Maria Orska

Maria Orska. Published by Photo Studio [Margarete] Willinger, Berlin.

Rahel Orska was born into a prosperous Jewish family in the southwest Russian (now Ukainian) city of Nikolaev (now Mykolaiv) in 1893. Owing in no small measure to the patronage of her maternal uncle, the theatrical agent Eugen Frankfurter (1861–1922), she was able to train as an actor in Vienna. Following short spells in Mannheim and Hamburg—where she had her breakthrough, in 1911, as Salome in Oscar Wilde’s eponymous play—Daisy Orska, as she now called herself, came to Berlin in the spring of 1914. In the summer of that year, as Germany went to war against Britain, she changed her first name to Maria. For roughly a decade after the First World War, Orska was a highly sought-after and widely feted actor. Most observers agreed that she embodied the profoundly unsettled and angst-ridden postwar mood like few of her peers. For some, this made her a demonic, even dangerous figure, others greatly admired her for this very ability. In the late 1920s, as her sustained morphine and cocaine habit increasingly took its toll, her career began to flag. As the Jewish Chronicle wrote in September 1929, “There seems to have been some affinity between Madame Orska and her many tempestuous creations of unbalanced women, burning with a fire that was as capricious as it was devastating”. In May 1930, she died of a (possibly intentional) barbiturate overdose.

Hungarian-born Wilhelm (Mór) Willinger (1879–1943), his Vienna-born wife Margarete Willinger, née Grünbaum (b. 1885), and their son Laszlo Joseph Willinger (1909–1989) were major players in the Central European photography business and pioneers of photo journalism particularly well known for their coverage of theatre performances and actors’ portraits. Wilhelm Willinger initially established a studio in Berlin in 1909. After the First World War, he moved to Vienna and created a new business—and became increasingly involved in the organization of the photographic profession—there while his wife continued to run the Berlin studio, eventually supported by her son. Possibly, the Willingers had already separated or divorced at this point. In 1926, Margarete Willinger married Arthur Pflanzer-Baltin (1888–1963), the son of an extremely prominent Austrian General lampooned by Karl Kraus in The Last Days of Mankind, Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin. The fact that they married a year after Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin’s death invites speculation that they may previously have been prevented from marrying because the father objected to his son marrying a Jew. On the other hand, Pflanzer-Baltin never featured in his own right in Berlin’s city directory, not even at the address mentioned on the marriage certificate, making the marriage something of a mystery. It is unclear when they divorced, but by the time Margarete Willinger arrived in New York on 29 December 1938 with the intention of joining her son in Los Angeles, she was once again a divorcee. Nor does she seem to have mentioned the second marriage in her immigration papers, instead naming her former first husband as her contact back in Europe. Having previously worked for the Keystone Press Agency, Laszlo Willinger was apparently sent to Spain by them to cover the civil war. In 1937, he was able to flee via Mexico to the United States where he had a job waiting for him as a studio photographer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Following the Anschluss, Wilhelm Willinger was able to flee to Shanghai, taking his equipment with him, and ran a photo studio there until his death in 1943. On 28 April 1942, Margarete Willinger’s sister Ilka Maibaum (1883–1942) and her husband Maximilian (1877–1942), who apparently fled Berlin in 1938, were deported first from Prague to Theresienstadt, two days later from there to the ghetto in Zamosč and then sent from there, most likely towards the end of May 1942, to the Belzec death camp where they were murdered.