The children grew up in the old city , near the Goethe House. Henny's older sister, Anny, later trained as an opera singer. Henny trained as a dancer at the Frankfurt Opera Ballet; she first appeared on stage there at the age of 8 and later became a dancer in revues. He describes her as he saw her then: And there I saw her dance for the first time: that woman possessed the most attractive body that I had set eyes upon in my not all that long life.
The girl, here moving to and fro in the spotlight. She was a simple, nice, approachable girl, but she had as much interest in sex as in Immanuel Kant. That's to say, none at all. There are at least two other versions of how La Jana was discovered.
According to contemporary reports, she was first discovered in Frankfurt, at the Weinklause cabaret, before going to Berlin to dance. Another story is that she was brought in at a day's notice to replace the ailing star of a revue in Dresden and later received engagements in Berlin as a result.
In Casanova she was presented to the audience semi-naked on a silver platter. Crown Prince Wilhelm became her lover and visited her regularly at her villa in Grunewald. Cochran , in contrast, reports reading in a newspaper that " Hitler was seldom seen in public without La Jana". In this show, she played a Spanish dancer. After her return to Germany, Truxa filmed in , released in made her a film star, [18] and from then on she appeared in one or more films almost every year.
She represented an exotic, not typically German type of womanhood. She "initiate[d] the experiments of Nazi cinema in mimicking the Hollywood musical" and became the top dance and musical star in German films.
