German postcard by Photochemie, Berlin, no. K.2637. Photo: Eichberg-Film. Bruno Decarli and Leontine Kühnberg in Uns aber ist gegeben auf keiner Stätte zu ruhen (1918). While the film title Uns aber ist gegeben auf keiner Stätte zu ruhen [But to us, it is given to rest on no place] is absent on IMDb and the German site Filmportal, from the six films that Richard Eichberg directed with Leontine Kühnberg in 1918, all for his own company Eichberg-Film, a probable option is Im Zeichen der Schuld (Eichberg, 1918), aka Aus dem Leben eines Vorbestraften [From the life of a convicted man]. Filmportal lists this as the only film in which Decarli and Kühnberg played together in a film by Eichberg-Film. The plot deals with a man (Decarli) who, convicted of forging his boss's name, kills the bank director and assumes his identity. However, the Early German Film Database does list the film Uns aber ist gegeben, auf keiner Stätte zu ruhen as a separate film (1918), directed by Eichberg, and starring Decarli and Kühnberg. So perhaps, this is a separate film after all.
German actor Bruno Decarli (1877 - 1950) had a short, but intensive career in the silent cinema.
Leontine Kühnberg (real name Leontine Chimberg; 9 September 1889 in Berlin - after 1930) was a German theatre and silent film actress.
The daughter of the Jewish merchant Emil Chimberg and his wife Heni, née Lastu, can be traced as a theatre actress from 1908. For a time she belonged to the ensemble of Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War she began to make films, first under direction of Harry Piel in Der schwarze Pierrot (1913) with Ludwig Trautmann. In 1914 she started at PAGU/ Union, led by Paul Davidson. Her participation in two Sudermann adaptations, Die Geschichte der stillen Mühle (Richard Oswald, 1914) and Der Katzensteg (Max Mack, 1915), brought her recognition. The former film dealt with an impossible menage à trois, also with Alfred Abel and Robert Valberg, while the latter was set in Napoleonic times and dealt first with a father-son conflict in which a maiden was forces to help the father and the French enemy, and later on the son, despite being a Prussian freefighter, defending the woman at all costs. Ferdinand Bonn, who later on often act with her, already had supporting parts in these two films.
Kühnberg continued at PAGU in films such as Pension Lampel (Max Mack, 1915) and So rächt sich die Sonne (William Wauer, script Richard Oswald, 1915). Apart from PAGU she also acted in the mid-1910s in Otto Rippert's Der grüne Mann von Amsterdam (1916) with Erich Kaiser-Titz, Harry Piel's Das lebende Rätsel (1915) with Ludwig Trautmann, and Richard Oswald's films Seine letzte Maske (1916), Zirkusblut (1916), Des Goldes Fluch (1917), and in particular the lost film Es werde Licht/Let There Be Light, I (1917, protesting anti-abortion law and warning against syphilis), all with Bernd Aldor. Accrding to IMDb, Kühnberg also acted in two Hungarian films: Az ezüst kecske (Michael Curtiz, 1916) with Victor Varconi, and A Világ csak hangulat (Eugen Illés, 1917). With Illés she would do various German films too.
In 1918, after a few films at Duskes and Neutral-Film, Leontine Kühnberg stepped over to Eichberg-Film, where under direction of Richard Eichberg she did seven films in 1918-1919, e.g. Die goldene Mumie (1918), also with Ferdinand Bonn, Die letzte Liebesnacht der Inge Tolmein (1918), with Karl Falkenberg, and Die Tragödie der Manja Orsan (1919), in which she had the tile role opposite Charles Willy Kaiser. She then moved to Neutral-Film for a few films under direction of Eugen Illés, e.g. Die silberne Fessel (1919-20) and Moral (1920), often acting opposite Ernst Rückert. Her last films were for the company Neos-Film, among which Judith Trachtenberg (Henrik Galeen, 1920), about a young Jewish woman who cannot choose between her Jewish family & roots and her non-Jewish lover, a count (Paul Otto). Moreover, she is pregnant of her husband-to-be. In the end she commits suicide. In 1932 an American remake was released as A Daughter of Her People.
At the beginning of 1921, Leontine Kühberg got married with the businessman and film producer Ludwig Schwarz in Vienna, for whose Neos-Film GmbH she had appeared in leading roles three times before. She withdrew from the film sets. In the following years, the couple lived in the Berlin districts of Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg, where Ludwig Schwarz ran a large hosiery factory. In 1930, Leontine Kühnberg was the owner of the short-lived publishing house Buchkultur, which she ran together with her husband. No definite information is currently available about her later fate. In 1970, Leontine Kühnberg was declared dead at the Schöneberg District Court, with 31 December 1945 as the official date of death. Her last place of residence was presumably Warsaw, so that it must be assumed that the actress, who was considered a "full Jewess" according to Nazi racial doctrine, died violently - possibly in connection with the Warsaw Ghetto. Her husband had already been declared dead in 1962. NB IMDb writes she already died in 1924 but this is wrong.
The writer Ernst Birnbaum was a cousin of Leontine Kühnberg.
Sources: German Wikipedia, IMDb, Filmportal.
