That a piece of work is I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright’s one-hander about the German collector and transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. And what a piece of work was its subject, who survived Nazism and Communism—two of the most repressive regimes in modern history—and managed to keep faith with her chosen lifestyle while vastly improving her standard of living.
Between 1942 and her death last year, von Mahlsdorf—born Lothar Berfelde—amassed a small fortune’s worth of late-19th-century furniture and bric-a-brac, parlaying it into a private museum collection that she housed in the twenty-three-room, 18th-century manor house near East Berlin that she Continue reading