A Cherry Dress

Die Wiener Tänzerin Anita Bild floh Anfang 1939 mit einem Hausmädchen-Visum nach England, wo sie durch eine Scheinehe wieder auftreten konnte. Sie organisierte die Ausreise ihrer Eltern nach London, die in einem Flüchtlingsheim unterkamen, dessen Leiter Fritz Bild sie später heiratete. Bekannt wurde sie als »Anita Douglas – The Viennese Nightingale« und später bei BBC. Anita Bild schrieb 1991 ihre Lebenserinnerungen für ihre Familie. Die Memoiren werden von wissenschaftlichen Beiträgen renommierter Expertinnen begleitet. Sie kontextualisieren die Tanzkarriere vor und im Exil, die Situation von Hausangestellten in England und Anita Bilds Scheinehe und zeichnen biographische Skizzen über Anitas Vater, den Juristen Georg Lelewer, den Musiker Franz Eugen Klein und ihren Scheinehemann Donald Douglas. A Cherry Dress is the memoir of a Viennese born dancer driven into exile. In her late 70s and 80s, Anita Bild wrote about her extraordinary life at her son’s request. The main aim was to give her much-loved grandchildren a personal picture of the Viennese family she was born into, her sometimes exotic experiences as a dancer and choreographer in German language theatre, her escape from Nazi Austria and her early adventures in exile in London. Fleeing to London in February 1939, with a visa permitting her to work only as a domestic servant, she managed in just a few months, despite her lowly status, to arrange her parents’ flight to London just weeks before the outbreak of World War. She describes with fascinating details how she drifted from household to household and how new-found friends provided a social network enabling her to visit London’s leading high-court judge to plead, successfully, for her parents to be allowed into the UK. Those new friends even found her a generous, fascinating and eccentric Englishman happy to give her British citizenship via a marriage of convenience, thus enabling her to resume her stage career. Full of humour and vivid descriptions of people and events as she saw them, this very personal memoir is also a document of wider public interest. A series of academic essays and articles by members of her family provide historical context to accompany and to complement Anita Bild’s charming memories of a charmed life lived to the full. She was the living proof that reflections on one’s history are a source of wisdom and that variety is, indeed, the spice of life. This is a book that both charms in its personal reminiscences and illuminates events of a troubled, turbulent century.