He wrote the role of Polly Peachum in The Threepenny Opera for her, but late in rehearsals her husband died at Davos on 14 August 1928.

[citation needed] She enjoyed success as Marianne in Ödön von Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods, and embodied and immortalized Polly in G.W.

[4] While in Berlin, she practiced boxing with Turkish trainer and prizefighter Sabri Mahir at his studio, which opened to women (including Vicki Baum and Marlene Dietrich) in the 1920s.

Posing for a photograph opposite Mahir and equipped with boxing gloves and a maillot, she asserted herself as a "New Woman", challenging traditional gender categories.

[9] According to Buber-Neumann, in 1940 the Soviets included her in a prisoner exchange with the Nazis, which was part of the NKVD-Gestapo cooperation initiated by Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.