Wera Blanke

Wera Blanke (Paintner) is a German actress and Esperantist. Born in 1933 to a pair of actors, she acted both on stage and for television throughout her career. Blanke began activity in the Esperanto community in 1976, writing several books about Esperanto-language terminology.

Early life
Blanke was born in Leipzig on 2 March 1933, to actors Martin Flörchinger and Ruth Trumpp. She made her theatre-debut at the age of six, as a child actor at a theatre in Bochum. She often moved cities through her childhood according to where her parents were acting: she would often appear on stage with her parents, for example in theatres in Königsberg and Munich.

Career
After graduating in 1951 in Schondorf, Bavaria, Blanke worked as a technician at Bavaria Film and Aktiengesellschaft für Filmfabrikation, before applying to study theatre at the Staatlichen Schauspielschule Berlin (known today as the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts) in Berlin. In 1956, she moved from Munich to Leipzig in East Germany, where her father was acting. During her studies, she worked as an actress at the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin, and from 1958 the Theater der Jungen Welt in Leipzig, the Landestheater Altenburg, and the Nationaltheater Weimar. Blanke also worked as an actress in productions by Deutscher Fernsehfunk, such as Maria Diehl's Daring (Das Wagnis der Maria Diehl), several episodes of the detective series Polizeiruf 110, and Der Staatsanwalt hat das Wort.

Around 1967, after acting in Bitterfelder Weges, Blanke went to the East German agricultural cooperative Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft, where she worked as a chicken keeper; she kept a journal during this time, which appeared as a manuscript under the title Of Chickens and Humans (Von Hühnern und Menschen). From 1967 to 1971, Paintner worked as a lecturer at the Staatlichen Schauspielschule Berlin (where she had previously studied), from 1972 to 1982 and worked as an occupational and expressive therapist at the Wilhelm-Griesinger-Krankenhaus. Blanke continued acting roles during her time as a teacher; she played roles in televised films, radio dramas, and dubbed foreign media into German. Blanke also presented a program about literature, in which she presented some of her own fables and poems

Blanke married fellow actor Wolfgang Dehler in 1960, having three children with him during a nine-year marriage; their son Thomas Dehler (actor), is also an actor. In 1986, she married the interlinguist and Esperantist Detlev Blanke (died 2016), who was a lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Esperanto
Blanke began working with the International auxiliary language Esperanto in 1976, becoming convinced of its potential after visiting the 1978 World Esperanto Congress in Varna, Bulgaria. Starting work on issues of terminology in Esperanto in the early 1980s, in 1985, Blanke (then under the name of Wera Dehler) proposed an Esperanto terminological centre, together with Humphrey Tonkin, in a report entitled Terminologia Esperanto-Centro: Spertoj, Problemoj, Perspektivoj (Esperanto Terminological Centre: Experiences, Problems, Perspectives), leading to the Terminologia Esperanto-Centro being established and funded by the Universal Esperanto Association in 1987.

Together with her second husband, Detlev Blanke, Blanke has published several books and articles in and about Esperanto, and given lectured about Esperantists in the field of terminology, such as Eugen Wüster, Ernest Drezen, and Alfred Werner. In 2006, Blanke was awarded the Eugen-Wüster-Sonderpreis by Infoterm, and was made an honorary member of the German Esperanto Association in 2018.