The daughter of the technician Arthur Erdmann and his wife Johanna, née Viertel, [1] attended the lyceums in Solingen , Essen and Chemnitz and received violin lessons at the conservatories in Breslau and Berlin . She completed her acting training with Adele Sandrock, among others . [2] In the 1920/21 season, she began her stage career at the Rotter Group's Trianon Theater in Berlin , where she worked with later well-known colleagues such as Paul Bildt , Hans Albers , Eugen Burg , and Max Zilzer, Paul Biensfeldt , Harry Hardt and Franz Weber together. Already in the following season she changed the ensemble and now worked at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm . At the same time (1922) Erdmann was in front of the camera for the first time with a supporting role in the German-Dutch joint production The Man in the Background . However, her main interest continued to be the theatre. After stints at the National Theater in Mannheim and the Thalia Theater in Hamburg , she was a member of the ensemble of the United Theaters (later called the Schauspielhaus ) of the city of Cologne from the 1927/28 season to the 1933/34 season.