A sleek and vivacious actor with saucer eyes and a wide, pearly smile, Austrian-born Richter starred in seventy German feature films between 1913 and 1933. She was one of the biggest box-office attractions in Germany during the 1920s, appearing in everything from comedy to costume melodrama, but she was most associated with the serial-inspired, heavily plotted antics of fast-paced Reise-und-Abenteuerfilme, a.k.a. travel-and-adventure films. At Pordenone we saw two of these multipart features and so were able to enjoy her fashion-plate aviator circumnavigating the world in Der Flug um den Erdball (Willi Wolff, 1925) as well as her Armenian princess on a mission to save her incarcerated father in Die Frau mit den Millionen (Wolff, 1923). Often, thanks to her dark hair and eyes, Richter was cast as the German film industry’s concept of “exotic”: not just Armenian princesses but Spanish dancers and Gypsy girls—see Aberglaube (Georg Jacoby, 1919), a thundering variation on the Carmen theme, with Richter’s seductive beauty luring men to their inevitable destruction. In this way, her profile was similar to that of her near-contemporary, the Polish actor Pola Negri. But whereas Negri boarded a liner, headed across the Atlantic, and rebuilt her career in the Hollywood studio system, Richter stayed in Germany and started her own production company in 1920, which made nearly forty films. Richter had been the first muse of celebrated director Richard Eichberg in the 1910s, and worked with Joe May and Richard Oswald as well, but she subsequently made most of her films with her husband, the writer-turned-director Willi Wolff, in more crowd-pleasing genres.
So why doesn’t Richter have more than a sliver of contemporary name recognition, even an entry in the major German film history textbooks? As Barbara Hammer reminds us in Nitrate Kisses (1992), “Effective history does not retrieve events/actors by official history. But shows the processes that produced those losses. Those constructed silences.” Richter’s films filled cinemas, but box-office receipts and postcards easily fade—prestige rather than popularity is a reliable route into history, and Richter rarely worked with the more celebrated auteurs of the period. Most urgently, as a Jewish performer, Richter was heading for a dangerous bend in the road. She and Wolff weathered the transition to sound, making four talkies, but not the arrival of the Nazi regime and the eviction of Jewish creatives from the German film industry. That’s the loudest silence in her life story. Richter and Wolff left the country in 1933, settling first in Austria, then France, before fleeing Europe for the States in 1940 and becoming U.S. citizens in 1946. Wolff died a year later, while Richter lived to the age of seventy-eight, dying in 1969. They never made another film.