by Donald Spoto
“He who writes for Berlin writes for the world,” trumpeted the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt in its first edition. Few would have disagreed, for in a sense the city was a microcosm. Immigrants flowed in from Austria, Italy, Poland, Russia, Hungary and France, all of them attracted by the promise of immediate employment and a superior standard of living. Additionally, the famous Berlin air—cool, fresh and invigorating year-round—offered an appealingly temperate atmosphere for the enjoyment of a sparkling chain of lakes and public parks. Gardens, splendid in their designs, were planted thick with birch, pine, chestnut and lime trees.
The climate may have been moderate, but the city’s Teutonic tastes were not. At the century’s turn, the classic modesty of old Berlin was replaced by a garish, nationalistic excess. Coveting the paraphernalia of pomp and circumstance, the arch-conservative Wilhelm II became obsessed with military parades and maneuvers, and he encouraged an urban design that virtually defined kitsch. The monument to his grandfather Wilhelm I stood sixty-five feet high on a bronze pedestal, flanked by bronze lions, and the Kaiser personally supervised plans for buildings with classical columns and great staircases leading from the street to the elevated ground floors, as if administrative offices were temples. Inside, the spaces were outlandishly opulent, with a profusion of gold and ebony, parquet floors, still more Corinthian pillars and scenes from mythology painted on fifty-foot-high ceilings.
From this style every designer took his cue. The lavish Adlon Hotel at Number One Unter den Linden, subsidized by the Kaiser himself, featured Italian marble and enormous chandeliers; it was one of the most famous lodging places in the world, frequented by royalty as well as Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. But other hotels—the Central, the National, the Monopol and the Kaiserhof—quickly surpassed the Adlon with even more red velvet, more ivory, more gilt banisters. New residential palaces seemed to spring up each month, along with expensive apartments offering ten, twelve or sixteen rooms. Ambition and pretense were tangible in the Florentine villas of the grand boulevards, their interiors crowded with heavy, expensive furniture: an excess of tables, bureaus and stained glass, elaborate chandeliers, heavy bronze household implements and overstuffed velvet sofas with gold and silver tassels.
Meanwhile, in less fashionable parts of town, modest barrack-like apartments were proliferating to house workers for the locomotive factories, iron foundries and new Daimler-Benz automobile plants. By 1901 the industrial proletariat lived mostly in tenement blocks, with six or eight families sharing a common lavatory.
Life was rigorously stratified. At the summit were Wilhelm II’s family and court, fiercely patriotic and ever alert for anything political, literary or aesthetic that threatened established power. (“An art that transgresses the laws and barriers outlined by me ceases to be an art,” the Kaiser said flatly in 1901.) Then came the upper middle class, loyal to him insofar as it was in their interest. The majority of Berlin’s population was comprised of the working class, those who during the 1890s had won important socialist reforms and strove to keep and extend the benefits deriving therefrom. And finally there was the intellectual bourgeoisie, opposed to everything represented by the court ideology. This last group was largely responsible for the prevalent tone of ironic, sarcastic wit that characterized Berlin’s social and intellectual life, and they supported the dozens of newspapers that in turn endorsed the proliferating political parties—among them the Guelphs, Bavarians, Old and New Liberals, Polish dissidents, Catholics and a variety of Conservatives. Since the 1890s, these factions often clashed violently, their confrontations inevitably augmenting the power of the imperial police.
IN 1901, THERE WERE 4,500 ROYAL PRUSSIAN POlicemen in the upper-middle-class district of Schöneberg, southwest of central Berlin, each man well paid and highly respected by the area’s population of 89,143—an astonishing police-civilian ratio by any standard. Groups of more than fifty subordinate patrolmen, detectives and telegraph operators were accountable to their leaders, and one of three supervising lieutenants was Louis Erich Otto Dietrich. An imposing man of thirty, Dietrich was autocratic, humorless and severe, his appearance very nearly a cliché of Prussian military tradition: he wore a monocle subjected to incessant polishing, a perpetually waxed and upturned moustache, closely shaved hair and a slightly ridiculous topknot that betokened his magisterial profession when he was helmetless and at leisure.
Louis Dietrich had married Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine Felsing in 1899 and the couple had taken a spacious apartment at 53 Sedanstrasse, Schöneberg. Descended from the wealthy Conrad Felsing family (watchmakers and jewelers for generations at the fashionable shopping address of 20 Unter den Linden), she was at twenty-three a plain but sharp-witted bride whose height (five two) and build (tending to plumpness) belied a quiet sensuality. Wilhelmina had acquired from governesses an enthusiasm for music, poetry and the details of proper housewifery, and when she gave birth to her daughter Elisabeth on February 5, 1900, her household, thanks to her husband’s handsome salary and her own small inheritance, included three servants.
Just after nine o’clock on the evening of December 27, 1901, a second daughter was born at home. Although never religious people, the Dietrichs called her Maria Magdalene—a fairly common appellation in Christian Germany, where it was popular to recall saints and disciples. When her mother was playful, however, she sometimes called the girl Paulus or Paul, the name chosen for the boy she never had. At about the age of twenty, Maria Magdalene joined the first and last syllables of her two names and called herself Marlene Dietrich.
Blue-eyed with fine red-blond hair, little Maria was from childhood much admired for her almost translucent complexion and gently serious expression. By the age of two she was remarkably self-confident, curtsying while she repeated the names of guests and utterly lacking the coyness common to a pretty and pampered child. At four, she could read the fairy tales provided by her English nanny, who also taught her to write, add and speak simple French sentences.
Maria’s quickness established a polite rivalry with her sister Elisabeth who, perhaps because her appearance and manner were not quite so charming and attractive, claimed less attention; in any case, the older daughter fancied dolls, outdoor games and walks with her father, while Maria preferred her mother’s company, sitting contentedly while Wilhelmina played piano, sang madrigals, read aloud from a book of poems and taught her daughter to make apricot jam and buttermilk soup. By school age, the sisters seemed almost to have come from different families, and in fact their mature lives never intersected. Elisabeth Dietrich became a teacher, married and lived quietly in Berlin until her death in 1977. Few of Elisabeth’s friends ever knew of her famous sister.
IN 1904, THE DIETRICHS MOVED TO A LARGER apartment not far away, at 48-49 Colonnenstrasse, near a wide thoroughfare. Later, Maria remembered the almost constant sounds of horses’ hoofs and men marching, of military pageants, police and cavalry parades and troops of schoolboys in strict formations. Even casual strollers observed exact protocols of formal politeness: uniformed gentlemen saluted ladies; children yielded to their elders in conversation, on sidewalks and in streetcars; and decent women never appeared in public without hats, gloves and a male escort. Everywhere public life appeared regimented, manners prescribed, the forms of dress and address precisely specified.
Just so at home, where life was characterized by duty and discipline. Louis Dietrich’s professional commitment to law and order had its counterpart in Wilhelmina’s elaborate system of the household chores assigned to Elisabeth and Maria, with concomitant rewards (a Sunday outing) and punishments (a meal forfeited). Maria’s father expected his children’s clothes to be as presentable as his uniform, their shoes spotless, their High German clearly enunciated and grammatically correct, and their deportment flawless. Social propriety and proper deportment had the sanctions often connected with religious observance.
Wilhelmina’s zeal for household virtues was the perfect corollary. Economy was primary: every Friday, fo
r example, the girls accompanied their mother and governess to the hay, straw and wood market for calm but persistent negotiations of wholesale prices. Invariably disappointed with the maid’s and cook’s performance of their duties, Wilhelmina rescrubbed, waxed and restained the intricate parquet floors of the parlor. Often she hastily remade the sauce for dinner, teaching Maria that the proper execution of such tasks produced the immediate rewards of satisfaction—and of having pleased the girls’ father, always a dominant consideration in every matter at home. Making Papa comfortable, gratifying him and deferring to his superior status as a man were in fact official household responsibilities.
Germanic precision and masculine supremacy was thus part of every detail, and Wilhelmina’s rules for honoring these were indisputable. “Sie selbst glich einem guten General,” Maria wrote later: “She herself was like a benevolent general,” and most of all the commanding officer outlawed idleness. “Tu etwas!” Wilhelmina said if she saw her daughters unoccupied—“Do something!” Performing things correctly was the demand of every day, Wilhelmina reminded, quoting Goethe. One had to approach life conscious of its various requirements, which included a careful concealment of emotion. “My whole upbringing [forced me] to mask my feelings,” Marlene Dietrich wrote later.
The last slap I had from my mother was because of that. I was having dancing lessons and had to dance with everyone in the room, including a young man I did not like. I made a long face. Mother saw it and slapped me as soon as we were alone. “You must not show your feelings, it is bad manners,” she said.
But there were compensations. The Dietrichs often took their daughters for promenades, to admire the new brownstones and orderly rows of trees along Unter den Linden, a grand boulevard where the most elegant emporia sold everything from food to toys to clothing. Shopping was now a fashionable pastime, an end in itself: at the richly carpeted boutique Demuth, for example, expensive leather goods, silver inkstands, jade paper knives and silk pencil cases could be admired. Nearby were the Felsing store with its expensive watches, hand-painted music boxes and filigreed picture frames, and elegant tearooms, delicatessens and steamship agencies. Here Maria could see women with fancy parasols and men with straw boaters mingling with career officers in plumed helmets, white trousers and black boots.
It was the twilight of the German aristocracy, and even in the afternoons matrons sparkled with strands of opera-length pearls, cotillions were announced in newspapers, and a rigid social protocol linked money and privilege to heredity. An entire way of life was presented as desirable and even possible for most Berliners, a life of richness in food and furnishings, of large diamonds and powerful colognes, of exciting new forms of transportation. More families could afford servants to care for their children while they took a holiday in St. Moritz; cafés were crowded with housewives who did not work; and while the women chatted and sipped, thoughtful waiters routinely set down pewter bowls with cool water for the ladies’ poodles.
On Sundays, the Dietrichs often stopped at the Hovel Confiserie to buy chocolates, marzipan or vanilla creams before proceeding to the Café Bauer on the Friedrichstrasse, where they sat at a marble-topped table and were served steaming cups of coffee or cocoa. Sometimes a few delicacies would be offered from the famous gourmet food store Huster, whose horse-drawn carriages were now all over Berlin, carrying buffets of lobster, salmon, salads and smoked hams to select restaurants and wealthy private patrons in the Bellevuestrasse or the Voss Strasse.
There were special entertainments, too. Maria and her sister were occasionally taken to the vast Scala Theater, home of the most famous variety show in Berlin. Here they saw Rastelli the juggler, Grock the clown, singers, impersonators and sideshow performers who cavorted with noisy abandon. The city was the theatrical center of middle Europe and grand productions filled the State Theater, but actually Berlin itself was a place where every resident and visitor, appropriately garbed, seemed to be a player in a vast social drama. When the Dietrichs left a music hall for Sunday dinner at the Kempinski on Wilhelmina’s birthday one year, the restaurant scene resembled nothing so much as an elaborate set piece—lavishly uniformed waiters, choreographed according to an almost religious ritual, served a meticulously presented artwork of roast pheasant.
In early 1907, the family again moved to another rented and furnished apartment, at 45 Potsdamerstrasse. Maria was not yet six years old, and for the third (and not the last) time she had new furnished rooms to become accustomed to, a new governess, a new neighborhood. And then, with shocking suddenness that summer, her father died, apparently of a heart attack after being thrown from a horse. Custom required the dignified masking of family grief, and Wilhelmina affected a stoic calm. Maria could recall no display of emotion as mother and daughters formed a strong, womanly circle, augmented by the protracted visits of two aunts and Grandmother Felsing. Following an old (and by then increasingly abandoned) Prussian custom, Wilhelmina henceforth wore her late husband’s wedding band above her own.
“O lieb, solang du lieben kannst . . .” Maria remembered her mother repeating for weeks after her father’s death a lyric by the nineteenth-century German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath:
O lieb, solang du lieben magst!
Die Stunde kommt, Die Stunde kommt,
Wo du an Gräbern stehst und klagst!
O love, while still it’s yours to love!
O love, while love you still may keep!
The hour will come, the hour will come,
When you will stand by graves and weep!
With money from a small civil service pension, Maria was enrolled that autumn at the Auguste Victoria Academy for girls, 63 Nürnbergerstrasse, where all the teachers were women. (Elisabeth, who suffered a series of childhood illnesses, received tutorials at home for most of that year.)
A hotchpotch of architectural styles—Victorian, Gothic, Florentine, Biedermeier and French Regency—the overappointed school halls were sharply distinct from the severe, chilly classrooms with their hard benches and poor lighting. Although she had enjoyed a prior advantage in her basic educational skills, Maria—a year younger and physically smaller than her classmates—felt lonely. At home she had not been encouraged to look outside the family circle for friends; now, detached from maternal protection and unprepared for quick socializing, she seemed a withdrawn and altogether unremarkable pupil who demonstrated no special aptitudes.
Her mother, however, sensed musical talent in the girl, and soon Maria was receiving piano lessons at home from a plump, jolly lady whose name has not come down to us. But this teacher was discharged after four months, since she seemed to Wilhelmina somewhat too relaxed to instill in Maria the basis for a serious musical career. A violin instructor called Bertha Glass followed—a serious, pale and slender woman more befitting Wilhelmina’s intentions; accordingly, the violin was emphasized almost exclusively in Maria’s education over the next decade. On her birthdays in 1909 and 1910, encouraged by her mother, she offered recitals at family gatherings. She was also apparently overcoming her shyness, for she argued loudly and often with Bertha, who tried to convert her student from a preference for simple pretty melodies to the graver, more intricate rhythms of Bach and Torelli.
Especially proud of Maria’s musical ability was her widowed maternal grandmother, a tall, elegant woman of fifty with dark red hair and damson eyes. Grandmother Felsing took Maria to the family shop on Unter den Linden and taught her details of fashion and fine art—how Fabergé eggs were made, what jewelry should be worn with which dresses, how important were the right accessories and colognes for a lady’s wardrobe and boudoir. She gave the child pretty ribbons and small pieces of jewelry and also arranged for her to have lessons in knitting and crocheting. Mrs. Felsing also insisted that the violin was quite proper but that the child also needed skills for common socializing, and so she paid for six months of guitar lessons. Maria’s parlor now echoed with jaunty Bavarian folk songs as well as baroque airs.
Jovial and forthright, Mrs
. Felsing represented, with her pearls and pomades, a kind of luxuriant sensuality, and she indulged Maria in keeping with her role as a doting grandmother and as a kind of whimsical coach in the arts of womanly appeal. She was, in other words, a welcome and powerful balance to the quiet severities of life with Wilhelmina and Bertha. From her mother and teachers, Maria learned responsibility, self-denial and the necessity of focussed concentration on hard work; her grandmother stressed the equally exacting but more enjoyable niceties of an artfully designed femininity—even if, according to Wilhelmina’s judgment, these interests were to be reserved for maturity, and Maria’s dress and manner had to remain sober at home. Above all, she was warned never to attract attention.
BY THE TIME SHE WAS TEN YEARS OLD, MARIA DIEtrich had lived almost exclusively in a female environment both at school and at home. “We lived in a women’s world,” she wrote later; “the few men with whom we came in contact were old or ill, not real [wirklichen] men.” She had seen the strength of widows in their resourceful independence from men, despite the prevalent social assumption that they were inferior. Unaided, they were also forced to make important economic decisions. In 1908, Wilhelmina, unable to keep servants and a large apartment, moved with her daughters to a more modest apartment at 48 Akazienallee and then, in 1909, to even smaller quarters at 13 Tauentzienstrasse. To provide her growing daughters the luxuries of private music lessons and reasonably fashionable clothes, and to maintain the appearance of genteel dignity appropriate to the heirs of a Royal Lieutenant, the Widow Dietrich (so she was identified in the Berlin telephone directory for 1908) took a part-time job as a housekeeper for neighbors.