1987.Her second novel, "Schmetterling" appeared in 2008 after a gap of nearly three decades. In 2011 she presented her third novel, "Schattenfrauen", the story of three women meeting up in 2009 at the same camping place beside the Baltic Sea where they previously camped many decades before when it was a girls' holiday camp for Free German Youth members during the years of one-party dictatorship. Published by Langen Müller Verlag, this book had its debut at the 2012 Leipzig Book Fair. A film version of "Schattenfrauen" is reported to be under preparation.