| Cosma Shiva Hagen | |
| Birth Place: | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Actress |
| Years Active: | 1996–present |
Cosma Shiva Hagen (in German ˈkɔs.ma ˈʃiː.va ˈhaːɡn̩/) is a German actress. Although she speaks English, her acting roles have been largely confined to German-language films and television productions. She also starred in an Irish film called Short Order (2005).
Born in Los Angeles, California, Cosma Shiva Hagen is the daughter of German singer Nina Hagen and Dutch musician Ferdinand Karmelk. As a child, she lived in London, Berlin, Paris, Ibiza, Lüneburg and Hamburg. Her grandmother was actress Eva-Maria Hagen and her step-grandfather is the East German dissident writer and singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann. Hagen's unusual name was picked by her mother, who claimed she saw a UFO while pregnant. "Cosma" is a reference to the cosmos, and "Shiva" is a reference to the Hindu god Shiva.
Hagen's great-grandfather Hermann Carl Hagen, a German-Jewish banker and economist, was murdered at Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1945. Her non-Jewish great-grandmother Hedwig Elise Caroline Staadt, wife of Hermann Hagen, was also murdered at Sachsenhausen. Her maternal grandfather Hans Hagen was a Holocaust survivor, being held at a prison in Moabit between 1941 and 1945 until liberation by the Soviets.[1]