by Donald Spoto
Wilhelmina also seems to have set herself the task of finding a new husband, for there were several gentleman callers to the Dietrich apartments—most of them military or policemen, always in full regimental uniform. These various courtings ceased in 1911, when she accepted a proposal of marriage from Eduard von Losch, a career colonel in the Royal Grenadiers whom she had met while she was employed as housekeeper for his parents. Stolid, darkly handsome and ill at ease with his two stepdaughters, von Losch remained very much in the background for the few years he was in Maria’s life, and of him she remembered little more than his ubiquitous cigarettes and a collection of sabers. Her stepfather, like the man he replaced, was simply another somewhat aloof, uniformed authority figure she had to please.
THE ROUTINES OF SCHOOL, HOUSEWORK AND VIOLIN lessons continued for Maria from 1912 to 1914, but she entered adolescence with a sudden rush of new affection. One of her teachers, a slim and cultivated Frenchwoman in her twenties named Marguerite Bréguand, taught French at Auguste Victoria. Maria, who had learned the rudiments of the language at home since the age of three, advanced rapidly in Mlle Bréguand’s class, receiving high marks and perfecting her accent in after-class walks with her teacher. With the adulation common to a schoolgirl’s crush on an attentive and sympathetic mentor, Maria imitated the woman’s hairstyle, tried to duplicate the colors of her wardrobe and earnestly sought to seal the friendship with little gifts of chocolate or lace. As for Marguerite Bréguand, she encouraged Maria’s love of things French and took a kindly interest in her general development; any overt display of camaraderie—even if the teacher had been so inclined—was of course strictly disallowed. Whatever were the terms and degree of reciprocity in Maria’s attachment to her teacher, the relationship ended abruptly when Mlle Bréguand returned to France immediately after war was declared in 1914.
Of this time, the actress Tilla Durieux remembered soldiers marching proudly out of Berlin to war, showered with blossoms as they went. “Every face looks happy,” Durieux wrote. “We’ve got war! Bands in the cafés and restaurants play [martial tunes] without stopping, and everybody has to listen to them standing up . . . There’s a superabundance of everything: people, food and enthusiasm!” But Maria, forlorn over the departure of a teacher she idolized and confused about the attitude of Francophobia everyone was supposed to assume, could not comprehend the prevalent jubilation. Nor would she agree to stop speaking the enemy language, as pupils were asked to pray for the defeat of France; she often peppered her conversations with French phrases, to the indignant stares of classmates and superiors.
The festival atmosphere—as Berliners celebrated a war to establish the Empire’s supremacy—was brief. Maria and the other schoolgirls were required to take on extra duties, knitting gloves, scarves and sweaters for soldiers. By 1915, food and fuel were strictly rationed, milk was a rarity, and potatoes were the diet staple. Maria’s stepfather, who was on maneuvers during the summer of 1914, proceeded directly to combat without returning home, and before the end of that year her Uncle Max and two cousins were killed in battle. Like many of her friends, she then attached a black band to her left sleeve and wore only a black or grey dress. The rituals of bereavement also required that her long hair (now a luxuriant ash blond) henceforth be tightly wound and pinned up, worn loose only on Sundays at home. (In her adulthood, she was embarrassed by the fact that her uncle had commanded the first Zeppelin raid over London.)
Throughout the war, Maria went regularly to the city hall with her mother or a schoolmate, to scan the lists of wounded, missing and dead. At home there were ominous family meetings, as visiting aunts, cousins or Grandmother Felsing asked news of those fighting relatives from whom no letter had been recently received. By 1916, life became harsher still, for every street had a family in mourning and food was severely limited. At Christmas that year, Eduard von Losch sent a tin of corned beef to his family; it was the first meat they had seen in two years, and they parceled out slices in tiny slivers, heating the empty can several times for the residue of grease in which to fry potatoes. The following year, however, even potatoes were scarce and considerable imagination was brought to the preparations of turnips; there were, for example, turnip jelly, turnip bread and turnip soup, and the top-greens were boiled and reboiled for stocks and teas.
During wartime, Marlene Dietrich later felt, German women
did not seem to suffer in a world without men . . . Our life among women had become such a pleasant habit that the prospect that the men might return at times disturbed us—men who would again take the scepter in their hands and again become lords in their households.
But no master would ever rule the Dietrich-von Losch home again. Early in 1918, Wilhelmina was informed that her husband had been seriously wounded on the Russian border. She was permitted to visit him at a makeshift hospital, and although he seemed to rally, he died of infection not long after her return to Berlin. Since he had entered Maria’s life in 1911, Eduard von Losch had lived with the family for a total of about eight months; he was never more than a vague and distant provider. When asked years later if she missed her father or stepfather, she replied flatly, “No. You can’t miss what you never had.”
For Wilhelmina, however, the second abrupt loss of a husband was shattering. Her ordered life collapsed again, her critical judgments on her daughters’ styles and manners became sharp, and her serenity was broken. Never especially demonstrative with her daughters (and never as doting as their grandmother) Wilhelmina became more reserved than ever, as if she feared that any expression of an emotional bond with Elisabeth or Maria might again invite the rupture of death. “She didn’t want to know whether I loved her or not,” Marlene Dietrich wrote later. “She [simply] considered it more important that I should feel secure with her . . . Perhaps she didn’t love, perhaps she was just trustworthy.” Wilhelmina assumed a distracted, lost air, moving slowly, sometimes even neglecting the chores with which she had once been so obsessed. More than once, Maria awoke in the night to see her mother, fully dressed, stretched across her daughter’s bed. “If only I could sleep,” she would whisper wearily. By day, she often read aloud and, while working or walking through the apartment, she repeated verses of the Freiligrath poem: “The hour will come when you will stand by graves and weep . . .”
THERE WAS GOOD REASON FOR GRIEF ALL OVER THE country. Almost 1,800,000 Germans had been killed in the war—more casualties than any other nation—and by autumn 1918 there were few more men to sacrifice. During the conflict, Berlin had endured many strikes in addition to the general political turmoil, but now the crisis was enormous. A general strike on November 9, organized to dissolve the Empire and depose the Kaiser, rallied hundreds of thousands of Berlin workers, soldiers and sailors at the Reich Chancellery. His own generals advised Wilhelm to abdicate, and that day he left for exile in Holland. Within hours, the radical pacifist, anti-imperialist and Social Democrat Karl Liebknecht proclaimed the birth of a free Socialist Republic of Germany from the balcony of the Imperial Palace. At the same time, police headquarters and newspaper offices were occupied by left-wing extremists.
The uprising was immediately opposed. Bloody street battles ensued, and while armed revolutionaries took to the streets—seizing everything from government buildings to breweries to railway stations—private armies loyal to the old regime responded in full force, and in early 1919 Liebknecht was murdered. International peace treaties were being composed as the war ended, but there was nothing like concord in the streets of Berlin.
After elections were held, a new constitution was drafted on February 24, 1919, in the town of Weimar, about 140 miles from central Berlin. The Widow von Losch, eager to provide some kind of safe haven for her daughters, decided to pack them off to school in that city. Elisabeth successfully pleaded to remain behind and begin her teacher training in Berlin, but Maria readily agreed to her mother’s suggestion.
The intellectual center of Germany in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Weimar had been from 1815 to 1918 the capital of the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The city of Goethe and Schiller, it housed their archives in major museums and their effigies presided sternly in front of the German National Theater. The Liszt Music College memorialized that composer, and despite the war, the city’s permanent political and cultural status was taken for granted throughout Europe. Architect and educator Walter Gropius was in Weimar in 1919, and he became director of the famous Bauhaus school of modern design and architecture; his staff included a remarkable roster of names—among them Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy. Equally renowned for its music conservatories, Weimar was also the residence of Professor Robert Reitz, a noted violinist and teacher. When Maria Dietrich arrived in April, it was to study with him.
At seventeen, she had grown to her full height of five feet, five inches. Like her mother, however, she tended to corpulence, and the short, more fashionable skirt and the short bobbed hairstyle she now adopted made her seem almost Rubenesque. Very much had been restricted in her Berlin life because of family and school obligations, and in Weimar she had no particular polish, nor an entrée to a new circle of friends. She was, therefore, pleased when Reitz, a demanding but kindly instructor, arranged for her to reside at a girls’ dormitory near his studio. Her only desire was to please him—that, after all, was virtually the only approach to men she knew—and so she frequently brought him a pastry or offered to do his household chores. Years later, in answer to a question put to her by her lifelong friend Billy Wilder, she claimed that Reitz had been her first male lover.
With her roommates—girls who were studying music or literature at one academy or another—Maria soon began to flourish. They all bought cheap seats for theater and opera productions, and often on Sunday afternoons they took a picnic to the park and read aloud to one another—selections from Goethe’s Faust, with each of them taking a part; the lyrics of Heinrich Heine’s Romanzero; a poem just written by one of themselves; or sometimes a letter from a male admirer. During such activities, Maria’s friends came to appreciate her witty comments and her brisk, satiric remarks.
For perhaps the first time, she became aware that she could be an asset to a gathering. Eager to be liked and accepted, she dispatched most of the dormitory tasks on their joint behalf and often invited a crowd of students to join them for a hearty goulash; additionally, she readily shared her cigarettes with friends and gave part of her own meager allowance to anyone in need. When her mother visited during the late summer of 1919, armed with supplies of tinned food and soaps, she found Maria far more casual in speech and manner, more gaily independent and perhaps, to Wilhelmina, more alarmingly mature after the experience of living away from home. A photograph of a much older man on her daughter’s dressing table evoked her mother’s inquiry; Maria smiled, said nothing and that evening introduced her mother to him—Professor Reitz, of course, who seemed very much a surrogate father as well as serious instructor. Of her year in Weimar little else is known, and later Marlene Dietrich rarely spoke of it: it was apparently a time of earnest study and of personality development, but neither written records nor personal witnesses survive to reveal more. In any case, she was back in Berlin before her nineteenth birthday in late 1920, studying with Professor Carl Flesch at the Music Academy and living in a one-room apartment nearby. Her mother, making an enormous sacrifice, bought her a violin for 2,500 marks—then almost 700, an amount which would have bought a small house in the Berlin suburbs. There seemed to be no doubt, as Professor Reitz had said, that Maria was on her way to a major career as a violinist.
3: 1921–1926
IN 1910, THE CRITIC KARL SCHEFFLER HAD CALLED Berlin a city doomed to a perpetual state of “becoming,” but never completed. By the end of 1920, a legal ordinance had recently created Greater Berlin, which included four million people, making it the third largest city in the world. That year, the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht described it as “a wonderful affair, overflowing with things in the most ghastly taste—but what a display!” The activity was indeed remarkable, for in progress or recently opened were dozens of new theaters, cinemas, swimming pools, racetracks, office buildings, factories, exhibition halls, luxury apartments and proletarian flats. There was also an abundance of languages: Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Dutch, Danish, French and English were spoken everywhere, for the city was a major European gateway, and citizens en route to and from their own countries often stayed, attracted by the cornucopia of a bedazzling life.
That life was, perhaps more than anything, a madcap European version of the postwar, liberated jazz age; in fact, in a way the Roaring Twenties began in Berlin. There was first of all, in 1919, a great Russian influence following the mass exodus from that country after the war: their newspapers, restaurants and styles were ubiquitous. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz and writer Vladimir Nabokov were among the first Russian refugees, as was nineteen-year-old Gregor Piatigorsky, who had waded across the Sbruch River holding his cello above his head while border guards shot at him. Dadaism, the anarchic art movement founded at Zurich’s Café Voltaire, reached Berlin, too, where an adherent like Kurt Schwitters insisted he was making a political statement by festooning the walls of his home with junkyard trash. More sedately, English tearooms and literary societies opened monthly in Berlin, and soon American influence was everywhere evident—in pop songs, imported Broadway shows, the films of Chaplin and the translated works of Melville, Whitman, Poe, Twain and Sinclair, all of which Berliners were reading in bestselling quantities.
Things were happening quickly, and nowhere was the speed more evident than in the silent “flickers” that became popular as the new German cinema flourished. At the height of the war, General Ludendorf (among others) had seen the potential of film as propaganda, and in 1917 the major production companies were consolidated as the Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft (known familiarly as UFA)—the Universe Film Company. After the Versailles Treaty, the government’s one-third interest was sold, and UFA began to produce commercial and, when censorship was abolished, even unusual entertainments. The titles Hyenas of Lust and A Man’s Girlhood fairly describe their stories.
But there was enduring art in the cinema. Robert Wiene’s fantastic silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), a weirdly expressionistic horror tale with a hallucinatory depiction of madness, was perhaps most responsible for the public’s interest in movies, and soon Fritz Lang was preparing grave thrillers (Destiny, Dr. Mabuse and Spies) about society’s anarchic impulses. F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch and Robert Siodmak were also refining skills they later took with them to film work elsewhere, and Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Alfred Hitchcock came from Vienna and London to make films at UFA’s Neubabelsberg studios, which offered the finest technical facilities in the world. Whatever could not be supplied by state funding was provided by wealthy bankers, and by 1922 there were over 275 film companies (up from twenty-eight six years earlier) and a parallel explosion in the number of movie houses.
In the theater there was also unprecedented progress. A twenty-one year-old actor named Max Goldmann had come to Berlin’s Deutsches Theater company from his native Vienna in 1894, and under the tutelage of its director Otto Brahm had developed astute performing and managerial skills. By 1905 he had directed plays by Strindberg, Wedekind, Wilde and Gorky as well as operas by Richard Strauss. Now known by the less obviously Jewish name of Max Reinhardt, he succeeded Brahm that year and widened his repertory to include Shaw and Shakespeare, Schiller and Goethe. Committed to the concept of exciting theater for the masses, he introduced revolving stages, spectacular mechanical devices and new approaches to stage lighting in his three-thousand-seat Grosses Schauspielhaus (Great Theater), a conversion of a circus on the Schumannstrasse. This new home of the Deutsches Theater was a steeply ascending amphitheater surrounding the stage on three sides. Here he presented monumental productions of the Oresteia and Danton with expertly managed, vast crowds of actors and extras.
Next door to this vast auditorium, Reinhardt opened the smaller Kammerspiele or Chamber Theater, for staging smaller and sometimes avant-garde pieces, and nearby was Reinhardt’s drama school.
German talent often flourished in less formal settings, however, and the cabaret was perhaps the most notorious. Set in a kind of supper-entertainment atmosphere, it had evolved from the circuses and street fairs of the late 1800s to the vaudeville shows of the early twentieth century, and by the 1920s, cabaret shows delighted both the lower and middle classes. Its most famous literary form emerged at the Kabaret der Komiker, where Kurt Tucholsky’s satires drew an international audience (“We say no to everything!” was his provocative motto). Also popular were Erich Kästner’s casual skits combining classical references, contemporary literary allusions and piquant sociopolitical commentaries often spiced with interludes of topless dancers. In such settings, one was free to perform and discuss anything—and those on- and offstage did just that. Nothing was censored, everything was fair game for impromptu send-up and every sort of sexual taboo was challenged—often at the behest of the conferencier, a witty master of ceremonies who joked with the audience and introduced the acts and playlets.
BUT THERE WAS A DARKER SIDE. THE ARTIST George Grosz, for one, called the Berlin of that time
a completely negative world, with gaily colored froth on top that many people mistook for the true, the happy Germany before the eruption of the new barbarism. Foreigners who visited us at the time were easily fooled by the apparently light-hearted, whirring fun on the surface, by the nightlife and the so-called freedom and flowering of the arts.