“It’s not difficult to write a screenplay for Henny Porten. In almost all her films she is carrying a baby on her arm, is a touching mother. She is always unhappily married in those films. Caught in a marriage between unequals, with a baron, a duke, a prince, even with a king. Were German script writers to broaden their thematic horizon a bit, she might even be married to a god.
The aristocratic husband demands that she go to balls, that she behave like a woman of the world. But she prefers to sit at her child’s cradle or busy herself about the house. She is a one-hundred percent German woman. Thus the rift. When her honourable husband is not at home, the baroness, duchess, princess, eats lunch in the kitchen. She does not feel at ease in the large uncomfortable ceremonious rooms with no rubber plants and geraniums.
Since 1911, when she first appeared on screen, from film to film Henny Porten has borne in honour the memory, the dream, of the German pre-war woman, through the land of orphans and taxes, astronomical prices for a loaf of bread and eight-year-old prostitutes, through uprisings and a suppressed revolution, through hunger and syphilis. In a peculiar way, this woman reflected the memory of German literature and idealist philosophy. Of Goethe. Of the family, of hand-knitted socks. Of the ‘shining defence forces’ of Wilhelminian Germany. Of true poetry. Of the lullaby of childhood, that dear, familiar, gentle, superfluous lullaby. Of genuine coffee, not roasted acorns, with thick cream. Of the trip to Italy, through museums and art galleries Baedeker in hand. And of the so-called women of the four Cs (church, clothes, cooking, children). (Ismael Urasow, Henny Porten (1926), in Helga Belach (ed.), Henny Porten, Der erste deutsche Filmstar, 1890-1960, 1986)