“She was the spark that lit our generation …” Dorothy McKegg.
In 1938, the Jewish actress Minnie Maria Korten, star of the European stage, left Nazi Germany for the safety of the United Kingdom. In her hand luggage she carried a few theatre reviews, some photographs and a copy of Goethe’s Faust. Eventually she arrived in New Zealand with her family ‘in exile at the other end of the world’. In her new home she was known as Madame Maria Dronke. Renowned for her dark, beautiful voice and magnetic presence, Maria Dronke entranced audiences with her acting and poetry recitals, created spectacular productions and trained the first generation of New Zealand professional actors. Maria Dronke: Glimpses of an Acting Life brings to light the story of a woman who changed the face of New Zealand theatre.
Monica Tempian
Monica Tempian is an author, editor and lecturer whose work focuses on the inter-related research areas of Diaspora and Exile Studies, Memory Studies, Multicultural Literatures and German-Hebrew Studies. She has taught German language, literature and culture since 1996, first as a PhD trainee and assistant of Professor Hans-Jürgen Schrader at Geneva University, and from 2006 at Victoria University of Wellington, where she is currently Senior Lecturer. Her publications include Manfred Winkler - Catching the Wind: Poems; The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust and Postwar Displacement and Ein Traum, gar seltsam schauerlich: Romantikerbschaft und Experimentalpsychologie in der Traumdichtung Heinrich Heines.