“Having worked exclusively in the theatre for three years, cine­ma unexpectedly caught up with me again. Should the boycott be terminated? Not at all. … I was “smuggled” into the film. It must have come as quite a surprise when my name appeared in the newspaper, but my comeback was a fact. During the pre­miere in Berlin, I received demonstrative applause throughout the whole film, and after the showing the audience stood up and called for me, until they were requested from the stage to leave the theatre so that the audience for the next showing could take their seats. The press, too, who during the years when I was not filming had constantly searched for me, received me as never before. The ice was finally broken. I was inundated with offers. I accepted some of them because I found them particularly interesting, but with the theatre in the back­ground, I didn’t need to enslave myself. But cinema, as it was then, did not succeed in tearing me away from theatre again”.

Asta Nielsen, Die schweigende Muse, Veb Hinstorff, Berlin, 1961