An Interview with Mark Nelson

By Diane S. Frank

I think I’ve got egg on my face.  Again.  As much as I write, and I write a lot, I’ve been reminded yet again that I’m not really very good at it.  Today in the Sunday, November 06, 2005 edition of the Plain Dealer, Zachary Lewis wrote up a story of his interview with Mark Nelson, the actor who plays Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in “I Am My Own Wife”, which officially opens at the Cleveland Play House on November 9^th.

I look over my patchwork of notes, my prepared questions, and the intermittent sounds on the voice recorder that managed to drop out when people weren’t shouting.  What have I got?  I’ve got a little here and there that Mr. Lewis didn’t get. I do have two advantages over him, I wear skirts and makeup with great frequency and I have neither an arbitrary deadline nor size limit on what I write.  What you dear reader will read is something I can only speculate on.

The main points are the same.  Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was born Lothar Bersfelde in Germany 1928.  A homosexual, a transvestite with a beloved lesbian aunt, and a brutal father, Lothar survived the Second World War, the communist rule of East Germany and lived until 2002.  In the 1970’s Lothar adopted the identity of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf permanently.  Shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, Charlotte was honored by the unified German state for her efforts at cultural conservation, preservation of artifacts from the Grunderzeit era (the first unified cultural period of Germany from 1854-1910 under Kaiser Wilhelm II) and the rescue and reconstruction of a East Berlin gay bar called the Mulack-Ritze.  Then it was discovered that she was listed in the files of the East German secret police as an informant.   How much of what Charlotte said about herself could be believed?  What do we want and need to believe?  That is the essence of Douglas Wright’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play.

Mr. Nelson was originally was supposed to direct the play, but couldn’t find an actor he really trusted for the role. He finally decided that he wanted the part for himself.  It was and is a huge challenge to play so many different characters with different accents and body language.  At the time of the interviews Charlotte was still coming to life in Nelson. Like Douglas Wright, the play’s author, and despite the shadows on a difficult life, Nelson has acquired a bias in Charlotte ’s favor. From watching a movie biography of Charlotte , reading her autobiography and listening to selected interview tapes ( Charlotte spoke excellent nearly unaccented English) Charlotte is to Nelson a person of graciousness and quiet pride in her being.  If she had to make compromises to live, perhaps we comfortable Americans should forgo judgment.

Of course, I did go after a few questions that the PD reporter missed, coming naturally as a Friend of Charlotte’s.  After all as the Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard has said, (in paraphrase) you can’t understand one unless you are one.

One of the things that struck me about Charlotte was her plainness of dress.  When we think of homosexual crossdressers we think of drag queens who are rather flamboyant, and even with heterosexual crossdressers there is a tendency to be more glamorous.  Charlotte with her starkly plain black dresses and single string of pearls doesn’t fit our expectations.   Nelson’s thoughts on this relate to both Lothar’s deep attachment to his mother and her role in life and to knowing early exactly who Charlotte was, a person of a 3^rd sex in Magnus Hirschfeld’s taxonomy.  In the play, when Charlotte utters the title line of “I am my own Wife” it is not in the context of having a lover, but of having a woman to take care of domestic chores.  Throughout the play, Charlotte makes repeated references to her housekeeping.   Charlotte ’s deep identification with feminine ideals of domesticity might raise questions of her transsexuality. Charlotte was aware of the desire of some people for a physical transformation but it didn’t interest her.

The battlefields and lines of demarcation that are so hard fought in the various segments of the American transgendered communities did not exist for Charlotte and perhaps they didn’t exist in East Germany at all.  With everyone so oppressed, being the subject of that oppression could override the differences we seem to take so seriously here.  Still, just like in “Soldiers Girl” where there were protests at calling the romance between the transsexual Calpernia Addams and the murdered marine, Barry Winchell a gay love affair, there may be objections to shoe-horning Charlotte into the mold of Gay hero, when her identification was clearly 3^rd sex, and in modern terms more likely trans.  In an era when gay personal ads all emphasize “straight looking and acting, no femmes” it is disconcerting to think of those same people embracing Charlotte, whose demeanor, as noted in the author’s introduction to the play is “so sweetly self-effacing, so coyly feminine, and so full of modest charm that even the hard-core locals forgave the fact that she was hiding a man’s body beneath her pleats.”

One point that Mr. Nelson makes in the interview, and that shows up in the introduction to the play itself is absent from the program notes.  Charlotte did make mistakes in translating German to English.  One mistake in particular involved the word acquire, bekommen, which Charlotte mistranslated “become”.   Thus there is a scene where Charlotte lists item after item that she has acquired, but rather become.   This mis-translation seemingly innocent and charming is important in that it reveals the depths of Charlotte ’s commitment to her mission of preservation.  It also reveals something about the playwright. In his obsession with Charlotte , he doesn’t just acquire her history, he does in ways become her.

With a person as obviously eccentric as Charlotte , it is natural to wonder about her lovers.  According to Mr. Nelson, Charlotte did not have a major romance in her life. When asked about it she replied that, “I never found the love of my life, but no flower blooms in vain”.  Her lovers were mostly older men.

Perhaps though, most revealing about the stage that Mr. Nelson was at in creating Charlotte was the following remark, this one the digital voice recorder did pick up:

It’s hard enough for me to walk down the hall in a dress, and I can’t imagine the guts it takes to live your life….”  And I had to respond that for him, the dress subverted his sense of self, his identity as man.  Whereas for me, dressed in red velvet from my boots up for the interview, I was not subverting my image but finding another means for its expression.  And thinking about it, I hoped that particular exchange might have given Mr. Nelson some insight as to how far he had yet to go to fully inhabit Charlotte as a character.  For Charlotte and I, despite differences in era, country and sexuality had that much in common, that our choice of clothing allowed us to be seen as we wished to known, and as we felt about ourselves.