She was fifteen.
## The Film That Followed Her Everywhere
Gustav Machatý was a Czech director with a gift for visual experimentation and a reputation for pushing past what censors considered acceptable. His 1932 film Extase — known in English as Ecstasy — told the story of a young woman trapped in a joyless marriage who falls into an affair with a handsome engineer. The film contained a scene of the actress, Hedwig Kiesler, swimming naked in a lake, and another scene in which her face, filmed in close-up, conveyed unmistakably the experience of sexual pleasure. Whether this was art or provocation or both was debated furiously across Europe and the United States. Pope Pius XI condemned it. The United States Customs Bureau tried to seize prints at the border. The Austrian censor board banned it.
Ecstasy made Hedwig Kiesler famous in a way she had not anticipated and could not fully control. It was, by any standard, a remarkable piece of cinema for its time — technically innovative, emotionally direct, more interested in female experience than most films of the era. It was also the thing that would be thrown at her for the rest of her life whenever anyone wanted to diminish her. For years afterward, the film was the first thing many people mentioned when her name came up, as if it negated everything else.
She was eighteen when it was released. She had already moved on to other things.
## Fritz Mandl and the World He Inhabited
In August 1933, Hedwig Kiesler married Friedrich Mandl, known as Fritz. He was thirty years old to her eighteen, the director of Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik, one of Austria’s largest arms manufacturers, and one of the wealthiest men in the country. He was also politically connected in ways that would become catastrophically significant within a few years. Mandl supplied weapons to Benito Mussolini’s government in Italy, and his business relationships extended to clients across the European arms trade — a trade that, by the mid-1930s, was accelerating toward the catastrophe everyone said was not coming.