[13][14] Despite her long marriage to Fleischer, who died in South Africa in 1950,[15] Sagan expressed interest in lesbian themes and characters throughout her career as an actor and director, before and after making Mädchen in Uniform.

[18][19][20] Supported by her mother and savings from working in the Austrian consulate in Johannesburg, Leontine moved to Vienna in 1911 to train with Max Reinhardt, who was already known for elaborate and imaginative sets and direction of intimate drama and mass spectacles, as well as his theatre school.

as well as plays on topical Jewish themes such as anti-Jewish pogroms in Die Jagd Gottes (Hunted by God), by the Rabbi Emil Bernhardt Cohn, which proved controversial.

In 1931, she directed Gestern und Heute [Yesterday and Today], a play about an intimate relationship between a teacher and a student at a girls school, by the avowed lesbian Christa Winsloe.

[29][30] On Winsloe's recommendation, the feminist Hertha Thiele played the role of the student and caught the attention of Carl Fröhlich, head of the German Film Chamber.

Although Fröhlich maintained overall control as artistic supervisor and changed the title to Mädchen in Uniform, allegedly to attract more male viewers, Sagan cast and directed the actors, including Thiele and, in the role of the teacher, Dorothea Wieck.

[31] Sagan's direction of the all-female cast was ground-breaking not only for its portrayal of lesbian and pedagogical eros and for its critique of Prussian militarism, but also for the production's co-operative and profit-sharing financial arrangements.

[34] After the war, a more sentimental remake , also titled Mädchen in Uniform, starring Romy Schneider, appeared in 1958, but from the 1970s, renewed interest in lesbian lives and culture at women's film festivals brought viewers back to the 1931 original.

[38] Her reputation as a director of young people led to work with the Oxford University Dramatic Society, with whom she directed male students and professional actresses in plays by Shakespeare.

[41] While writing treatments, she renewed contact with former colleagues who had found work in Hollywood such as screenwriter Salka Viertel, whom Sagan had known as Salome Sara Steuermann when they were both acting in Austria.

[45] In 1939 with the outbreak of World War II, Sagan and Fleischer moved to South Africa, where she directed mostly amateur actors but also taught black students at the Hofmeyr School fo Social Work, including later famous people such as the creator of the township musical Gibson Kente.

In the film, the school is ruled by a strict Prussian headmistress but, where Winsloe's play has the student who has fallen in love with her teacher commit suicide by throwing herself down the stairwell, Sagan revised the plot.

[53][54][55] The elements that make Mädchen in Uniform a lesbian classic are not the titillating images that might be implied by the title, which was in any case chosen by producer Fröhlich—girls holding hands, dressing and undressing, and so on—but rather Sagan's sensitive and sophisticated direction of talented actors, the avowedly feminist Hertha Thiele as the student Manuela, and the more subtle contribution of Dorothea Wieck as the teacher Fräulein von Bernberg.

Mädchen in Uniform's success in 1931 was due in large part to its celebration by avowed lesbian magazines such as Die Freundin and Der Skorpion and their readers but also to broad support for feminist and independent women in Weimar Germany.

Sagan kept notes on her aspirations and career from her adolescence in Johannesburg through her theatrical training in Vienna, and her theatre and film direction in Germany, Britain, South Africa, and Australia.