“The myth of Henny Porten was rounded out and promoted by the Messter company’s outstanding organisation, which guaranteed that Henny Porten was almost omnipresent in German cinemas during the second decade of this century. As a rule, Porten’s star series consisted of no less than eight to 10 films per year, which alone enabled her to be constantly showing in German cinemas. Yet the material basis for this great popularity in the territory of the German Reich consisted, which is unimaginable today, of a mere 15 to 20 copies of each film (the difference results from calculating one to five substitute copies for cases of wear-and-tear). These copies did the rounds with great speed, extreme precision, and long-term. Even in Messter’s own Mozart Hall in Berlin, a Porten film only ran for the usual premiere week, with one extra week at most. Regularly, usually at four to six week intervals, a new Porten film reached various local cinemas, until she finally adorned screens even in the ‘most remote mountain hamlet’ (Pinthus). You could be absolutely sure of Henny Porten. And she could be sure that the organisational basis for her popularity functioned.
In this way, Henny Porten was a lot of things but nothing fully, and was thus very typical of early cinema: something for everyone. It was this many-sidedness which constituted her myth and enabled it to assume such dimensions”. (Corinna Müller, in Hans-Michael Bock (Hg.), Cinegraph. Lexikon des deutschsprachigen Films, 1984)